A waste of bits and bandwidth

Today was a busy and eventful day for us. We met Mihwa’s old friends from LG for lunch and then went to GeunCheon to do some clothes shopping.

Just before we left the Co-op, Mihwa asked me if I had been using the hair dryer. It was freakishly hot for something which hasn’t been used. “I’ll unplug it…” Try as I might, I wasn’t able to unplug it from the wall. I was really pulling on the plug and this thing wasn’t budging. This had fail written all over it…

Now the bathroom is about a metre square and the sink, shower and toilet occupy the whole space. Hence, the floor was still wet from my shower.

I don’t want to get into the stupidity of using a hair dryer in a bathroom where everything is wet but it is what it is. The dryer was really hot and we weren’t feeling very good about leaving the room with a hair dryer that was about to combust.

We (and by we, I mean Mihwa) called the front desk and in no time a repair guy was in our room. He explained that he needed to remove the electrical outlet as they had to glue the hair dryers into the wall to prevent the Chinese students from walking off with them. I looked at the plug and sure enough, a huge glob of glue on the end.

“You can take it; we aren’t using the hair dryer…”

I was frustrated to find that many of the pics I took today were grainy and frankly kind of worthless. The one above wasn’t too bad.

Sol is Mihwa’s niece and she attended our wedding in 2007. I was nice to see her again even if we didn’t have much time to talk. She had a western wedding in a church and I would estimate that it was slightly larger than ours at least in terms of the number of people.

You’ll notice that we are wearing our hanbok for the ceremony. At first I was against wearing them as they aren’t particularly comfortable and would require almost a dedicated suitcase just to get them to Korea. Of course I lost that one and we brought them along.

I wasn’t that upset by it as it did give us a reason to use them again. However, I was not impressed to find that I was the only male at the wedding wearing one. Every other guy was in a suit and comfortable even though I had seen some of them wearing their hanbok at my wedding.

“Great. Another reason for the white guy to stand out.”

And so begins the process of sorting through over 800 pictures from the trip. Saturday night was the first time I slept properly since we got back. The jet lag is so much harder to deal with when you are returning.

We had a great time and covered a lot of ground by car. I’ll be sorting the pictures as I go and posting some of the good ones in the coming days.

Day 1 was a travel day and the flight was pretty good; bumpy at times but mostly fine. Korean Airlines was really good. I’d say better than Singapore Airlines and about equal to Japan Airlines.

Mihwa’s brother picked us up at the airport and Mom and Dad were with him. We drove into Seoul and had a nice dinner together. I would have been happy to just go to the hotel and crash but we did need to eat.

The Co-op residence was a disappointment. Really dirty and not at all like some of the others we’ve stayed at. The room was the same layout but inside and out was pretty bad. We changed rooms in the morning and got a better view for our troubles.

Day 2 was the wedding. Stay tuned.