The Adventure Continues...Day 2 in Korea

I woke up on Friday morning around 8:30. The night before, I asked Mr. Lee what time I should be awake the next day for work. He told me to rest Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I was very grateful, as working on Friday would have been very hard for me. I had toast and milk for breakfast and spent most of Friday morning unpacking and organizing my belongings. I also had the chance to Skype with my parents using the little amount of battery power I had left. (They have different plugs in Korea, so I couldn't just plug my laptop in.) They seemed pleased.


 I also tried out the shower in the bathroom. If you didn't see the pictures in the previous post, the shower is just kind of an added on nozzle above the bathroom sink. There's a drain in the floor for all of the water. One of the great things about this is that it is very easy to keep your bathroom clean. All you have to do is take a shower and you've practically done all the work!

Pretty cool stuff.

After unpacking, I was hanging out in the apartment, reading when the doorbell rang. I opened it, expecting to see Mr. Lee at the door. Instead, there was some guy dressed in coveralls. "Hello," he said in Korean, and came right in. He slipped off his shoes, marched over to the telephone and began inspecting it. I realized that he was there to hook up my phone. Because my apartment is so small, there are no chairs, and I didn't want to sit next to him on the bed to watch him work, I went into the bathroom and hung out there for a while. After a while I peeked out at him. He called me over, turned the phone over, and showed me that it needed batteries. Because I didn't know how to say "I don't have any batteries" in Korean, I kind of shrugged and did my best to pantomime the fact. He eventually caught on. He went to the door, put on his shoes, and left. He returned about 1 minute later with some batteries and put them into the phone. He then made a phone call on it. I couldn't tell what he was saying, but it didn't sound like it was work related. He must have talked on it for a good 10 minutes before he got a call on his cell phone. He had another, somewhat exciting conversation on his cell for about 10 more minutes. After hanging up, he looked at me and said "Thank you" in Korean and left as abruptly as he came. 

I hung out in the apartment until about 2, since school started at 2 and Mr. Lee or the director might have dropped by to check on me. After not hearing from them until then, I decided to go out and explore my surroundings. I went downstairs and looked around outside. It was dark when Mr. Lee drove me to the apartment and so I wasn't exactly sure how to get out of the complex. A man drove by in a truck that had a recording playing. He was either buying, selling, or repairing electronic devices. I couldn't really tell. I walked around the complex for a bit, running into only dead ends. I saw that there were men working to repave the street a ways down and figured that that was the only way to get out of the complex. It started to get really hot and so after some confusion, I found my building and went back to my cozy, air conditioned apartment. Satisfied that I could find my way back to my place, I spent about 15 minutes in the apartment before my stomach started growling. I decided to go on a quest for some sort of food and drink. 

I found an alternate, roundabout way to get around the men repaving the street and walked out to the main highway. It looked kind of like this, except a little more like an interstate. You couldn't cross the street because of the traffic, and there was a divider in the middle of the road. You could, however, walk on the sides of the highway.

Most of the shops were in Korean. I passed by a gas station with some old men sitting out in front of it. Across the highway I could see a 7-11, but did not see any easy way to get to it. I walked along the street past several shops and sit-down restaurants. I was initially searching for some sort of grocery store, but I was starting to think about possibly going to a restaurant. Knowing that Korean restaurants are mostly designed to accommodate families, I decided to look for some kind of street food, perhaps a hole-in-the wall shop with a menu that had pictures so that I could point at them. I hiked along the road for a while, until I found a shop that looked like exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately, it was closed. 

I eventually reached a dead end next to a school, so I decided to go back towards the complex. By the time I got to the gas station with the old men, I was really thirsty so I decided to stop there to get something to drink. As I got closer to the building, I could see that it was not the kind of gas station that carried that had food and drink...it just had stuff for automobiles. The old man that was sitting outside got up from his chair and approached me. He asked me what I was looking for. I tried to explain that I was just looking for junk food or soda or something like that. (At that point, I was hungry for just about anything). He couldn't understand me very well, but told me to wait there and ran to get his son, who he said had "good English." He insisted that I sit in his chair while I waited. His son (another old man) came out and asked me if he could help me. I told him what I was looking for and he said "We don't have that here. Would you like some water?" I told him yes. He ran inside and brought back a bottle of water. When I asked him how much it would cost, he insisted that it was free and wouldn't take any money for it. I thanked him and continued on. 

I saw a restaurant that looked like it had the kind of food that I was looking for. I saw someone go inside and decided to try my luck there. Inside, people were sitting around watching TV and eating. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to wait for someone, if I was supposed to seat myself, or what so I just stood there for a while. When I saw no apparent waiters or waitresses, no menus, and no apparent place to order food, I went back outside. I hiked back to the apartment and decided I'd settle for more toast and milk. Fortunately, the milk is really good. It's actually some of the best that I've ever had!

Hunger, heat, and jet lag all worked together to create fatigue, and after I ate my toast and milk, I decided to take a nap. The phone rang around 10:30. It was the director. She told me that she'd tried to call earlier that morning (presumably before the phone was hooked up) and received no answer. She said that they'd had such a busy day at school that they didn't have time to call, but she asked if I was hungry and if they could take me out to eat. I agreed. She told me that Mr. Lee would be by to get me in about 10 minutes. I got ready to go out and after Mr. Lee called me saying that he was almost there, I went down to meet him. Mr. Lee was in the car with Jake and his daughter. Jake asked how I was and told me that we were going to eat golbi. I asked him what it was and he said "I don't know," but then changed his mind and thought for a minute and finally came up with "sweet meat." His sister later told me that it was pork. On the way to the restaurant, Mr. Lee asked if I'd been able to use the Internet. I told him yes, but that the battery on my laptop had died and that I needed a transformer to plug it into so that it wouldn't fry my computer. He told me that I could find one of those at E-Mart and pointed to a large yellow sign out in the city. It looked like it was a good ways from the apartment, but I made a mental note to find a way to E-Mart the next day.

The restaurant had an area with smaller tables where you sat on the floor and it also had booths. We sat in a booth that had a hole in the middle of the table. The server brought an open metal container filled with hot coals which he placed in the hole in the middle of the table. He then brought a grill that was placed over the hole and 2 very large pieces of meat. Mr. Lee used cooking shears to cut the meat into small pieces and cook them. It all looked a lot like this picture. 

He would cook the pieces and then place them in front of each person when he was finished. The server also brought out a lot of bowls with different sauces, ingredients, etc. Mr. Lee's daughter asked me if I like onion. I told her that I liked it okay. She poured some sort of broth over some onions in a bowl, handed it to me, and said "Try it later." I assumed that it was to be mixed with the golbi and probably rice. When the server brought rice out, I took the portion that was mine and dumped it in the broth. Everyone shouted "NOOOOOO!" right before it went in, but then shrugged and laughed. (They seemed sad that I'd done that and wouldn't let me eat the broth)

I tried the different sauces and ingredients, some incorrectly I think judging by the fact that they all burst out laughing several times when I would eat certain things. Oh well, at least it all tasted good. Golbi is awesome.

We left the restaurant and got in the car to head back. We talked about some movies and I entertained them with my impersonation of a New Zealand dialect (they used to live in New Zealand, so they'd had some experience with that...I thought it was even funnier when Mr. Lee started to tease his daughter about the way she'd acquired it while they'd lived there). On the way back, Mr. Lee stopped by a store called I-Mart and pointed it out to me. He said that I could buy everything I needed there. He then showed me how I could get there easily from the apartment. It was night time and I was a bit turned around, but I began to suspect that it was very close to where I'd walked earlier that day...

They dropped me off at the apartment and I thanked them for the meal. Jake told me to have a good weekend. I spent the rest of the night reading. As I drifted off to sleep, I decided that the next day my objective would be to visit both I-Mart and E-Mart...