Dear Mom and Dad, I made it!

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And, of course, anyone else who's been wanting to know.

The wonderful thing about being in an Asian country is that internet access is not nearly as difficult as it was in Europe. Even camp for that matter. I'm, in fact, sitting at my computer in my hotel room with the FREE internet access complete with complimentary cable. WIN.

They say Seoul gets hot and muggy this time of year. They are right. After being in this wonderfully cloudy country for 2 hours, I felt stickier than I felt after a 14 hour plane ride.

I also read that Seoul gets really cold in the winter months, but this German guy I spoke to on the airport shuttle said that we New Englanders... oops, I mean, I the New Englander... have nothing to fear. Their "cold" isn't as cold as our "cold" so it's okay. Apparently it doesn't even SNOW here.

Cab drivers at Incheon airport are pushy beasts. Especially when they see that you are a new and confused American to squeeze 100,000 won* from. Luckily I had CDI's strict instructions to find THE BUS NOT A CAB, so I pretended not to understand them and walked away.

*1 US dollar is roughly 1,000 Korean Won, so to convert you simply move the decimal point three places. According to CDI's warning, the above estimate about cab costs is not an exaggeration. Luckily, I wouldn't know.

The countryside is really cool in that it is a combination of jagged peaks, funny-looking trees and skyscrapers. There's none of the suburban sprawl we Americans know and love. The well-informed German guy said that was because only about 30-40%!o(MISSING)f Korean's land (of which there is not a lot to begin with) is liveable, so they have to build skyscrapers to fit everyone. "The more you know..."

(Mis)Adventure of the day: dinner.

In my hotel room is a little kitchenette complete with pots and utensils. Instead of going somewhere and trying to mime an order (ask my father about a certain KFC incident in French-speaking Canada when I was nine), I decided to find a supermarket.
The guy at the front desk gave me directions but they were complicated and I got confused, so instead of wandering around lost and dazed like that naiive American you can spot from 7 blocks away, I panicked and ducked into a Family Mart, which looked like a small, Asian 7-11.
After a couple minutes of "oh-God-I-can't-read-the-labels-is-any-of-this-vegetarian?" and a brief internal debate about whether I should take out my Korean phrasebook and look up "peanuts" (luckily my good sense won out), I managed to find some veggie food.
The cashier had a computer screen that displayed how much everything cost, so when the clerk rattled off my total in rapid Korean, I could smile and pretend to understand.

On the way back to my hotel, two guys called to me from across the street, just to wave and say hi (or "annyeong", as it were). I can't be positive about why, but it might have had something to do with the fact that I didn't see a single non-Asian face the whole time I was out.

Pictures next time. For now, I'm off to learn some Korean words. It seems (surprise, surprise) I'm going to need them.

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