Initial Impressions

Yesterday was a long day. After the incredibly long flight (in which I managed to amazingly never use the daunting airplane toilet), I arrived in Korea. Luckily for me, my recruiter met me at the airport and we bussed together to the hagwon I'll be teaching English at. My principal met me at the bus stop and took me to the hagwon to introduce me to all the teachers. I might get more into the school in a later post, after I've spent a bit more time there, but I will say I was very impressed with the school. After the introductions were out of the way, I was driven to a hotel where I'll be staying for the next couple days. I guess I'll start with my impressions of that first, as it was very different from any Western hotel I've been in.

I am living in a very newly-built city, so it's possible that this is more to do with that than how most hotels are in Korea, but it is high tech. You tap the card on the outside of the door to unlock it, and then after entering the room, you put it in a slot on the wall. Putting it in the slot turns on the lights in the room, which you then can control using a panel on the wall. So to put it in perspective, there are no light switches in the hotel room. None. It took me a little bit to figure out how to turn on specific lights, so I have to mention that I didn't have a light in the bathroom for awhile. Speaking of the bathroom, I've never seen such a high-tech toilet. The toilet itself has about 20 buttons you can press, all of course described in Korean. I'm almost postive my toilet can turn itself into a spaceship, but I wouldn't have any idea what button to press to make it do that. Also, the bathtub has a jacuzzi built in, which I intend to make use of if I have enough time.

Let me get into a couple less technical things that I noticed about the hotel room. For one, there are slippers at both the entrance to the room itself and the entrance to the bathroom. The reason for this is that Koreans take off their shoes when they enter a house. This was a custom I was already aware of before coming to Korea, but I was surprised that it extended to hotel rooms as well. I'm used to taking off my shoes when I enter someone's house though, so this one was easy to get used to. Another interesting thing is that there are a number of complimentary items in the hotel room. There's complimentary towels, shampoo, and soap of course, but there was also complimentary hair styling gels, razors, body washes, bathrobes, and even a computer (which I'm using right now to type this, as my laptop died and I don't have a Korean adapter yet).

Before I end this post, I'm going to get into my biggest culture shock so far and one that I expected to have coming into Korea. Most of the communication is in Korean (duh!). Now despite this being INCREDIBLY obvious, it was still something that I couldn't prepare myself for at all. I can read all of the Hangul here, so I know what a lot of the shops are, but it was coming in contact with a cashier at a local bakery that really drove the point home. I was able to pay for everything, but after paying she asked me something (which I assume was something along the lines of "Do you want a bag?") and I had absolutely no idea what she said. Because I've only ever been in North America, I've never been exposed to meeting people and being almost 100% unable to communicate with them. And it was kind of scary knowing that what was most likely a very simple question presented such a huge barrier between the two of us. This isn't something I'm going to easily be able to overcome either, so I'm prepared for the first two months or more of my stay to be very, very confusing. But on that note, I'm also very, very excited. Being forced to communicate in a completely different language is exciting, mainly because I know at the end of it, I'm going to be that much better off.

I'll leave you one more thing about Korea to make all of you jealous. The internet connected to this hotel's computer is astounding. I currently have 75Mbps download and 90Mbps upload. Which is obscene, considering what internet speeds I've had all my life. The fact that my hotel's internet is 15 times better than my home internet is crazy.

Anyway, I'm going to go back to watching Mnet until things start opening up here. I haven't really talked about how I'm feeling yet, but that's also still tough for me to express because I'm just such a glass case of emotions. I will say one thing though: I'm absolutely loving Korea so far!