Arrival

After flying for almost a solid day I finally arrived in Incheon/Seol Airport. My new friend Allison (who I met in San Francisco) and I pulled worked our way through the air port and immigration without much trouble. We than pulled out our list of papers to see what our next task should be. We came to our first obstical: using a pay phone. We found them without much trouble but trying to work one was another story. There were instructions written next to the phone both in English and Korean but no matter how hard we tried and no matter what combination of numbers we put in we just couldn't make it work. So after about 20 min and picking up one more member of our crew, some random guy finally took pity on us and just called the numbers for us. We could now move on to the next leg of our journey.
Getting to the hotel wasn't much of a problem but it did take a little longer than I would have liked. We had about an hour bus ride to a Taxi pick up spot and than had to wait for about another hour to grab the right cab that would pick us up. Not very eventful.
The second I encountered was when I got to my room in the hotel. I met my roomate (Nick, who is also from Boston) For about 20 minutes we could only figure out how to turn on only one bedside light in our room. There were plenty of switches but no other way of turning them on. So we wandered around in the dark a bit until I noticed a place to put my room key card on the wall that had some korean writing on it and below it said: put room key card here. I didn't know what it would do but i decided to give it a shot and the lights came on.
The third obstical was where I sort of had an epiphany. Even though most instruction are written in Korean and English, the mere fact that there is a block of letters that you can't read, above the english ones that you can read, and the fact that you're in a strange place, makes you second guess everything you do, even simple things like turning on a light. So in a sense just being in a foreign land automatically makes you stupider. Or rather, just being in a foreign land makes me stupider. The third obstical was in fact, learning how to flush the toilet. This toilet had a lot of buttons on it. I mean a lot of buttons. I'm pretty sure on one the english word "massage" was there. How you get a massage on a toilet I will never want to find out. But after staring at the toilet for about a half hour, my roommate and I decided to give up and just tell the front desk that our toilet wouldn't flush. A man prompletly came up and showed us that the flusher was exactly where you would expect it would be hidden behind all the buttons. We laughed, felt stupid, and said thank you.
The first day wasn't too eventful. We mostly just slept and studied for our training which begins tomorrow. It should be interesting. I'll keep things up to date as often as I can.

Jason