Touchdown In Korea

September 24th 2009 through September 25th 2009  Touchdown In Korea

I left my house at four in the morning to tired for the benign conversation that I knew lay in store for me.  The trip to the airport was a blur along with the first length of the trip to San Francisco.  I really only fully came to as I stepped onto the plane going to Korea.  I walked calmly and collectively toward my seat 22F.  In my head though I was thinking that if there is no screen on the back of each seat Im going to lose it.  I was comparable to a ticking time bomb but as I passed the first row of coach my whole body felt at ease seeing the perfectly placed screen on the back of everyones seat.  Most people enjoy reading on planes and Im sure I sound sick to everyone reading this blog but try waking up at three thirty in the morning to start traveling.  I'd been imagining that my brain was closely resembling oatmeal and the only way to entertain my brain in this delicate state is to flip back and forth between all asinine movies of this summer, mainly the chick flicks and eye candy films that whipped boyfriends review as "it was entertaining."  Suprisingly they were playing the Mike Tyson documentary which has probably one of my all time favorite movie lines in it.  In Mike Tyson's high pitched soft lisped voice he tells the interviewer "I performed fellatio on her."  Speaking of a girl he followed into the bathroom.  After watching the Tyson documentary though I still knew that I hadn't even managed to put a dent into the 12 hour flight.  This is about the point in the flight when the allergy fairy decided to pay a visit...I didn't actually know that she enjoyed flying United overseas but she managed to get a first class seat right in my freaking nostrils.  I felt really bad for the kid sitting next to me because he not only had to endure me sneezing on anything and everything but also I was a bit gassy.  He kept acting like he had to scratch his nose but was keeping his fingers there for far to long to relieve an itch.  I didn't blame him though I was surprised myself by the potency.  Even with my stuffy nose I could smell the atrocity that I had just released into the pressurized environment.  Needless to say I didn't make an airplane friend on this trip, but Im sure I made a impression and also a good story.  The terrible part about the plane ride is that my girlfriend Lauren decided to tell me about how many people die from blood clots every year.  Oh "hey Zach did you also know that two twins flew from London to the States and both dropped dead upon exiting the aircraft because of blood clots."  No I didn't know that my loving and thoughtful girlfriend but did you know that Im deathly scared of flying? but if you want we could talk about overseas plane crashes and maybe other inflight fatalities."  So for the entire plane ride anything that felt strange with pressure made me freak out.  So I basically freaked out for twelve hours and Im pretty sure everyone knew me on the plane because I was standing in the center of the aisle every ten minutes leading a jazzer-size routine to try and save everyones life... that or I was running laps.  On top of that the food was pretty bad (which is not surprising) but one of my favorite meals was when they gave me a cup of ramen noodles.  It was like the airline had just given up all together on trying to make your flight enjoyable, meanwhile first class is laying out in their beds being spoon fed lobster while the flight attendant makes airplane noises.  Finally after what seemed to me to be a millennium we touched down in Korea.  As I scanned my eyes over the Korean landscape the song California Dreaming happens to come on by the beach boys over the loud speaker.  It made me smile.  I got off the plane and headed straight to customs.  I did not have a valid work visa to get into Korea but I did have a visa.  It was a long story but the idea here was that i was pretending to be visiting Korea for sight seeing but of course when they saw my visa that was void they were wondering what was going on.  They sent me to the office where I was repetitively asked why do you have an invalid work visa here but you are trying to sight see only?  Why would you get a visa if you want to just visit?  I just kept saying well I couldn't work here so I at least wanted to visit and i didn't want to use that visa.  They bought it after a lot of questioning and finally let me in for ninety days on a visitors visa.  I got my bags and met up with a man holding my name on a sign.  Oh and what do you know look who happened to be going with me to my school the same poor bastard that I had set next to me on the plane.  One word for the conversation leading to the school Avalon "Awkward" oh and there were lots of apologies.  I arrived at Avalon at about 8:00 PM with about two more hours left of teaching so I was dragged around to meet all the teachers and also to see an old friend who I knew before arriving in Korea.  I sat in on one of her classes and watched while the students tried to impress me by clowning around.  They all said that I looked like a wrestler and they were asking if I could choke slam them.  The children were all very vocal and a lot smarter than I ever imagined.  They all spoke better english than I did which isn't very hard.  The girls were surprisingly abusive towards one another.  They played simple games like rock paper scissors but with one major difference the girl that lost got hit or slapped with every ounce of the other girls being.  I thought it was so funny watching the children at this age because when they get older they become much more shy around the opposite sex and women become very sweet and innocent.  The roll change with age is very interesting.  Anyways everyone seemed very nice and eager to meet the new teacher as if they had all been on an island for years and were now met with a new face.  They all invited me out to eat afterwards and I had a good time.  We ate ribs and drank a beer called Cass and then I went back to see my place.  It was a three room apartment that had a thin layer of dust over everything.  There was a christmas tree in the living room and it smelt as if santa and all of his reindeer decided to take a potty break all over the floor.  The urine stench was incredible, but I am starting to think it is the smell of Kimchi being made.  Either or the apartment was a big let down.  Not caring because I was to tired to I went to sleep on my rock hard bed.  I will write more later but the journey has begun.  I hope everyone enjoys these updates.  I will try and at least post once a week and I will start taking as many pictures as possible.