Korea - April 2002

Korea - April 30,2002

Our flight was with Singapore Airlines. The flight attendants (the girls only) have probably the best outfit of all airlines. The food was great, but I don't care how spoiled you get on a plane...a 12 hour flight is a 12 hour flight. You come out of the plane feeling like a lazy old woman...crinks in your neck, tired and feeling guilty that you haven't done anything but sleep or eat.

We arrive to Incheon airport at nighttime. On the way to the hotel I started learning simple Korean sayings like "thank you" , "excuse me" etc. I think the taxi driver thought I was nuts. But at least he seemed to understand me because every once in a while I saw him smile. He was probably thinking, "American accent so ugly". The next morning I get up at 8am to get ready for work. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to turn on the shower, until I finally found some obscure knob in the back. Seriously. I see these numbers: 30,40,50 and I'm thinking...is that the angle of the showerhead, the strength of the water stream or good God I hope it's not Celsius! I actually still have no idea what the numbers stand for, but I can at least successfully shower. The hotel towels are harder than sandpaper, with a huge lion face on it (the hotel's logo).

So off to work i go. I meet my coworkers downstairs and we walk about 15mins to the office in rain. What happened to the weather? Last night it was beautiful. Oh well. I go to work and meet some coworkers of mine that I've never even seen face to face, and had lots of meetings, blah blah blah. Not interesting to you.
So let me get back to the interesting stuff: Drinking. Haha! So after work a bunch of Yahoo!s go out to "kalbi" , which is korean barbeque. You sit down Indian style in front of these long tables with the bbq grill right in front of you. Then the waitress puts a million little serving dishes with all this food. Kinda hard to explain, but basically you have the meat on the grill, and then you can choose what food you want to eat with the meat. So one dish might have lettuce, some funky seaweed salad , or kimchee, etc. So we eat away, with "Soju", an alcoholic beverage. Korean custom is that no one can drink alone. So if I start drinking, everyone else has to cheer every single time. I thought this was the best way to make everyone drunk, but I didn't abuse it.

Then we go to a bar. Apparently anytime you drink , you have to eat appetizers. So we were served dried octupus and squid, cheese that didn't look like cheese, wasabi green peas, and some other things I didn't even try. I actually liked the dried squid. Anyway, they served us the biggest beer pitcher i've ever seen in my life. It's about twice the size of the normal American pitcher. We started playing drinking games...which is pretty funny because you get this surreal sense that ...wow. I'm really in Korea.

So after we all get pretty lit at this bar, we decide that our fun isn't over. We go to ANOTHER bar called "Flair". All the waiters are dressed up as military. I tried to bust out my "where's the bathroom" in Korean, and somehow the guy actually understood me. I was soooo proud of that. Of course, today's a new day and I already forgot how to say it. So no bathroom for me. We were having more shots..I chose the "playboy" shot just for it's name. By this time it's about 1am and we are all pretty lit. Jetlag hit me up the head and basically I couldn't handle it anymore, so we all headed out for the hotel. Two of our guys were walking waaaay behind us, and apparently they got lost so they went to another bar until 430am. Too funny.

Today's going to be even more fun because we can all party again. Tomorrow is a holiday here, so all the Korean guys are ready to stay up late into the night. Tonight all of Customer Care will go out for more Kalbi (but they say it's better than yesterdays) and the manager mentioned something like karaoke (uh oh) afterwards. She politely asked me, "Sara, do you sing?". UHOH. Maybe they can give me lots of soju.