Korea is orange!

This was my first thought as the plane descended into Busan: "Korea is orange!" The sunset blazed brilliantly as lightning sparked through the clouds below. The city lights, draped in the Korean mountains, glowed amber against the same clouds, casting them in a subtle array of orange, purple, green and gray. It was beautiful. After 20 hours of traveling, I knew then that I was in the right place. I fell in love with Korea through the window of a DC-9.

That was last night. After arriving at the airport, I was picked up by my recruiter, Sun-A, and her supervisor, Aaron Seo. They took me from Busan to Changwon, about a 40-minute drive to the northwest. We saw the school I'm teaching at, dropped off my luggage at my apartment, and then went out to dinner downtown.

I researched Changwon before I decided to come here, and I had an image of it as a quiet but large suburb of Busan. I underestimated the city. As we walked around downtown late Saturday night, the streets were continually packed with people. Not for just a block or two like the Old Market in Omaha or downtown Colorado Springs, but throughout the downtown district. The towers that pack this city glowed and vibrated with clubs and parties. The energy, the life flowing through the streets surprised me. I could hardly eat, I was so busy just taking it in.

(Yes, that was me, doing the full-on tourist thing -- my jaw slack, my head tilted back and swiveling from one side of the street to the other. "Gawly, they got sum big bildins here.")

Oh, and there are mountains, too. If you took away Pikes Peak, it'd be about like Colorado Springs -- the mountains surround the city, but there's nothing near a fourteener around here. I can't see a treeline on anything within sight of the town. But still, it's pretty.

After dinner last night came my first Korean karaoke experience. Another teacher, Greg from Minnesota, and another coworker of Sun-A and Aaron came with us. I expected the karaoke to be subpar here, since you just take up a room with only people you know, and my favorite thing about karaoke is meeting people. But this rocked in eight dimensions. Maybe it was because I had just met all these people, and so it was kind of like performing in front of strangers. But I had an absolute ball, and everyone else got into it too. Let me tell you, watching Sun-A sing Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey just about made my face explode. What a night.

I finally got home a bit before 3 a.m., and even though I had slept about three hours in the previous 48, I still didn't feel like I wanted to go to bed. I did, though, mostly because there's nothing else to do (the TV and Internet don't get here till tomorrow and I didn't get a power converter for my laptop). It's going to take some getting used to, sleeping on the eighth floor right next to the window that takes up the east wall of my apartment. I haven't lived this high up since Omaha, and even though that apartment had big windows too, I never got the feeling I was snoozing on the brink of the precipice.

My apartment, by the way, is about what I imagined. It's a bit larger, with an actual room for the bathroom, and there's more kitchen than I expected (I have a four-burner gas range, but no oven). The building has a PC bang (cyber cafe) on the third floor and even though I speak next-to-no Korean, I've about figured out the system for renting a machine and checking my e-mail. It's only a buck an hour, and I've yet to use more than an hour at a time, so it's a fine substitute for having a computer of my own.

The only problem is, I can't seem to find the cord that plugs my digital camera into my computer, so this blog will be text-only for a while. Once I get an SD card reader, I'll be able to post some photos. Until then, use your imaginations, guys!