I'm officially homesick

Korean word of the day - hello - An nyoung ha seh yo

It's only taken me two and a half days in Korea to become homesick. I was in Australia for over four months and not once did I long to go home. Maybe it was the fact that in Australia I was constantly busy, I lived in a real city, they speak English, the food is normal, and and made some great friends. In Korea I am living in a dorm on a campus in Pohang, South Korea which isn't exactly one of the main cities. They do have a downtown, but it is nothing like Melbourne, the city I have become so accustomed to. So not only is there not a lot to do, but when you look around and realize that you are the one who is different and everyone is looking at you, you feel isolated and lonely. It is nice to have someone that I know from home here, but when it comes down to it, it wouldn't matter if he was here or not.

The AIR CONDITIONING just turned on. For the first time since I've been here!!! Korea is more humid then PA and pretty hot too. One of those places where if you walk 100 feet outside you are already sweating.

Anyways....

Charlie arrived late Friday night. We agreed to meet the next morning at ten for breakfast because I could have sworn that breakfast was from 9-11. Well it turns out that I was wrong because we show up in the cafeteria only to get shooed away by a small Korean woman. The only other place to find anything remotely breakfasty was in the campus convenience store. They had a pretty wide variety of pastry looking things but the only one I actually recognized was a muffin. I went with that, some bananas, and OJ. As we are talking over breakfast, Charlie informs me that they don't eat normal breakfast food. They eat fish, rice, and other random things. So we decided to go to the grocery store later that day to find some food that will sustain us for breakfast for awhile.

Next on the agenda was a trip to the gym. I have a feeling I am going to be spending a lot of time there over the next couple of weeks seeing as there is so little to do here and the gym is state of the art. They even have a beautiful turf field (luckily I have my hockey stick and an MUHC stolen hockey ball), racketball courts, tennis courts, ping-pong, an indoor track, and a basketball court.

My first trip downtown

I've been in Korea for two and a half days now and have managed to expand my vocabulary to three words or phrases, hello, thank you, and university. Hello and thank you are important for obvious reasons, but university is vital if you are anywhere off of campus and are trying to get back. For example, yesterday Charlie, his roommate named Awesome (that not how you spell it but it is how its pronounced), and I went into town to the grocery store to get some basic food like bread, peanut butter, and fruit. They do have a bus system but we decided to take a cab because split between the three of us it was actually cheaper then the bus. Charlie was able to convey our destination to the cabby (E-mart...pretty simple) and off we went into the most crowded grocery store I've ever seen. Now this grocery store was normal with the exception that they had samples of food everywhere. If you are starving and don't have money to eat, go into the grocery store, grab a sample of everything, and it will probably be as filling as an average meal. Granted, I didn't know what most of the samples were, but we tasted the safe ones. As soon as we entered, I headed straight for the fruit because no matter what country you're in, bananas look like bananas, apples look like apples, etc. After a lap around the store, I ended up with bananas, plums, apples, peanut butter, jam, bread, and granola bars. These are pretty much the only items that I could accurately identify that did not need to be refrigerated. Clearly, I plan on eating fruit and PB & J for breakfast for the next few weeks.

Paying for the food was an experience. The cashier (who didn't speak a word of English) rang up my items and then grabbed a plastic bag and started waving it at me. I was looking at her like, lady why are you waving a bag in my face. But then I realized she was asking me if I wanted a bag or not. No why would I want a bag, I only have six items to carry in my arms.... yes I want a bag and she hands it to me. So there I was trying to come up with the nearly 30,000 won to pay for my items. I figured it out eventually, she gave me my change and I take my bag and start filling it with my food. I am later told that they charge for bags in Korea. So you better either bring your own or you will have some serious trouble getting all of your groceries home after a big shopping trip.

We exit the grocery store and start walking down the street. This is where I realized how truly different we look and how obviously we stand out in this country. We are standing on the corner waiting to cross the street and these young girls (not even ten years old), walk right up to us and say hello. We say hello, how are you, back to them. And they respond with, I'm fine. Next, the girl says "I'm hungry" and starts rubbing her stomach. I realized then that these kids spotted the white people, assumed we were English speaking, and decided to practice their English on us, whatever random phrases they may have been taught. Then I felt really dumb because these young kids know more English then I know Korean...

This is where university in Korean comes in. We hail a cab and Charlie says Pohang University (but in Korean) so that the cabbie knows where to take us. Apparently if you say POSTECH, they take you somewhere completely different, even though that is what the University is called. I will definitely not forget that word, or else I might end up in Bumblefu** Korea and who knows if I'd ever made it back again.

Dinner was better last night. I still couldn't tell you what I was eating, but it was better then the night before. Less spicy items, and nothing that tasted like old fish. I guess it is going to be hit or miss with the meals, but that is okay, Korean food really isn't as bad as I thought it would be.

Last night, Professor Jung took the majority of his lab members to the movies to see Transformers. Luckily, the movie was in English but subtitled in Korean. I think that would really bother me if every movie that came out in the states was in another language and subtitled in English. It would get annoying after awhile, right? The movie theater was state of the art, but located on the seventh floor of a building. This seems really stupid to me because other then climbing 7 flights of stairs, the only way to get up there was to take the elevator. But a zillion other people are trying to take the elevator too, so it was a very slow process. Coming down after the movie was even worse.

Class and lab both start tomorrow so stay tuned!