As Christmas approached, social media unsurprisingly became filled with friends and families spending time together over the holidays. For some it was even a White Christmas! For the past 25 years I've spent this holiday with my family, and this year I wasn't able to join them. I was a little down in the dumps at times because of it and would be lying if I said I had "the perfect Christmas" that I was used to. That being said, my Christmas was a new kind of perfect!
We got off the bus and I was automatically in everyone's way wherever I stood. People were flying by left and right as I stood there in a group with three other mid-westerners who had no idea where to go, or how to speak Korean. But nonetheless, we were there to adventure and see the big city. Before attempting to navigate our way to another teacher couple (who actually knew the city), we stopped at a breakfast food truck. Fried food on a stick.
This weekend we learned that South Korea has hot wings. And I mean HOT wings. It was maybe not smart of me to try one, but I had to know how good they were. I almost cried and my tongue basically fell off, but I survived. Really though, the chicken was delicious and its good to know we can find wings when we're craving them! We followed up dinner with a trip to our first Korean bar where we learned a simple two-part drinking game involving Soju.
It was a good day. It was a good day in...Daegu ("Day-goo"). Ha.
We took a taxi to the bus. The bus to another bus. Then the second bus to the subway, and finally arrived to Daegu. For comparison, South Korea is about the size of Indiana, and Daegu - being the 4th largest city in the country - has a population of ~2.4 million. So it basically felt like a squished version of Chicago.
On our second day here, we woke up at 8 AM to head into town for our medical check before we could receive our immigration card. In an hour, we had received a vision and hearing test, checked our blood pressure, had blood drawn, peed in a cup and went to the dentist (where she looked in our mouths for 30 seconds). For the most part it seemed pretty similar to how things are done in the U.S. but there were still a few times we had to laugh to ourselves because it seemed odd.
WE MADE IT!!!
In the last 48 hours, Luke and I started our big adventure by going to four airports and two countries, taking three different flights, problem solving our way through a foreign country and their transportation system, meeting our new coworkers, having our first day of training, and experiencing our first TRUE Korean meal.
