Sunday, Day #2

Today I was lucky enough to meet up with Andy, a friend of a friend who is Korean. We went to lunch in the Hundai department store's food court (the menu was in Korean on a lit up white board, all in Korean) and had spicy noodles with beef. Pretty good I must say. The beef looked pretty gross and wasn't the best, but I've had worse.

After lunch we went to Holly's Coffee. There's one at the bottom of my building, had lunch, and talked there. He came up to my apt after to help me with my hot water situation (it only stays hot for a few seconds before going back to lukewarm...) which he says is maintenance related...meaning I'll have to somehow communicate to the people downstairs this situation using charades...

History I learned from Andy:

Back in the 1500's, there was a king whose name I don't recall. Anyways, King Sejong (name according to Wikipedia) decided that the Chinese language they were speaking was "uncomfortable", so he hired intellectuals of the era to devise a new language and then teach it to the people and thus was born the Korean we know today; Hangul.

He also helped me buy water and toilet paper online at gmarket.com. They deliver it for free to your house and it's pretty darn cheap. If you don't have your ARC, your foreign registration number, yet, you can't buy anything. We used his account and bought 12 2 liter water bottles and 30 rolls of toilet paper for about 25 dollars.

Trash or garbage bags are specifically marked according to neighborhood and the trash men will not pick up the trash unless it is in your neighborhood's bag. The bags for mine are white with orange writing and you supposedly have a place to put them at the bottom of your building though I have not done this yet. You can buy the bags at E-mart or a convenience store and they are 100L or 50L. I of course had no idea what they were asking me, so I stared blankly at them until the one guy wrote down 50L / 100L. I wanted one of each but bought 2 of each. Actually I only bought 1 50L because they didn't have another one. Recycling is a different issue and they seem to have pretty strict rules about that so I'm going to have to ask a fellow teacher and get back to you on that.

I rearranged my room and it feels weird, but I didn't like how they put my bed behind the kitchen counter...my pillow went underneath it and I was afraid of bumping my head all the time.