Saturday, March 12, 2011 (Eventually this date and the posting date will match up...it may just take me a little while...)
So after a ridiculously long day of packing, bringing stuff to a storage locker, selling furniture, cleaning the apartment, last minute packing, running errands, saying good bye to friends, more last minute packing, etc., etc., we were finally ready to head to our hotel so we wouldn't be taking the Skytrain at rush hour for our 12:10pm flight to Korea the following day. So much for having a relaxing evening and taking it easy; it was almost midnight by this time. We decided to go to the airport to weigh our bags so that we could do some reshuffling if our bags were too heavy. Good thing too, because that would not have been a fun job at the airport (not that it was a whole lot of fun at the hotel...). So, after repacking our bags (all of them were about 0.2 kg away from the maximum allowance of 23 kg *phew!*) and having a bite to eat, it was close to 3am. Longest. Day. EVER. The next morning, as we were getting ready to head down for what would be our last Canadian meal (all-u-can-eat brunch, no less!) we watched the news reports about the earthquake in Japan. Definitely put some things into perspective and made everyone's experience at the airport a bit more sombre. Other than that, it felt like the only other difference between this trip to the airport and any other was that we had six very heavy bags between the two of us.
Our 12 hour flight was reduced to about 10.5 thanks to great conditions and perhaps a changed flight plan. Despite us only having one power plug (that malfunctioned about an hour into the flight) I was able to pass the time reading, watching movies, sorta sleeping, reading notes from my peeps at work (one an hour, just like you instructed, Ida!) and training Mike to smile like an idiot, courtesy of some Reese Peanut Butter balls Ida supplied for the flight. Jackpots on a variable-ratio schedule worked best, in case anyone was wondering ;). We landed in Incheon at around 5:30pm local time on Saturday, even though it really felt like it was 2am on Saturday morning. Thursday had been a crazy long day, but everything went pretty smoothly considering! I was expecting a lot more craziness and carrying of heavy baggage, and getting lost, but our recruiter met us at the airport and got us on a bus that would take us to what would be our homebase for the next year, the city of Uijeongbu (also spelled Uijungbu, pronounced Oo-ee-jung-boo). Uijungbu is a satellite community, about 25 km North of Seoul, with a population of a little over 400,000 people. Didn't get to see much of anything out the bus window, partly because it was starting to get dark at this point and I wasn't actually looking out the window (oh come on, I was dead tired!). Mr. Chung, a driver from our new place of employment, picked us up where the bus dropped us off, and after driving like a crazy person (which I know now is really just driving like a typical Korean) we reached our new apartment at about 7:30pm (click here to see it on Google maps!).
Now, when I say "new", I mean "new" for us because we hadn't yet lived there, not "new" in the "just built sense". I was very happy to see that it was bigger than I expected (I had prepared myself for the worst, just in case) and that we had our own bathroom (I was a little worried because I got the impression from our supervisor that it was maybe some sort of dorm-style apartment, owned by the school with a bunch of other foreign teachers living in it. Turned out that only the last part was true, so yay!). It's all very open, with a little entryway and kitchen, equipped with a small fridge and a gas stove and no oven (thankfully, I had prepared myself for this, and didn't burst out crying at the sight, or non-sight I guess). Sliding doors lead to a very narrow closed-in balcony type room that mainly serves as a laundry room/storage area, while a second set of sliding doors lead to a decently sized bedroom, with a double-bed that has one of THE most uncomfortably hard mattresses I've ever slept on, but it's better than sleeping on the floor, which is what a lot of people still do here, so I suppose I can't really complain about that. Thankfully, the weirdest thing is the fact that the shower and the bathroom are technically the same room: the floor and walls are all tiled, there's a shower head on the wall, and a big drain in the floor. Most of the bathrooms in apartments here are like this, for whatever reason...as long as you remember to slip on some sandals when you use the bathroom after someone has taken a shower, you're fine, and it makes cleaning the bathroom a breeze! After inspecting our digs, we each had a bowl of noodles (our supervisor wasn't around to meet us, but he stocked the apt with some food for us, which was super nice of him) and were asleep by 8:30pm.
(I'll post some photos later!)
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