How to put your foot in it in South Korea on day one

LO: It's exactly one week since we left NYC. We have been so busy exploring the area and walking around that we have had little time to write about our arrival. So here it is..... It took us 14 hours to reach South Korea on a Korean Air 747, and after 3 movies, 2 documentaries and 3 sitcoms, we finally landed at Incheon Airport at 4.30 on Monday afternoon. University staff assistant Taek-gun welcomed us outside the baggage claim and got us and our 6 suitcases into a van. We bypassed Seoul and continued on Highway 50 straight to Wonju. What caught our attention, and surprised us, as the night fell were the red neon lit crosses adorning churches between hundreds of high-rise apartment complexes all the way to our new city. Two hours later we arrived at Dongbo Nobility, a luxury high-rise we are going to be calling home. The apartment has three bedrooms, a living room the size of our entire NYC apartment, two bathrooms, dining room/kitchen, laundry room and a balcony. Oh, and two hallways ... one where you leave your shoes, per Korean custom, and one where you actually enter the apartment. We didn't know the footwear protocol, so we strode into the apartment in our shoes, dragging our suitcases along the beautiful wooden floor, only to be politely but firmly pulled up by Taek-gun (Teckan), who diplomatically explained that entering one's home, or anyone's home in South Korea, wearing shoes is inappropriate and rude. OOPS! I get it....but we were so tired and shoes or not, we wanted to see our new home.

Luggage dropped off, Taek-gun flagged down a taxi outside our new apartment complex to take us for dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in a new downtown (there is also an old one). Over soup, Taek-gun let it slip that he had missed a blind date to pick us up. We felt bad and insisted we'd be fine, that he should leave us to make our own way home. We'd find a cab. Hey, we were in town for about an hour and we were already taking cabs!

Next day, we took another one, shyly succeeding in getting the driver to take us to E-Mart, a Korean version of Costco, just a bit posher. One of my new colleagues and his wife came over that afternoon to take us shopping for basics, and could not believe when they found out that Dave and I had already ventured out by ourselves. I guess living in rough, tough ol Noo Yawk City has prepared us, so we didn't even blink at the idea of going out without understanding a word of Korean. A week later, we are already reading Korean letters!



Wonju is a modern city with loads of restaurants, bars, coffee shops and small stores. Dave's height and my curly hair are not very common here so little children like to stare at us and shout "HELLO"! We live about 15-20 minutes walk from that new downtown. It's very easy to get around the city with buses that cost about 75 cents a ride and cabs that cost less than $2 to go just about anywhere. We have already discovered a couple of great Korean soup restaurants and an old traditional food market called Nambu, housed in a single large building where numerous room-sized restaurants are crammed next to each other on the ground floor. At the entrance to each is a crate on which sits the carvings from a pig's head, including an upturned snout and porky ears. Okay, not quite for the faint of heart. Like Dave! In each of these little open-plan dining rooms is just one lady cooking and serving food from a large wok. She prepares your food from scratch. We opted for bowls of black bean sauce noodles, which included small chunks of pork...and we watched the lady actually make the noodles. The food was not only amazing but we paid just $3 for both of our meals.

Talking about food has got me hungry ... off to make dinner.