Made it!

It's seven in the morning, I got maybe seven hours of sleep after an all nighter, and I'm wide awake. Yay jetlag! Now I just have to not fall asleep at 4pm at work. Hopefully they don't expect me to be in a particularly caring mood after travelling for 36 hours.

Korea is a rather peculiar place. I was picked up at the airport by a guy in a black suit who didn't speak English, and jabbered something into his cell phone on Korean as soon as found me. It felt very spy movie-esque to me, until I almost laughed when he said "No speakee Engrishee."

I'm going by Elizabeth while I'm here, since the closest Korean approximation to my name is Bessi. My name written out in Hangul is "엘리차베스", or El ri ji bae su. Sterling is something like "서틀링", or Sut tur ling.

Bathrooms here are rather interesting. Unfortunately, they're communal, though I've only seen evidence of a few other women living in my hallway. I found that this morning that one of the toilets is a normal Western one, but the one I was using last night had about a dozen buttons (all in Korean), and I was terribly afraid of accidentally turning on one of the two or three bidets and hitting high C when I find out how cold the water is. The showers are also communal (communal as in there are six showerheads in one room), and made even more awkward by the mirror in front of every showerhead. And no dressing rooms.

I've yet to talk to any Korean women, oddly enough. Surely they exist, though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there aren’t that many working for an engineering company. (Update: I’m living in the men’s dorm. There’s a Siberian woman next door to me, making it two women in a dorm of oh, 150 men. Oddly enough, it’s ok to put two foreign women in a men’s dorm, but men aren’t allowed into the women’s dorm at all. Maybe it’s all ok because my hallway is protected by a sign stating “Do not allowed the gentlemen.” )

"No corrupting public morals" is one of the rules written on the sheet of rules in my room. I'm almost afraid to ask what that means, though I’m sure that breaking it would be fun.

Anyways, I'm going to go out and see if by any chance the cafeteria has opened. Other than the apple that I accidentally sneaked in, I have no food in my room, and haven't eaten since yesterday afternoon. There’s a convenience store nearby, which sells a lot of rice and smoked squid.