We have Internet!

We have wireless internet set up now. This is seriously exciting stuff. We still don't have cellphones and we can't get them until we are officially registered as aliens (which should be around the end of this week), but at least one line of communication is open again! Not to mention, this makes lesson planning and prep a lot easier.

Over the weekend, Corey and I went to Seoul. It takes about an hour by subway from where we are. We were lucky to get seats right when we got on the train because as we got closer to Seoul the train got packed! We sat next to a lady who introduced herself to us as Carol. She's originally Korean, but has been living in the States for the last twenty years. She asked where we were from and where we were going. When we told her we had just come from Toronto and we were going to explore Seoul for the first time, she insisted on being our tour guide. I kind of thought she was joking. I mean, who gets on the subway, meets a pair of foreigners and changes their plans for the entire day to accommodate them? It sounds crazy, right?

She was not joking. Carol showed us around marketplaces, department stores, palaces, and more. She helped us translate to talk to shopkeepers and kept bartering for us to get a better price. She took us out for lunch and gave us Korean baked goods to try. Of course, we didn't have a phone number to give her, but she gave us her business card and insisted we get in touch with her when we have phones so she could show us around Incheon too.

It's probably a good thing that I had no certain expectations about life in Korea. So far I have been shocked and surprised about a hundred times. It's mostly good stuff like making new friends and finding out that I kind of enjoy K-Pop. Sometimes there's stuff I have to adjust to like not having a dryer and not being able to just have a conversation with people without playing a sort of charades to communicate, but it's small stuff.

Working at the school continues to be good. Today there was a torrential downpour as fallout from the typhoon happening in the south. We had a special typhoon-day-schedule that allowed students to have shortened classes and leave early, presumably before the storm got worse. All the teachers stayed at the school though and we continued to do work as if there was not a major storm rattling the windows. I think tomorrow is supposed to be a "normal" day, whatever that means!