First Impressions

Fourteen hours in the air without sleep or enough leg, hip, or shoulder room, and a mind sludged by jet-lag will colour any first impressions.  Still, Korea made an immediate impression on me. 

Seoul was incredibly cold when I landed on February 17th. I managed to find my way through customs and immigration, connect to the airport wifi, and find out where I needed to catch my free shuttle-bus to my hotel. Standing outside, alone, waiting for the bus, I realized that I made a terrible mistake. I didn't pack my winter coat, and my fleece jacket wasn't going to cut it in sub-zero weather.

I decided to arrive in Korea a few days before my orientation to adjust to the time-zone change, and do some sightseeing.  I stayed in Incheon near the airport because I would need to return to the airport in a few days to meet my coordinators and be shuffled off to orientation.  Despite how convenient, comfortable and modern the Best Western Premier was, it was no match for jet-lag that results from the 14-hour time zone difference between Seoul and Toronto.  I was incredibly tired, but couldn't fall asleep until about 12:00 am and, of course, I was wide-awake at 4:00 am.  I would wake up groggy and confused at 4 am for the next week at least.

What to do at 4am?  Well, there was some complimentary tea in the hotel room with an electric kettle. I made what I thought was green tea and took a sip.

sample

Turns out, this is a popular flavour of tea in Korea. It's not green tea, exactly, and one sip was plenty. I scrambled to see if this actually was tea. Had it expired? In my early morning stupor, could I have accidentally put a bag of dirt into a mug? 

I fired up my trusty Google Translate app and learned that this tea, called hyeonmi-nokcha in Korean, is actually a mix of green tea and brown rice flavour. Okay! Fair enough. This is going to be an interesting year. Several days later I would mistakenly buy a 50 pack of this tea, believing again that it was green tea. Let's blame that on the jet-lag too.

After a bumpy start, I managed to navigate my way through the stations and the trains to meet my friend and do some sightseeing around Seoul.  As a city, Seoul is expansive and dense, but incredibly organized. I felt out of place at first, but Seoul is comfortable with visitors and most of the people I interacted with spoke to me in English before I had to worry about using charades to order a meal. 

The days eventually warmed up to spring temperatures. All in all, not a bad few days...