Sunday Morning

It's now Sunday Morning. Flying to Korea wasn't so bad. The first leg was through Narita, Japan, and they seemed to speak more Japanese than English during the flight hehe. I sat next to this small Korean kid who kept wanting me to beat levels in his Super Mario game for him. 13 hours to Narita, a 2 hour layover, and another 2.5 hours after that I finally made it to Incheon. To put that into perspective, I left Atlanta at 2:20pm Thursday, arrived in Narita at 5:00pm Friday local time, and got my luggage in Incheon at 10pm local time (add 13 hours to your time on the east coast and you have Korean and Japanese time).
The strange thing I noticed is that Japan and Korea don't really have skies. I haven't seen even a hint of blue or anything other than white so far (2 days + traveling). This is kinda ironic, because there seemed to be a hole in the sky yesterday to welcome me to Korea. All day Saturday we had torrential downpour, which made going to yongsan market kind of a trial. Fortunately, Yeseul (who picked me up at the airport and let me crash at her place Friday night) went with me and showed me how to ride the Subway and the buses - turns out you can go a good ways around the city with just 3,000원 (~$3). It also turns out that banks are closed on Saturday and Sunday and unfortunately I didn't change any money into 원 (won) at the airport, so I had just 2,000원 that a guy on the airplane had given to me on the way as a souvenier. Bank Cards seem to work, but most markets don't like to deal with cards because of the tax associated with them.
I still managed to get cell phone service - the Korean guy who activated my service couldn't speak any English, so we had an interesting time trying to communicate fees and services and authentications >< Again, fortunately Yeseul was there to help me out and I got a good deal - got some power converters at 2 for 1000원 (~$1) and a cable to connect my computer to my phone for pictures at 2500원 (~$2.50), which is useless because they don't make USB drivers for Mac. If you go into yongsan though, it's like a mall but with all sorts of segmented stores and people who just talk to you nonstop. You just have to ignore them though, because if you talk to all of them, you'll never get anywhere. Or if you're crafty, you can use their tactics against them to get a lot of help navigating the stores and finding what you want really quickly.

Anyway, it's now 7am in Korea, and I'm at my homstay family's house. They're going out for work and such today (they work at a church someplace), so it'll be my first day alone traveling the city. My family gave me some cash very graciously, so I'll at least have money to get a taxi if I get lost hehe.