In Korea!

Dear friends,

Well, I’m in Korea! I’m writing from my apartment. Let me paint the picture for you: I’m sitting on my bed, eating dry frosted flakes and drinking milk out of the carton, because there are no spoons or cups yet. We got the Frosted Flakes from Val’s apartment and bought milk last night, but that is all there is right now. Hahaha.

Anyway, it is Monday, Sept. 20 but I'm posting today, the 24th, because I just found an unsecured wireless network. There is no official internet at my apartment yet so this might not last too long but I figured if I have internet I should post! Ok, back to the original post:

Val is at school now, until 1, and when he comes back we’ll stop by my school to say hello and then go shopping for food. We totally lucked out because the next 3 days are public holidays here so he doesn’t have school. I imagine we will spend those days getting the apartment spiffed up and stocked, meeting Val’s friends, and checking out some of the celebrations for the holidays.

Cool/ interesting things about the apartment: the door is SUPER high tech. First, the door to the building is a just glass door that slides opens with a key card that you hold up to a sensor, just like my ‘Berg ID card that I used to swipe into my buildings. As you ascend the stairs (I live on the 3rd floor), the lights in the hallway illuminate automatically when it senses people there. That means the lights are only on when there are people in the staircase—pretty cool and environmentally-friendly! I like that. The door to my apartment itself does not have a key, just a touch-screen keypad that lights up when you press a button on the outside. Once you punch in the code, it does this little sing-songy beeping pattern and unlocks. OH and the coolest part? When opening the door from the inside, you just press a button on the handle and the little lock physically turns by itself. After about 30 seconds it turns again, locking it. The sing-songy beeping happens then too. Sweet!

What is currently in the apartment is: a small cupboard for shoes at the door (in Korea it is customary to remove your shoes whenever you enter somebody’s home. Val jokes that in Korea you can never get away with wearing two different pairs of socks!), a bed and a closet in the bedroom. There’s also a washing machine, but no dryer. The bathroom doubles as the shower: there is just a toilet and a sink with a shower head-sprayer-thingy attached to the faucet, and a drain on the floor. To shower, you close the door and turn a dial on faucet to switch the water from the faucet to the sprayer, and shower like that. It’s somewhere between having a shower and not having a shower. We’ll see how that goes.

My flights went very smoothly. The long one was surprisingly comfortable. I flew Asiana airlines, a Korean airline that is very, well, Korean. Meaning very efficient, clean, and high-tech. The seats were very comfortable and the blankets and pillows provided were actually comfortable and big. I had a window seat next to just one person, which meant I only had one person to crawl over if I wanted to get up.

Now I imagine you are thinking “apartment, flight, yada yada yada….I want to hear about the much-anticipated reunion!” Ok, I tell you. ☺ After I went through immigration and got my luggage, I clumsily maneuvered my REALLY heavy luggage cart though the line to hand in my customs card. I walked into the lobby and spotted Val immediately (he’s not too hard to pick out of a crowd here!). He saw me too and we ran to the opening of the partition. Thank goodness those luggage carts stop as soon as you let go of them because otherwise it would have gone flying when I just let go of it and ran into his arms! We stood there hugging for a really long time, both us just saying “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!” My first thought was that he smells exactly the same as he did before. And that he is about 1,000 times hotter in person than he is on the webcam. ☺
When we finally pulled away I kept saying, “you’re real!” and poking his face. We went outside and bought bus tickets and waiting for about 15 minutes for the bus to take us back to Suwon. The poking and hugging and kissing continued while we waited, along with the saying of many “I love you”’s and “wow it’s you”’s. It was about an hour bus ride, but we kept busy ☺. It feels pretty __________ to be with him again. Seriously, I can’t even think of an adjective that can accurately describe it. Just pure happiness, relief, and the sense of feeling complete again. Every time I close my eyes and open them again I can almost not believe what I’m seeing. When I look down and see my hand in his it feels like a dream. When I breathe in and smell his natural scent I feel like I’m in a trance. I feel sort star-struck in my own universe because I’ve spent all this time seeing him on a screen and dreaming (day and night) about him, wishing to see him. Now that I’ve seen him again in person I feel fluttery-hearted and almost embarrassed or timid. Like seeing this seemingly perfect, glorified person who was just 2-D before is now a real person who I can see with my own eyes and touch. It’s similar to how I imagine seeing a celebrity in person for the first time is. Like you can’t keep your eyes off of them and you are taking in the fact that they are real, in person.
There is a difference though, between star-stuck with a celebrity and how I feel. I think the general conclusion about seeing celebrities is disappointment. Sort of like, “oh, that’s it? (S)he is so…normal. There’s no white light beaming from somewhere behind them. (S)he looks like a regular person.” Personally I’ve never seen a celebrity in the flesh (minus a millisecond-long glance of Will Ferrel in L.A. at the Step Brothers premiere that happened to be taking place outside the restaurant I was eating at), so this might be completely off. Regardless, this was the opposite reaction for me seeing Val. He is so much better looking in person. And I don’t just mean that he is handsome, I mean that the way he looks at me is better, and it feels better looking at him. There is no camera as the middleman here. When he looks at me I can actually see him. It’s like in Avatar, when they say, “I see you.” For those of you who didn’t have the pleasure (or desire, I suppose) so see Avatar, when the Na’vi people in the film say, “I see you” to somebody, it doesn’t just mean “I can see you with my eyes.” It means “I see inside you, I understand you, I see you with my soul and my heart”. So yeah, our eyes meet it’s just that. No webcam, no computer screen, no 2-D, and certainly no oceans and continents in between. That “seeing” of one another can’t really happen like that when all of those factor in. So with them gone, I feel like my heart has opened up to receive all of his love and I can finally see him, and he can see me. Less words are required now, because everything we had to try to express in words when we were apart are replaced by the warm, fuzzy feeling that makes you heart grow bigger that I get when he looks at me and I at him. And that, my friends, is what love feels like.

After bringing my bags up to my apartment, we relaxed and I called my mom and the Korean recruiter to inform them that I had arrived. Soon it was 10:30pm and I was starving! We took a short bus ride to the Ajou University area because there were a lot restaurants open late there. V picked a restaurant and we ate beef and veggies. The style of restaurant is typical in Korea and Val had talked about eating like this so I was excited to try it. At each table there is a part cut out of the middle and a stove kind of thing placed inside. There are hot coals underneath. The waiter brings over the ingredients (very thinly sliced beef, mushrooms, sliced garlic clove, and onion) and puts it on the fire and it cooks right there. They give us tongs to flip the beef and scissors to cut it. So the meat cooked right there along with the onions, slices of garlic, and mushrooms and we tended to the food on the fire ourselves. When it’s done we get rice and lettuce leaves and you’re supposed to mix it all together and wrap it in the leaf and eat it. As we ate, Val coached me on using the flat, metal chopsticks (definitely harder to use than the round wooden or plastic ones) and helped me with basic Korean phrases like thank you, hello, and the Korean equivalent of “bon appetite!”, which translates into “eat a lot.” We ate and reveled in the fact that we were there together, and it was all real. Things like “oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m pouring water for you and you’re going to drink it right here!” and “Yay, I can kiss you if I want to because you’re here!” After our meal we stopped by Val’s place to get the food because he lives very near to the university and also went into a convenience store to buy milk, soap, shampoo, and ramen. There are bowls and a few kitchen odds and ends in my apartment (thanks to the current English teacher at my school who is leaving soon after I start working) but that’s all so we needed other basics. By this time the busses had stopped running so we grabbed a taxi and rode back to my place. We stayed up for a while, continuing to say “I can’t believe this”, things like that, until we fell asleep. I’m jet-lagged so didn’t really sleep but as soon as morning came I was exhausted! I guess it’s going to take a while to adjust to the 13- hour time difference. Speaking of, I’m going to put my computer down and sleep a little before Val gets back.

Pictures and more updates to come!

Love,
Mel