Our week of preparatory tasks has now completed. We are finally at the point where we are only tired at night and our bodies wake us up at reasonable times, so no more jet lag. We have an alien registration cards, Korean driver’s licenses, a local bank account, a cell phone and a car.

Our hosts apologized for the low quality of the car, but we assured them that this ‘97 Hyundai Avante is a step up from the ‘93 Taurus we left behind in Ontario. We’ve found that the driving isn’t as bad in our city as some people had predicted we would find in Korea, but it could be better. A generation ago almost nobody had cars and now almost everyone does, and in that time, not everyone has been adequately instructed on safe driving practises. Bus drivers, taxi cabs and delivery trucks are especially bad, but you could probably say the same thing about a lot of Canadian cities. Another interesting thing is that almost everyone here drives Korean cars. Imports are available, but 99% of the vehicles that I have seen on the roads are Hyundai, Daewoo or Kia. I’ve seen an Austin Mini and a Jaguar, but the rest have been domestic cars.

We are also enjoying a wide variety of foods. Our lunch today included bone soup. The broth is made by boiling water with soup bones for 24 hours, and then some noodles and strips of beef are mixed in. Tuesday as we were touring our neighbourhood, we found a restaurant and decided to eat there for lunch. None of the staff spoke a word of English, but we figured that the premise of a restaurant should be pretty universal; whether or not we could communicate, we had money, and I was pretty sure we would get fed before we left. When the waitress arrived we pointed at another table indicating that we wanted to eat the same thing as them, which we later found was unnecessary, since most restaurants serve one basic dish. She brought out a beef rib soup, which we both enjoyed. Korean restaurants also serve a number of side dishes with their meals, which are unlimited; cabbage kimchi, radish kimchi, some pickled stuff, wasabi type stuff and some terribly hot red pepper paste. Ana and I have really enjoyed the food, with a few minor exceptions: Ana cannot handle spicy food and I suspect I may be mildly allergic to seafood (it turns out that fish and red pepper flakes are staples in the Korean diet).

It was with hesitance that we got the cell phone, since we tried to live without one in Canada, but it is a fun new toy nonetheless. The problem with it is that the instruction manual and some of the option menus are in Korean, but in the spirit of making lemonaid from lemons, we’ve found that we can just ask local teenagers to help us, and we all of a sudden have a social connecting point.