World Flavor

Today is Wednesday and we are almost done with orientation. It has been really hectic but I have also learned a lot.

We are staying in the dorm of the National Institute of International Education near Hyehwa Station in Seoul. This is a pretty bustling area of the city, very crowded at night. Each room has two beds, two desks, a table with two chairs, and a wardrobe with two lockable compartments. My roommate’s name is Mary and she is from Arizona.

The bathrooms are shared and have some interesting quirks. The sink faucets turn on the opposite way from in the US so I keep getting confused. All the showers have the handheld nozzles and there are a couple of stalls that you have to hold a button to make water come out.

We have a cafeteria with pretty decent food. Each meal is at a set time of about an hour long. Usually breakfast has eggs and cereal and toast as well as a few Korean things. They have done some sort of American style food but mostly there’s Korean food and it has been yummy. There’s always kimchee. I am pretty proficient with chopsticks (in fact, the president of NIIED complimented me on my chopsticks use).

Almost every day has been packed from 9 am to 5:20 pm with lectures. Four lectures a day at 1 and a half hours each. It is pretty tiring. Then for several days we have had lectures and other stuff after dinner until 9 or 10 pm. Breakfast starts at 7:50.

The first couple days I was waking up really early (6 am) because I was hungry or because I had fallen asleep really early the night before, but now I’ve gotten more used to the time and over the jet lag. Since it’s a 13 hour difference, it makes being hungry at the right time easy at least.

The first day, Friday, we had a medical exam. It was the most efficient and easy one I have ever had. They took blood and a urine sample and a chest x-ray, but still they got about 50 people through in less than an hour. We couldn’t eat before the exam but we were still up pretty early so a bunch of people took a walk around the neighborhood. We found some parks and some cool statues. Seoul seems to have a lot of green spaces, which I really like.

After the exam we were given snacks but still had to wait for lunch to open so we walked around some more. After lunch there was the opening ceremony, for which we all had to wear our EPIK t-shirts. Some boys from a local high school came and did samulnori, which is traditional drumming. Then the former security adviser to the (Korean) president gave a talk about Korea in the world today. I didn’t know Korea had the 15th largest economy or was one of the top shipbuilders. It is also up there in producing cars, phones, and flat screen TVs. Samsung is the biggest electronics seller in the world. All of this is especially amazing when you consider that Korea was more or less a third world country only 50 or so years ago. The economic boom was known as the Miracle of the Han River.

After that talk we filled out some forms to set up our bank accounts. I went to bed very early.

Saturday was full of lectures and in the evening we had Korean language classes. It turns out I was in the intermediate class because I could already read Hangul (sort of). We learned how to say hello and introduce ourselves in Korean.

We also discovered we had to do a lesson presentation with a group of 15 minutes, and do a formal lesson plan. This took up a lot of evenings as well.

Sunday we had lectures, Korean class, and group meeting. Monday we had lectures and our last day of Korean class. No group meeting so a bunch of people went out to party. Jeff and I joined them. We went to Beer O Clock where I had my first taste of soju and Jeff ordered an entire squid (delicious!). Afterwards we went to 노래방 (noraebang or room-style karaoke) which was of course super fun.

Tuesday we had a really nice field trip to Ganghwa Island (강화도) which I will blog about in more detail later.

Wednesday was the last day of lectures and we also had group meetings until late.

Today, Thursday, we did our lesson presentations through the morning and early afternoon. Afterwards we met our MOE (Metropolitan Office of Education) supervisor and signed our contracts. We also finally found out our schools! I don’t have the name of mine available just now but it is an elementary school on a major highway in Incheon not far from Chinatown. Jeff’s school is approximately a block away and is also an elementary school.

Tomorrow we will be moving to Incheon! I am quite excited, although I’ll probably also have to meet my principal which makes me slightly nervous. But it should be alright.

After a hectic week or two where Jeff and I were driving around a lot and trying to see everyone and get everything done, I finally got on the way to Korea! It took us a while to pack… we didn’t finish until about midnight or one in the morning before leaving… and we had to leave for the airport at 5 AM. But we got it done, and got up in the morning and Jeff’s parents took us to the airport.

Checking in and going through security was pretty quick. We had to check bags of course (I actually had 3, oops). The first flight was pretty uneventful; we both slept for a decent portion of it. I don’t have much to say about Virgin America except the ride was incredibly smooth, and the plane was sort of purple inside. We managed to sit next to each other and everything.

Then we got to San Francisco and luggage claim was pretty speedy (not many people check bags domestically anymore). We made our way to the international terminal, sort of painfully – yes, I have too much stuff to really handle all that well – then waited for the check-in line for our Singapore Air flight to open. Finally got through that stuff, then met with Jeff’s brother Patrick for lunch. I got a goat cheese pizza that came with pesto and red peppers and was actually really good. We then went through security which was kind of a madhouse. I was behind a lady with a cat.

Eventually got on the plane. Singapore Air seems rather luxurious; they even gave us a bag with comfy socks and a mini toothbrush and toothpaste in it! There was a menu for meals… for the ‘lunch’ I got the fish and pasta, which was okay. It came with cheese and crackers which was nice, and the dessert, a sort of pineapple pie thing, was pretty good. I haven’t been able to sleep yet on this flight, I’ve been playing games in the seatback entertainment system. I also watched a couple of movies – Scream 4 which was amusing and The Lovely Bones which I thought was a pretty great adaptation. While waiting in line for the bathroom, we met another couple teaching through EPIK who seem cool. We suspect there are quite a few of us on this flight. There are plenty of people at about the right age and stuff anyway. I then fell asleep while watching Thor. We had a meal after that, I got beef and potatoes which was okay. Finally we landed in Incheon!

Going through customs and getting bags was pretty easy. We got some cash and then met John from Reach to Teach. Then we picked up our rental phones and went over to wait for the EPIK shuttle. We got into the National Institute for International Education (where the orientation is) at about ten. We were told we couldn’t eat or drink after midnight for the medical exam on Friday. They gave us a bag of stuff and we went to our rooms. My roommate’s name is Mary.

The dorm rooms are pretty small and they only have one key each, so you have to put it on a key board when you leave. I pretty much went straight to sleep after checking my email.

It is pretty cool that I’m in Korea now! I’ll write later more about the dorms, and about orientation and stuff.

Last Wednesday Jeff and I set off on a road trip to Indianapolis for Gen Con, the country’s largest board game convention. This post will cement me as a nerd forever, and I will wear that badge proudly, just as I wore my literal badge for Gen Con for four days. We decided to make the journey since Jeff’s brother Kevin was going with 5 of his friends, most of whom we met while visiting Kevin in Ann Arbor. That group had already made hotel reservations, and there was space for two more, so we jumped on. We bought a badge when it was still early enough to not have jumped in price. The drive from the Fairfax area to Indianapolis is around 9.5-10 hours. On the way over, we stopped for a sit-down lunch in Cumberland, MD and wasted some more time in a Burger King in Indiana so it took about 12 hours in all. The way back was much shorter. Upon arriving we found a sneaky parking lot that let us park for $5 for the entire time (if you didn’t go in and out). If you are headed to Indianapolis to the convention center or nearby, I can let you know about this awesome deal. Then we took our stuff to the SpringHill Suites where we were staying and crashed. On Thursday we went to get our will call badges at around 9 in the morning and had to stand in line for them for two hours. During this time we got to see lots of good costumes, though.

Some of my favorite costumes of the convention were two pairs of the Eleventh Doctor and Sexy/Tardis as well as 3 weeping angels (two separate groups even). There were lots of anime costumes that I didn’t recognize, and some random stuff like Alice in Wonderland and Abe Lincoln on stilts. There were some really really amazing homemade costumes. There was a good group of X Men and a really great group of Star Wars cosplayers. I suspect some of them were members of the 501^st Legion.

We spent most of the convention in the Exhibition Hall, which had large areas for the major board game companies as well as artists, authors, t-shirt booths, independent game companies, stalls totally consisting of dice, etc. There was a whole bunch of stuff to see, as well as countless games to demo! Some booths let you play the full game, especially if it was a short game, but mostly you just got a pretty good taste of what it’d be like (so that you could decide whether to buy it).

We also hung out in the Rio Grande room quite a bit. All the major game companies (like Mayfair, Fantasy Flight, Wizards of the Coast, etc) had private rooms where theoretically you could play full versions of their games. However, they all charged you money (well, not Cryptozoic either but they have all of two games) except Rio Grande. Their room was free to play all day, open late, and gave out free food. It pretty much endeared Rio Grande to me a lot (not to mention they make great games).

I didn’t buy any games but was tempted a lot by Arcana and a cheap-ish copy of Seven Wonders in the auction store. I did buy a Miskatonic University t-shirt. The last day, right before driving back, we checked out the game library (which cost money on every day except Sunday) and we played the full version of Arcana which we had only demoed (it’s a deck-building card game where you use your hand to win cards in the middle).

I can’t say I saw much of Indianapolis besides the Convention Center. We were staying right across from some museums and close to the zoo, and the first night I was thinking maybe I’d stop by one of those attractions – but I was just really busy trying out games! I did eat out twice, once at Buca di Beppo, a chain family-style Italian restaurant that is decent but not great, and once at Bazbeaux Pizza, which was quite good.