And the Adventure Begins...

Well, we've made it to Korea.

After an exchange in Chicago, we took our 13 hour flight from Chicago to Seoul. Usually, I cannot sleep or eat on planes, but two sleeping pills later, I was doing just fine. I slept for most of the way with a break for a few meals, and to watch "The Proposal." Upon arriving in Seoul, we had to transfer to a different airport. Welcome to Korea, find your way to another airport. So we made our way to an airport train station, and found a line to go to Gimpo Airport, but then we weren't sure how to get tickets. Luckily, an incredibly nice man helped us get our tickets, helped us with our luggage through the gate and down to where our train would come. Turns out, when the guy was in elementary school, he had a pen pal from Iowa. Awesome! Then, when we arrived at the Gimpo station, we looked lost once again, and another man approached us to offer assistant.
"Do we look lost?"
"Yes," he replied.
Ah, well. There's always a learning curve. I expect to look lost for quite some time. After an hour flight from Seoul to Busan, we arrived in the city which is to be our home for one year. We met a young woman who works at my school, and she helped us exchange money and rode in a taxi with us to our apartment. Turns out, we're apparently working in poor schools where the students don't know English very well. I'm hoping she was only exaggerating how poor their skills are. Eek! It will definitely be a challenge. Also, she's afraid I'll feel lonely at the school since I'll be the only foreign teacher and the other teachers are shy to speak English. Good news. I'm hoping to find some way of making them feel at ease when talking to me—maybe try a bit of Korean. Who knows?

Then, at our apartment, she left us with our keys and seven days in which we can explore the city (we can't go into the schools for seven days to be sure we don't have H1N1—it'll be nice to figure out our surroundings). When we opened our door, we found our apartment. In the night and loneliness of arriving to another country, we were pretty upset and both cried a bit in the solitude and the filth that was our apartment. Apparently, the last foreigner to live here did not clean, and our school also did not check to make sure it was clean. Here's our place:
Our entryway


View from entryway


Kitchen


Bathroom


Bedroom


Living Area


Our Neighbors.

That's right....we have mold. Definitely need to remedy that.

An excerpt from my journal last night, "As of now, Chaz and I are discouraged and apprehensive...It just feels so lonely. Hopefully, things look a little brighter in the light of day."

And they did. Today we are feeling much better about things, and we like our apartment, it just needs a good cleaning and de-molding. Here's one of the reasons why we like it:


Our View.

We can see a teeeny bit of the mountains. We hope to explore the city, eat some Korean food, and maybe go to Haeundae Beach. How great is it that we have a beach?