Fresh off a couple days of R&R at the Nongshim, Graham and I were feeling pretty good! The jet lag had worn off a bit and we were finally able to stay up past 9pm as well as sleep through the night!! The time had come to move on from hotel life and start settling in to our new digs here in Busan. We toured the grounds of the hotel one last time, said good-bye to our wonderful room with a view (I absolutely adored looking out that Asian style window) and set off on a new adventure.
Exploring the Nongshim gardens
Good-bye Nongshim view
The school’s liaison (Mr. A) had offered to pick us up and take us to our new apartment which we greatly appreciated as we still had all our luggage with us and would have struggled fitting it all into a taxi once again! Not to mention we didn’t really know the location of our new place!
I didn’t know what to expect as I had mostly emailed with Mr. A and spoken to him on the phone just a handful of times. He seemed very nice, but we were still a bit nervous meeting him for the first time! Plus I didn’t know what kind of car he was going to pull up in and I was afraid the poor guy was going to have to make more than one trip! To my happy surprise he pulled up in an SUV and we fit everything and everyone in comfortably! There were also no awkward silences or small talk because he had lived in Canada for 17 years and we had a lot to talk about! Not like my first arrival here when my boss picked me up at the airport and proceeded to tell me not to worry because many foreigners lose weight here thanks to the spicy Korean food, so I was in luck! Gee thanks, that’s exactly the conversation a chubby little Canadian wants to have after stepping off a 15 hour flight and into sensory overload! This time around we were definitely doing much better!!
Mr. A drove us through town, past the beach and onto our new apartment building. It’s sad I know, but I was more than happy to see a Starbucks at the base of our building! It’s the little things!!! Though I knew it was going to be either a wonderful break or a dangerous addiction having it so close to home!!
Ahhh our oasis
We carried everything upstairs and Mr. A opened the door for us which had a neat little number pad requiring no key! “AWESOME!!”, I thought since I have a tendency to lose my keys… often!
No key required = Amazing
Also glows cool blue in the dark!!
We walked in and my heart sank a bit. I knew it was going to be small as I had seen pictures, but you know how something never seems the same until you are standing right in it! It was just one room, well okay two if you count the bathroom. Immediately I thought how are we ever going to comfortably live in here for a year?!? Just one room for two people to cook, eat, sleep, and live in… all the time… AAAAHHHHHHHH was about the only thing my brain was shrieking and I was now pretty much jumping for joy that there was a Starbucks downstairs!! At least we’d have somewhere to go and escape THE ROOM!!
Once we had lugged all of our stuff inside there was pretty much no room to even move.
The view from one end.
The view from the other
I don’t know if Mr. A could see the despair in our eyes or we just looked famished, but he offered to show us around and take us out for a Korean meal! Graham and I jumped at the offer as neither of us had the energy to tackle the job of unpacking and had absolutely no idea where to even start!!!
Behind our apartment was an abundance of little indoor/outdoor restaurants, bars, and pedestrian walkways winding between buildings and through streets. Graham and I couldn’t help but lock eyes and smile at each other because we both knew this would offer us another escape from THE ROOM!! We knew we were lucky to have so many things right at our doorstep!
It was still fairly early in the day and not a lot was open yet as everything in Korea tends to get going after noon or 1pm!! We found a tiny 24 hour BBQ and settled in at one of the tables. Seconds after we got comfortable we all regretted our choice as there was a table filled with belligerently drunk Uni students right beside us. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had been in the same spot since the night before! Immediately they started throwing any English words they knew at us… “Hello”, “You very beautiful”, “You handsome”, “Hello”, “Hello”!! The first two or three times we smiled and said thank you, the third, forth, fifth, etc., times it got to be a bit annoying!!! They finally left the restaurant shouting random English words down the street and we were left to enjoy our meal which happened to be Graham’s first experience with a real Korean barbeque!!
real BBQ
Sufficiently full of amazing food and ready to attempt unpacking Mr. A left us on our own and we headed back up to the teeny tiny apartment we now call home. We managed to organize quite a bit that first night and were glad to have had a few beers in us to ease the pain!!! We still had no idea what to do with the single bed and the bulky frame, so we ended up just passing out from exhaustion on it; snuggled super close for a good night’s rest!