Our First Weekend in Korea

As I probably have told you, we work in the evenings, at hagwons (after school English schools). Michael works 2:30-9:30 and I work 3-11. On our first day in Korea, we got up, spent some time at Lotte Mart getting groceries and a few things for our apartment, and eating lunch. There is a food court there and we decided we would eat at Lotte Mart because they have a bunch of meals that are numbered, so we could just hold up the number that we wanted on our fingers. Ha ha that has been hard, eating out, because most of the time the menus are written in Korean characters, and we cannot read them yet (I am working on learning the alphabet). So we sort of figured out how to get some food, however once we were done we had no idea what to do with our dishes. So, we went over to the trash cans, scraped off our food, and put our dishes in a plastic tub above the trash cans. We later learned that that was all wrong: the plastic tub was to put used water cups in (no one here drinks tap water, so in every restaurant you go in there is a water machine with little cups to drink out of), and you are supposed to take your dishes back to the counter you got them from. Oops.

     

Here we are eating our meal at Lotte Mart.  We were going to share one but we accidentally ordered 2.  It was meal # 2. 

This cracked me up.  A snack with a fried chicken taste, shaped like drumsticks!!

We went to our schools at regular work time that night to “observe” for the evening, and kind of learn our way around and the system, meet people, etc. That went well. We were both taken out by co-workers for dinner and so we are slowly learning how to order things from restaurants that are pretty much staples (kimbap: seaweed rice rolls; bibimbap: a hot bowl of steamed rice with lots of vegetables and a spicy sauce & egg on top; bogumbap: fried rice)

Then, Friday was a holiday (Korean Memorial day), so we got a nice 3-day weekend! We spent Friday exploring around Suji, our district of the city Yongin. We discovered (after lots of walking) a skate park with a climbing wall, E-Mart (another big department store like Lotte Mart), Shinsegae (a huge, very expensive department store that is like 10 stories high, and a CGV movie theater, on the top floor of the department store. 

Here are all 3 aisles of rice cookers...how the heck can one brand manufacture so many different types of rice cookers?!?!

Michael preparing for Ninja Warrior! :)

Something else that we’ve noticed and found funny is that on the basement floor of pretty much any department store, there is a grocery store with lots of food. Kind of random. We also found that the nearest train station to us, Jukjeon, is about a 20 minute walk from our apartment. That is nice, because we like taking the subway and it will take us pretty much anywhere into and around Seoul. It is pretty cheap to travel that way also. Cabs are stinking cheap here also! We are still working on figuring out the bus system: which buses to take where but we are slowly learning more about that. Friday night we saw the new Indiana Jones movie, which was fun. Theaters here are different: you buy your tickets and they assign you a seat. So, you don’t have to worry about getting there really early to save seats, you just have to buy your tickets before they sell out.

Saturday we got up and decided to try to find a place that my Korean co-worker from Searcy had told us about possibly meeting at, Samsung Plaza. Supposedly it was like a big mall with lots of shopping. We read in some papers that our school had given us about a certain bus that would take us there, but then we could never find the bus station or that number bus! We literally walked around downtown Suji for probably an hour and a half trying to find the bus stop across from the Pizza Hut. We later discovered that the Pizza Hut is being remodeled, so that’s why it wasn’t there! ☺ But it didn’t bother us too much because we were able to kind of see more parts of Suji and learn where more things are. We finally decided to walk to Jukjeon and take the train to Seoul for the afternoon. We didn’t have a clue which train station to get off at, so we just agreed on Seoul Station. We figured that would take us to the center of the city, maybe. I did have a map of downtown in my travel book that I had bought back home at Barnes & Noble, and I was determined to find the visitor center and get some good maps in English. Here’s a quick run down of what happened to us in Seoul: we couldn’t figure out how to get across the street (we forgot that if you go underground, you can cross the streets that way) so we asked a cab driver to take us to Samsung Plaza, which was kind of back-tracking. She proceeded to yell at us for about 10 minutes in Korean, we had no idea what she was saying, but knew that she didn’t want to go the other direction than she was already traveling. Oh well. She took us there but yelled at us several times along the way, and when I looked up in my book how to say “thank you very much” in Korean, she said “yah yah.” Whoops. 

There are lots of these neat looking gates all over Seoul.  On the right is a river called Cheongyechon.

  

Michael looked away right as I took the photo.  Oh well.

Turns out the Samsung Plaza we went to was just a big office building for Samsung. We later learned that there are like 3 or 4 Samsung Plazas, and 2 of the others are shopping centers—not the one that we had ended up at! So we just decided to walk around Seoul. We got close to City Hall and saw a ton of people that looked like they were having a carnival or party of some sort. We heard a band playing and decided to check it out. This is when we discovered we were in the middle of the beef protests! I think the mass amounts of people with cow hats and other cow garb on tipped us off. There were people throwing water balloons at a big sign of their president, George Bush, and a cow. Wow! Fun! We walked around for a few minutes and then decided to keep walking. We ended up in a shopping district called Insa-dong and walked around for a little bit looking at some of the goods. I found the most ADORABLE purse, but we did not have enough cash to buy it since we hadn’t gotten all of our traveler’s checks cashed at the airport when we got here. I am keeping my fingers crossed that they will still have it when we go back sometime. 

We found an Italian restaurant to eat at, called Il Mare. The menu was in English, so we were able to order some good food! The interesting part was I ordered Penne Pasta in a cream sauce with mozzarella & frutta. I assumed the fruit would be tomatoes, since they are considered fruit, and I see tomatoes here at fruit juice places. I was wrong. It had pasta, broccoli, and mandarin orange slices and pineapple, in the cheesy cream sauce. Looked strange but was actually pretty good! Michael had a seafood dish that I’m not really sure what all was in it, but he said was very tasty. We got home late that night and crashed again!

Sunday morning we actually got up and were picked up by an Australian couple who took us to a church in Suwon that I had found on the internet. I emailed the pastor and he set us up with a ride, which was great. It is an international, English speaking (for the most part) church called Life Church.  Check out the website.  We met a lot of very friendly people there, and several young couples who are here doing basically the same thing as us: teaching English, saving money, and traveling! I think the craziest part of it all was meeting a couple who had actually lived in Searcy, gone to grad school at Harding, and went to Fellowship Bible church, where I went to church before Michael and I got married, and where we went for the last year that we were in AR. What a small world!! Several of the couples made plans to go out to dinner at a restaurant called Brasilia (a churrascaria!) in an area called Bundang, so we went with them. We met them at the actual Samsung Plaza (we found it!) and walked to the restaurant, and had an amazing meal! It was a lot of fun hanging out with other young married couples who have been here a while and some who plan to stay a few more years as well. We really enjoyed the church and think that we will probably make it our church home while we are here. 

That concludes our first weekend in Korea! Thanks for reading (sorry its so long, like I said, once I catch up I will try to blog either daily or every other day or something so there is not so much to say!). When I get a spare few minutes, I am going to start some online photo albums and link them on here so you can see some more photos besides what I put on the blog.
~Leslie