My Life in the Land of the Morning Calm: "Orientation" is Korean for "death by lecture"

I have finally, finally, FINALLY returned from orientation. It was touch and go for awhile but I made it out. This was easily the worst orientation I have ever gone to for anything in my life. It was a just a perfect storm of awful: short notice, missed my field trip, missed my soccer game (which, incidentally we won 1-0!!), had to travel 3 hours to Asan in order to even get there, didn't get paid overtime, am about to work 12 days in a row, was forced to eat rice for breakfast, was on total lockdown for three days straight, and I didn't even have a bed. Yeah, I went all-out Korean on the room thing... we were assigned roommates and rooms, and for some bizarre reason, all but four of the rooms had beds. It's kind of an old-time Korean thing to sleep on the floor so this isn't super strange, but the deeply irritating part was that nearly every single TWO PERSON room had THREE beds. Yes, three. Was I allowed to sleep in another room? No. Was I allowed to move a bed into my room? No. Was I allowed to move a mattress into my room? No. Why? "It is not Korean culture."

It was three very, very long days. I took the 7:30am bus from Buyeo to Asan, then another bus to the Sucheonhyang University, then a taxi to the Korea Financial Institution. We had the opening at 11:00am and went until 9:00pm with two hours for lunch and dinner. Saturday we had a cultural trip to Independence Hall, which was essentially just museums, then lectures from 2:00-9:00. Sunday we had lectures from 9:00-5:00. Breakfast was from 7:00-8:00, so even though we didn't have to be ready until 9:00, we had to be up for breakfast by 7:30 because that's when they'd start clearing away the food.
Okay now enough complaining. I really enjoyed our cultural trip... I don't know much about Korean history, so it was cool to learn some stuff.

I'll write more about it later, but for now please enjoy the assortment of pictures.

My certification of completion for orientation. Quite fancy, actually.

Saturday night of orientation. Lucky us - there was a noraebang (karaoke) underneath the Korea Financial Institute. This is how serious Koreans are about their noraebang. Louis, who's Korean-Canadian, and I performed two duets: Ain't No Mountain High and One Sweet Day (Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men). I picked the former and he picked the latter. Next day at orientation I was chosen by my peers to receive a fancy-pants bookmark because of my singing ability! Those of you who have been lucky enough to hear me sing might be pretty surprised to hear that, hahahaha. It was tremendously fun.

Me and Celina at Independence Hall in Cheonan. The guide said this sculpture is supposed to represent two hands praying for peace.

My kindergarten Seokseong class. You can't really see their adorable faces so well though.

Kevin on the spinny/bouncing ride at the Great Baekje World Festival. This is a pretty accurate representation of how Kevin looks most of the time - fingers poised in Asian peace sign mode.

Parade at the Great Baekje World Festival.

Blake, Kevin, and Chris on the pirate ship. Kevin is afraid of heights and kept claiming his side "went higher" than our side. Please observe that apparently no one wanted to ride with the foreigners.