First two days in Korea.

As expected there have been many firsts, like my first time waking up at 8am without an alarm, that was a big first. Jet lag is still looming, but at least I get to see more daylight hours to make the most of it!

I left off with Simpson dropping us off at the hotel ( Paid for by our school, thank you to ur soon to be boss, Grace!) The Hote is just temporary until our other arrangments come through. It is a beautiful hotel though, it is a traditional Korean room, so there is a drain in the floor for the bathroom, it is one big open room complete with shower shoes since it can be very slick in there after a shower.

There is an entry way where you are supposed to take off your shoes, which we constantly forget...

The Huge televison plays really interesting shows, they have an entire channel devoted the playing a magnetic stone game... it is seriously a big grid and people place black and white stones on it trying to surround the other person's store so they can take it... Joseph has watched more of it than me.... he claims to understand it fairly well.

Also the commercials are really funny, they advertise water with a korean guy with a flower in his hair crying.... and a singing squirrel for some pine drink... yes.... pine drink... and my favorite 15 dancing and singing people trying to sell something I still can't figure out, but the tune is catchy! maybe it is a phone company....

We really didn't do too much the first day, as we were simply trying to find an internet connection, food... and towels, because they only gave us hand towels for the hotel! Simpson told us that anywhere we saw PC was an internet cafe, so we saw a sign and headed towards it. Since there is not alot of space in Korea, they tend not to spread out buildings, but the build up, so on the third floor we finally found an internet cafe. Knowing that we wanted to e-mail everyone to let them know we made it, we walking in completely unaware of what to do. The Cafe is very cool looking, with almost no natural light, it is ligt up with neon lights and has glass walls so you can still see where you want to sit. She didn't speak a word to us, just brought us two cards that you stick in some port above the desktop and it starts a timer, you pay a $1 an hour, so we had adequate time to figure out how to change the text from Korean to english , and then e-mail both sets of parents to let them know of our safe arrival.

After e-mails, we walked up and down the street heading toward the Home plus store and " Mall" that Simpson told us about. We looked for food, and there are tons of restaurants, but we didn't eat much the first day, after buying some towels we went to drop them off at the hotel, and both fell asleep for a long nap... upon waking up we had to eat something so we ventured down the street to a take out window and somehow managed to order a veggie pizza complete with corn, peppers, onions and mushrooms. It was very tasty, and after that we headed back out to see more of Geoje. We strolled down a long seaside sidewalk that had every countries flag raised, and as we dodged bikes ( the sidewalk is littered with scooters and bikes and people) we enjoyed the sea breeze and scent of fish in the air. The we headed back to the PC cafe to e-mail home more and update facebook!

We went to bed late but that is because we are still jet lagging.

This morning we got up and headed back to the Home Plus store, which has a food court, and managed to purchase a burger and fries from a place that was alot like Burger King, but was called Lotte Teria, ( I thnk) Next we shopped !!! We saw the best kitty ever, I will post a picture later. They had everything under the sun from clothes to furniture and english books too! We bought an umbrella ( It is a tad rainy today) and some chocolate since we had not had any sweets in a while.

We then went to the starbucks and got a lemonade and enjoyed our chocolate while we dicussed what to do next. We decided to test out our new umbrella and see more of the Island, we went a totally different route and saw all kind of great sights as we walked around the city, we walked past the bay again and saw some huge fish cresting in the water as well as a school of Jelly fish.

We also saw a pizza delivery boy on a scooter totally wipe out in the middle of the street. What was wierd was that he just got back up and drove off. Nobody helped him or asked him if he was okay, they actually honked at him to move from the street. He seemed okay, but there was not much Joseph or I could do... it was a very odd moment. We continued toward the Samsung shipping port where there was a huge container ship... it was like 10 cruise ships in one... Massive... which was really neat. It started raining a bit harder after that so Joseph put his directional sense to the test and without a problem navigated us back to the Hotel so we could take off our shoes and dry off some. Unfortunately this lead to both of us falling asleep in front of Korean television, although they do have a japanese channel here and we watched a Sumo wrestling match before we both conked out...

We didn't sleep too long and got up and had a dinner of our leftover pizza ( they don't give you a box for your leftovers, they took each piece of pizza and individually wrapped it up in Mr. Songs Pizza Pro wrapping paper and put it in a bag) Finally we decided to come back out to the PC cafe to see if our parents wrote us back!

It has been a long day but Joseph and I are going to stick around in the computer lab and try to learn some new Korean phrases, we know "thank you" and "goodbye", although we may be pronouncing it wrong, because people laugh when we say it....

Oh well! Tomorrow is another day!