My First Day in Korea: Early Days Part 3

I woke up at about 11 on my first day in Korea. What woke me up was yelling through a loud speaker.

"Panana, panana, panana. Ee chon won. Ee chon won," it said over and over and then cycled on to a similar repeated message. There was an urgency in the voice that worried me. Was there some sort of disaster that I didn't understand? I wondered.

The guy was just selling bananas, but I would't figure that out for a few days. "Bananas, Bananas, Bananas. 2,000 won. 2,000 won," is what he said.

I got out of bed and headed to the bathroom. This was the first time I used it, and I have to say, I was a little confused. Was this tiny tile room really our bathroom? Was this nozzle hanging off of my sink really the shower?

Unable to find another shower in the place, I used the nozzle hanging off of the sink. It was awkard, it was weird, but I made it through using my entire bathroom as a shower.

I got out, dressed and looked around. Everyone was gone....except some man on our floor who was still asleep. I assumed that he was Kevin.

Luckily, I still had an energy bar in my bag, because the cupboards had nothing I could eat. I looked in the fridge, and there was only one small thing of water. I'd better not take that, I thought, and just lived with being thirsty. I had already been warned about the tap water in Korea. That stuff's not for drinkin'.

Growing bored with reading, I headed outside to check out my neighborhood. It looked a lot different in the daytime. Behind me was what I considered at the time to be a small mountian, but is really just a big hill. In front of me was a small river (that would swell to a huge river in a couple weeks). And all around me was city.

I walked up to Toy Toys, the store I had passed about five times the night before. Luckily after some sleep it was funny again. I stood on the corner for a while. Across the river were big buildings with huge buildings right behind them. I didn't know it then, but that was downtown.

I looked to my right, and there was a bridge with a huge dragon sculpture on each of it's four corners. I didn't know it at the time, but Korean roads don't names (well, they technically do, but no one uses them...most Koreans don't even KNOW them because they aren't on the signs). Instead, Koreans navigate by landmarks. Each bridge had different sculptures on it to tell you where you were in town: down the street was a sculpture that looked a little like Mickey Mouses's head. Near the soccer stadium, there's the fish bridge. And near my house it was the dragons.

I looked to my left, and saw what I thought was a park. My recruiter had told me over the phone that my apartment was near a park. I wanted to check it out, so I decided to go that way.

I was terribly unimpressed. What I thought was a park turned out to be just a ten foot wide stretch of trees and grass that ran beside the road for about a block. Truthfully, it wasn't a park of all. It was only a ten foot wide stretch of trees and grass that ran beside the road for about a block. The park was that big hill that I mentioned earlier, but I wouldn't know that for a few days.

I kept walking and came to an intersection. I decided to turn, and check out all the buildings up the hill to my left. I'd like to say they were interesting, but they turned out to be pretty boring, just shops. Some of which were even American: Seven-Eleven, Baskin Robbins.

I was thirsty, but I realized all I had was American money on me. How would I buy anything anyway? I thought. I didn't speak Korean.

By this time, I started to get worried that I'd get lost. I couldn't even ask for directions if I did. I decided it was time to turn back.

Still thirsty, still bored, I came back into the apartment hoping that "Kevin" would be awake. He wasn't. It was about another hour before he did wake up.

"Hi," I said when he came out of the bathroom. "I'm Ryan. Are you Kevin?"

"Nope," he said. "I'm Bart. Kevin is on his way to Thailand by now." A little confused by the strange man in my new apartment, I had to ask why he was there.

Bart, it turned out was a friend of Chris. The night before, he had gotten a little tipsy and lost the keys to his new apartment. He didn't have the phone number for his new landlord, so he had to stay over at someone's house until he could ask a friend for that phone number. Luckily, he stayed at our apartment, because I would have been screwed without him.

I told Bart how hungry and thirsty I was.

"There's water in the fridge," he said. "Why didn't you trink that?"

"It's Chris's, isn't it?"

"So," he said and poured himself a glass, then poured me one.

I drank two or three glasses as we talked. Bart had been in Korea for almost two years. He just quit his job to try and teach only private lessons. Something that is illegal in Korea, but much much more lucrative. Bart soon found out that this wasn't feasible, because his visa expired two weeks after he quit his job and he couldn't get a new one without having a legal source of income. He found a part time job to make himself legal and piled on what private lessons he could.

"All I have is American cash," I said. "I need to get some Korean money to buy some food."

"I'm heading downtown anyway," he said. "I'll just take you to my bank."

And he did.

The bus to downtown was packed. "Hold on tight," Bart said. "These drivers don't seem to remember that there are people standing back here." I got jerked around for the ten minute trip, almost falling a couple of times. I still haven't gotten used to the way the bus drivers drive, but then again, everyone drives like that in Korea.

Downtown was overwhelming up close. Lots of neon and lots of height, but the strangest thing was the depth. After walking a block or two, Bart ushered me to a stairwell.

"We have to go underground for a few blocks."

Under the street was an entirely different street. There were shops and fountains for blocks and blocks. It was like a hidden city under the city.

We came back to the surface right in front of Bart's bank. He changed my money for me. While the cashier was counting out my money, Bart turned to me.

"Notice anything weird," he said. I hadn't. "Look harder."

I looked around. "What's with the glasses?" I said. Right in the middle of the bank on the little counter that's usually used for filling out checks and such, there were several pairs of glasses chained down.

"They're for reading. Most older Koreans don't bother to buy reading glasses, so the bank provides them," he explained. "Notice anything else."

"What's with the booth in the doorway?" I asked.

"It's a guy selling cell phones. The banks just let those venders come right inside and sell things."

I got outside and counted my money.

"Quite a stack, isn't it?" Bart said.

It was indeed. The highest denomination in Korean currency is 10,000 won, which is only about $10. I had just changed in a little over $400. I felt loaded, and quite frankly, a little uncomfortable carrying around such a big stack of cash.

I was starving at this point, so I asked Bart where we could eat.

"What do you feel like?" he asked.

"Well, I'm a vegetarian..."

"Man, Korea's going to be rough for you." He was right. Korea is heavy on the meat. I soon found that it was much harder to avoid it than in the US. Still, I've had very few slip ups since I've been here. My first day here was one of them. "So anyway, what do you feel like?"

"I don't know, maybe some noodles?" I said remembering that Korean noodles were vegetarian.

Bart took me to a little noodle place nearby. Sure, Korean noodles are vegetarian, Korean noodles: Nang-myawn. What we had were Japanese noondles: la-myawn (or Ramen as we call it back home).

I wasn't too keen on the egg in the noodles, but I picked it out. I wouldn't have eaten it, though, had I known at the time that la-myawn is made with beef or chicken stock, which made for a nice stomach ache that I blamed on the spiciness at the time.

Bart had to teach a lesson, so he took me back to my apartment after stopping me off at a grocery store to pick up a few things. Grocery stores are generally much smaller in Korea. The American type food is in the international section: foods such as baked beans and peanut butter and olives.

I thanked Bart and headed back up to my apartment for the map. It was only about 4 by then, and I thought it would be nice to check out the school before I had to actually work there the next day.

The map Chris had drawn me the night before got me to the intersection of the school. My problem was that I was looking for an American school there, not a Korean school. I saw nothing, and turned around to make the mile walk back to my apartment. Turns out I was standing nearly right under my school but didn't think to look for it on the sixth floor of an office building.

I cooked myself a dinner of rice and vegetables: a diet that would cause me to lose ten pounds and nearly go crazy in my first week in Korea. It wouldn't be for about a month that I really understood how to eat here.

Chirs came back to the apartment at about six. He showed me around the area a little more. We had a few beers, and then I went to bed, trying to rest up for my first day at Swaton. I fell right asleep again, even though I was nervous about my first day of teaching.