Sitting on my aunt and uncle's upstairs porch as I write this... it's a beautiful, sunny day in Seoul. Nissa and I just spent a few hours wandering around the Insadong art district (in a jet lag-induced haze) -- we had some dumpling soup for lunch and some tea afterward. I've realized my Korean is a lot worse than I thought, as I cannot even form the basic sentences necessary to communicate to employees in restaurants and stores. My public speech has devolved into nods and thank you's in response to questions and explanations I never quite understood in the first place. I have, however, been able to understand some of what my aunt and cousins have been saying to us in Korean, which is a start. I'm not really sure what the last few hours have been like for Nissa. A little daunting, at the least. But the drastic change in time zones and sleep deprivation is making everything seem a little surreal anyway, so cuppies (her new word for "couples").
The plane ride over was as pleasant as a 13-hour flight could be. There were a few sick-sounding people in the cabin, which wasn't very reassuring. A kid sitting in front of us was hacking and sniffling the whole way here. I'm surprised the quarantine officers let him through after we landed. The international swine flu scare has spread here to drastic effect -- men and women in yellow vests checked everyone's temperature before letting us through to the terminal. My cousin Haekgyung was nice enough to met us at the gate and take us on the hour bus ride into Seoul. When we got into the city, we packed a tiny taxi with ourselves and all our luggage and finally arrived at her house. Nissa and I will be staying here until we find a place of our own, which is a pretty sweet deal. This is a beautiful house just a few minutes walk from the subway.
There's a lot we'll have to sort out in the next few weeks, in addition to finding a place to live. We don't have jobs right now because the company we had been planning on working with told us a week before we were set to leave that we were being placed in Daegu, a town about two hours from here. Originally, we had asked to work in Seoul or somewhere nearby, so we basically told them no thanks. We've also got to get hand phones (cell phones) and a bank account here so we can move about and live on our own. I've heard both of these things are really hard to get without some kind of resident alien ID (we'll soon find out how true that is). Hopefully, the hour we spent at local the immigration office today will take care of the ID problem by next week. The office needed my passport to process the ID, so for the time being I don't have any form of identification on me besides the yellow traffic ticket I got in Chicago two weeks ago. Be careful at Lawrence and Broadway. And of course, we have to learn Korean, because this whole pointing and guessing thing isn't going to get us very far. We're planning on starting classes by the end of the month. I better go wake Nissa up from her nap.
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