First Impressions
My first post from Korea!
After a long journey from London, I finally made it to Daejeon yesterday evening. I was greeted by my boss and the PhD student from the group and we went out for some food. Luckily we went to a place that had some English on the menu, and I had some rice and prawn thing with an egg on top. After that, I went to my dorm. Seems like I’m sharing with someone, though I haven’t seen him yet…
After a loooong sleep, I woke up this afternoon and went for a wander into town to try and find some bed sheets. Found a place called Home Plus (which has almost God-like status amongst the ex-pats here. It’s more or less Wal-Mart, though when I went in, it seems like it’s owned by Tesco. Same style labels, and their own-brand products are sometimes actually Tesco stuff). Didn’t have any luck finding bed sheets, but at least I knew where it was.
Had got in touch with some of the other placement students, and agreed to meet them at KRIBB (my workplace). Easy enough, I thought. Except when I left the campus where I’m staying, I turned the wrong way. Took me an hour to find KRIBB, by which point, the students had given up and gone back. Frantically Facebooked them on my phone (dread to think how much it cost), and luckily they were still about. Oh, how great it was to finally talk to people who could speak English. We got some food, which is *really* cheap out here. And yummy. There are some dubious things in the food, and I’m going to try as much as possible to eat non-meat things. I think it might be somewhat tricky though. Sofie taught me the word for “meat” in Korean, so hopefully I’ll be ok.
We went back to Home Plus after meeting up with some other ex-pats in an ex-pat bar. Somewhere I think I’ll be spending a lot of time downing soju and whatever else is drunk here.
Anyway, some first impressions.
It’s like America. Only everything is in Korean. It really is. There’s so much choice. A lot of people drive big cars. They have most American chains you could think of (Dunkin’ Donuts…). They have coffee shops that claim to have the best coffee in the world. Food is cheap. It’s very green. It’s not as hot as I’d been led to believe, though of course that might change.
Starting work tomorrow, so going to get an earlyish night now…
