Cory And Katy

The gods smiled upon us when EPIK chose to have our orientation in Cheonan.  While the fabulous EPIK staff is busting their bums teaching us the language, pedagogy, and how to negotiate our way around Korea, we enlisted some fabulous people of our own to show us the ropes of Korean karaoke, called noraebang.   My (Katy) dear, dear friend Tracy and her wonderful husband D have been living in Cheonan for the last year teaching English at a private school, and we were lucky enough to have our first week here during their last week.

Tracy and D met us at the Dankook University, where we are staying, and poured their year’s worth of acquired knowledge into our brains as they took us to their apartment and then out for some Korean barbeque with some of their other teacher friends.  After the delicious lesson in grilling pork right at the table and wrapping it in a lettuce leaf (so good!), we headed off to a bar to consume countless kettles of rice wine and then left to go sing the night away!

The noraebang was AMAZING.  Each group gets their own little room to sing to their hearts content, so the group of us piled in to do our thing.  I’m not even sure how long we all stayed out, but our university dorms are locked between 1 and 5, so instead of getting in before 1, we decided our time with D and Tracy was so precious that we’d just stay out until the doors opened back up.  So that’s what we did!

It didn’t prepare us too well for the tour of the Korean folk village we took a field trip to this morning though.  I was pretty miserable between the pounding headache, crappy cold weather, and awful Korean food, but there we saw some great traditional performances while were were there and…

MORE NORAEBANG!  I swear, Korea and I were meant to be.  We had a badass charter bus to get back to the University and it was decked out with neon cosmic decor on the ceiling, flashing colored LEDs, a television screen, tambourines, and a microphone.  Yes, we karaoked the whole trip back.  BRILLIANT.  I of course wooed the passengers with a rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, which actually was really bad because I still have a hoarse throat from the night before when I lost my voice.

If I get to noraebang this much the rest of the year, I may never leave this wonderful land.  Sorry, folks, but I have priorities.

Katy and I finally made it to Dankook University in South Korea tonight. We got situated in our room about an hour and half ago, and just now got on the web. We made some fancy VOIP phone calls back home from my lappy since getting on a payphone is just about impossible right now.

Cory and Katy at the Incheon Airport

They have 4 phone booths and a hundred times more people. It took us roughly 34 hours of travel time to get here from good old Elkhart, Indiana. All of our flights went well, and we were very much taken care of. Especially on the Singapore Air flight we had from San Francisco to Seoul. Well, it’s off to bed and time to get used to the 14 hour time change. We have orientation tomorrow, so it will be a busy day. We will write more later!