The Adventure Slows Down...Day 4 in Korea

I woke up early (yet again) on Sunday morning (around 6:30). I tried reading in hopes that that would get me back to sleep but my hopes were fruitless. I rolled out of bed and into the kitchen (this isn't an exaggeration, since they're in the same place) and cooked up some dumplings and stick coffee for breakfast. I ate the dumplings and drank my stick coffee while sitting at my little Korean breakfast table, listening to Korean lessons on my laptop. 

Awwwwww...

After finishing my breakfast, I decided that it might be a bad day to go out adventuring, since it was the day before I started work and my director was bound to call me it some point. But I wanted to adventure... I decided to save my adventuring for after her phone call and/or any meetings we might have. So I did some laundry with my new detergent pushed onto me by the sweet old lady. I also Skyped with my parents and talked to various people on the Internet, making sure I was caught up on everyone else's social life. (Hey, when you've got no one to talk to in a foreign country, that's what you do. Shut up.) I spent most of my day organizing my apartment until I was completely satisfied and taking care of little projects that I'd made for myself. One project was to get the TV working, which didn't take long at all. I even got the Xbox hooked up, but was not able to get it to connect to XboxLive. Without XboxLive, I would have to resort watching NetFlix movies on my small computer screen. (#firstworldproblems) Unfortunately, I never did find a way to get it to connect. Maybe I'll be able to find a friend who knows a thing or two about Korean modems and is willing to help me with my first world problem.

One thing that had really been bothering me is that I didn't know my address. Korean addresses are different, so it's not something I could figure out very easily, even if I could read Korean! I realized that I wasn't even sure that I was living in Seongnam, as I'd seen several road signs the previous day with Seongnam printed on them...only pointing away from my apartment complex. I remembered that we'd driven for quite a while from the school before getting to the apartment, so it was very likely that I didn't live in Seongnam. All I really knew about where I lived was that it was in a city that looked like this:

Hmmmmmm...

 I looked around the Seongnam area on Google Maps, but was unable to find any landmarks that looked like they were anything close to me. Then a thought occurred to me...I'd seen a bill of some sort with an address on it in Korean that was in the mailbox for my apartment downstairs. I rushed downstairs, grabbed it, and ran back up the stairs. Using my terrible Korean reading skills, I was able to sound out some bastardized forms of the characters until I was able to type in something that Google maps would recognize: Gwangju.

Bingo.

I lived in Gwangju. I immediately looked it up on Wikipedia and found out that Gwangju was a large metropolitan city with a lot to offer. People came there for all sorts of stuff! It was a cultural hotspot in Korea with a lot of significant history. There were even tons of western bars! Hooray. It wasn't until I glanced at the map and saw that that Gwangju was in a completely different province, very far from Seongnam that I began to have my doubts. I tried Gwangju-si, Gyeongghi-do and then came up with another Wikipedia page about a smaller city called Gwangju (not to be confused with Gwanju metropolitan city!) that had much less to offer. Damn. Oh well. At least I knew where I lived!

I sounded out some more of the characters and was able to narrow down the address to my apartment complex. Yippee! Using an address given to me by my recruiter, I was able to find the school that I was teaching at in Seongnam. Hooray. Now I could find a way to work! 

The map showed me that I'd have to hop on 2 different buses (and walk some) but that it would be possible to make it to the school that way in about 45 minutes. I was stoked. I wanted to go right then and there, but also wanted to wait for my director to call. (She'd seemed worried that she was unable to reach me several times during the previous 2 days so I wanted to make sure that she wouldn't have that problem on this day.) I showered, got dressed, washed dishes, ate more food, read other peoples' Facebooks, and waited. Somewhere in there I decided to start a blog about my adventures in Korea.

The director called around 7 pm to tell me when we would meet the next day and tell me that she regretted that she could not take me out for dinner that night. (Seriously, these people are that hospitable. I'm very fortunate.) I spent the rest of the night chatting with people, Skyping, blogging, and drinking stick coffee to try to stay up. I finally got to sleep around 12:30 am, excited to start my first day of teaching!