Welcome to Korea

My journey began at 5 am on Saturday morning. My very kind sister Alesha drove me to the Sacramento Airport. I checked in my bags, but was told that because of fog my flight to San Francisco was delayed. So Alesha and I sat and chatted. The airline decided it would just be better to shuttle us over to SF, so I got my luggage back and got in a shuttle to the SF airport. After a couple of hours of wandering around the airport I boarded the plane to Seoul for the 13 hour flight. I sat next to an American who has worked in Seoul for two years. She gave me some good pointers. I asked about the weather and she said it hardly ever snows in Seoul but it does get cold. The flight was long, but bearable. Watched a couple of movies, read, listened to music, and attempted to sleep.

At the Seoul airport I went through customs, grabbed my luggage and headed out to meet my driver. I met him in front of Dunkin’ Donuts – a little Korean middle aged man. The only English word he spoke to me was my name. The only Korean word I said to him was thank you. It took about an hour to drive into Seoul. Along the way I saw a lot of lights, the Han River, some awesome bridges, and the annoying GPS that kept dinging and flashing blue and pink. Don’t ask me why it did this – all directions were in Korean. When we reached Seoul it was 8 pm Sunday night. The driver dropped me off at the school I am working at, where I met the director, Simson, and two of the Korean teachers, Yung and Jennifer. Yung and Jennifer took me to my apartment to drop of my luggage then took me shopping. I had to get kitchenware, bathroom stuff and some food – all of which the school paid for. By the time I got back to the apartment it was 10 pm and I had been up for I don’t know how long and was exhausted. I went straight to bed, but my hours were all messed up so I kept waking up.

My apartment is one big room with a hard bed, a couple of dressers, a sink, refrigerator, stove, and a couple of kitchen cabinets. There is a small bathroom and a balcony with a washing machine. In the morning I woke up to a foot of snow. So much for it not snowing a lot! I couldn’t get the hot water to work and I couldn’t figure out how to turn it to the shower, so I washed my hair in cold water under the faucet. I was going to make eggs for breakfast but I couldn’t figure out the stove either, so I ate an apple instead. At least I have heated floors :). I walked to work through the snow, which I actually quite enjoyed. It’s about a 15 minute walk and there were a ton of people and it was just kind of fascinating and exciting. I got to work at 8:30, where they gave me a couple of science books and told me I had to teach at 9. I taught four classes that day, and winged all of them. It actually wasn’t that bad; but here I am, a girl whose least favorite subject is science, and I’m teaching 14 and 15 year old Korean kids about cells and DNA in English. I didn’t even remember what the mitochondria was or how DNA duplicates, but now I’m teaching about it in a foreign country. Life is funny.