Seongnam-si

Firstly, thanks for the comments! It's evidence that people read my babbling :)

I woke up about an hour or so ago feeling wide awake! Shame it was something like 5:30am though. I'm pretty jet lagged to the extent that I started nodding off during the opening ceremony last night (oops...). I thought staying out late the first night would beat it, but I was very mistaken and I feel rough as you like. Even going out for a couple of beers yesterday didn't help! I'm starting to think that alcohol isn't a cure for jet lag, which I'm kind of gutted about because that began as a great excuse to sample the Seongnam-si bars.

Anyway, the ceremony last night was great. They had some famous Korean Taekwondo elementary school kids demonstrate their skills by breaking bits of wood and generally being as badass as it's possible for an 8 year-old to be.

After the ceremony, we had a buffet meal which had a ton of different Korean specialities. I was up for trying all kinds of stuff, but there was too much seafood to sample in one sitting and after I bit the head of the mini-octopus I called it quits and stuck to chicken. The octopus, by the way, tasted a bit like squid, except that it didn't really taste that seafoody and was very chewy, which was annoying because I wasn't crazy about the idea of keeping it my mouth for that long.

I've decided that learning the Korean language is going to be pretty much essential if I want to get anything done without getting stressed. The orientation I'm at is running Korean classes every night, so I'm going to have to be extra attentive in class and not fall asleep.

There's a field trip tomorrow to a 'Korean folk village' where there will be 'ceramics' for us to see... Bet you can't wait to hear about that one!