Longest day of my life

OK, get ready:

I'm still a little jet lagged, so I haven't been able to sleep in past 6:00 am yet. Saturday morning I woke up at six, got ready, unpacked a little more and set out to explore Busan. I hopped on the Subway and set off to meet Dave in his city which is about 10 minutes away by train. Neither of us has a phone yet or internet in our apartments so we had arranged to meet at 10:00 in front of a big hotel. We kept missing each other for about an hour, but we eventually met up. We went to the beach, which is really pretty nice here. The most popular beach is called Haeundae.

The subway system here is awesome. There is a train every 5-6 minutes and they go everywhere. It stops running a little after midnight but starts up again after 5 in the morning. I'm told that cabs are cheap (not when they don't understand you and take you 2 hours in the wrong direction - more on this later).

This place is really safe too. There are kids walking around by themselves everywhere. I'm not just talking about middle school kids, there are some really young kids just strolling on the streets.

Every subway stop is a different city and there are a lot of stops. These are really densely populated areas with tons of buildings. There are street vendors everwhere selling T shirts, watches, sunglasses, crazy food, etc. Think Mexico but less pushy and cheaper. I got a watch last night with a picture of a sea otter on it. It says: "I'm not a beaver, I'm an otter!" I love it.

So we took the train to the coast. We were on a mission to find some other foreigners and to make some new friends. There are actually a lot more white people here than you would think. We found some Canadians who pointed us in the direction of the expat bars. After getting off at the wrong stop and enjoying a beer at "Miller Time" (yes that is the name of the bar!!) we eventually found the University area and the Expat bars Vinyl Underground and Ol'55. The Bar names here are ridiculous:

"Girls and Beer"
"Chicken and Beer"
"Sexy Girls"
"Sexy Organiser" - not sure if this one is a bar but I thought it was worth mentioning.
etc.

Koreans and Asians in general use English as a marketing tool. Most of them don't understand it but in their eyes it looks cool. Often times the English will be spelled wrong and make no sense. China is currently attempting to go around Beijing and correct all of the bad English that is visable from the streets before the coming Olympics. Many people wear T-shirts with English phrases on them that they don't understand themselves. Today I saw a guy wearing hoodie with "Jesus Loves Even Me" in huge letters on the back. Some are inappropriate. For some asian gems check out www.engrish.com, there is some funny stuff there.

By the time we finally get to the University district we are exhausted. We've been up for over 14 hours, we're still dealing with jetlag, and we've been walking around this new city all day long. By the way, Koreans (along with other Asians) are skinny because they walk everywhere. I swear I burned more than 1000 calories just walking around yesterday. We stopped into a bar called Thursday club, made a couple new foreign teacher friends and set off for Vinyl Underground. by this time it's around 10:00, this is when most places back home start to pick up and get crowded. Vinyl was empty. Not a soul. This is when we learned that clubs in Korea don't close. There is no last call. People go all night long and wait for the morning train to go home. We moved along to Ol'55 a block away and ran into a whole group of teachers who work in the some program we do. Success!! It was nice to chat with some people experiencing the same stuff we were. There was a good live foreigner band there playing some old punk rock hits, it was a good time.

Eventually around 1:00 am our legs were ready to give out so we decided to try our luck with a cab. Dave lives in a city called Sasang which was closer to the University District than my place so he says "Sasang Subway station" and proceeds to fall asleep. Apparently I did too because the next thing I know it's 3:00 am and we're stopped somewhere in the mountains!! Our driver speaks no English and all we know to say is Sasang subway station. After some modified pronunciations we eventually clued him into the fact that he had gone way too far. by the time we got back to Dave's city it was around 5:00 am and I was able to take the subway back home. I was watching the driver's gps screen on the way back, we we're way out there. The good side of all of this is that we got to see some beautiful countryside. Korea is all Mountains, valleys, rivers, and greenery.

So today I am resting, tomorrow there is an assembly to introduce me to the entire school. Crazy stuff.

Teacher Tony