Dinner and a Movie

I feel as though my blogs as of late haven't been particularly deep in any way. But that's just where I am in life right now. I'm at the surface in a new part of my life, just biding my time until I can truly dive in deep. But for now, I'll just write about new and exciting things I discover here in Korea.

Last night, the dorm staff and our few new students (the returning students come today) went out to dinner and movie. We walked to a Japanese restaurant just down the street and I once again discovered the inexpensive cuisine offered here in Korea. For 6,000 Won (around 6 bucks) I got a huge portion of fish along with soup, cabbage, corn, rice, kimchi, and other veggies. Let's just say I couldn't quite conquer it. From there, we went to Say Department store. In Daejeon, we don't have malls, we have department stores. Inside, there are tons of restaurants and sub-stores so it looks just like a mall (but instead of taking up a lot of land, it has tons of floors). Well, we went to a movie in this department store (there's a theater in it too). What movie?? Transformers. It was shown in English with Korean subtitles. Seats at Korean movie theaters are assigned. You'd think that this means you wouldn't have to buy the tickets early. BUT, Koreans love their movies. You're best off buying online a few days in advance and then showing up to the theater 20 minutes early (at least on weekends). At the movie, the audience was mainly Korean except for a couple of our students and the 4 dorm staff members. As a result, there were times when we were laughing at jokes in the movie but the rest of the audience didn't understand them. So much of our humor doesn't translate or gets lost in the subtitles. Let's just say we got a lot of looks.

So, that was my first night out with the dorm. The rest of the students come today and school starts tomorrow. I'm excited to finally feel a sense of routine and discover what this whole RA thing is all about. Thanks for the replies and prayers. I miss you all!!

Random Korean Fact:

Even though several places and stores have English names, they are "Konglish" instead of straight up English. If I were to get into a taxi and say "HomePlus" (a Walmart-ish store), the driver wouldn't really understand me. However, if I said "hom-u plus-a", they would get it.

DVD Bangs are stores where you can rent a movie and then also a room to watch it in. There are different size rooms and different size TVs to watch the movies on, but you go with your friends, pick out a movie and then watch it right then and there.

There are parts of the city that look so advanced. The movie theater looks very futuristic as do some of the buildings and cars. But the streets are still narrow, there is garbage everywhere and some of the buildings look very old. It's almost like I'm living in two different time periods.