Dry - the tale of my first week in Korea.

In Korea, we have four seasons. Koreans love to tell me this, following up with the required "How About You?" that follows any statement about Hanguk.

Well, I arrived at the arse-end of winter, signified by everything being brown, and everybody wanting to die (and half hoping for the toasty warmth of the seventh circle of hell). The air was dry enough to immediately crack my lips and cold enough to freeze the warmest cockles of my heart.

The drive to Chungju with my co-teacher and the school nurse was dry as hell. And that was just the conversation (groan). I was informed by my co-teacher that my apartment was a little bit far from school because all the other foreign teachers live there... It's close to a big store, and just above a market. Above. A. Market. I had a mental image of waking up at 4am every day to the joyful cries of Korean fruit sellers, and the immediate subsequent image of me boarding a plane, bloody, handcuffed hands, sobbing "I'm just not a morning person..."

Luckily, it is not so. My apartment is simply near an agricultural co-op chain store. I got to my apartment as the admin staff were screwing the last of my Ikea-style furniture together. My thought process from that went something like this:

Omigod it's only one room. Oh it's a pretty big room. I have a TV...Oh... the remote for my tv and dvd player are both exclusively in Korean, as are the instruction manuals....ooh a shoilet - I was expecting that. How does the heating work? It's f**king cold! Do I have curtains? I don't have curtains. I have 2 blenders but no curtains. Huh?!

I got dragged to E-Mart, the big department store in town, to buy anything that wasn't provided for me, and puzzled my way through all the pictures to find which one of the thousand detergents was dishwashing liquid.

Then it was just me, and my apartment. I unpacked. I scrubbed. I arranged. I set up my dvd player and tv to play through reel of pictures The Ex gave me as a parting gift. I read the lovely cards from my friends and family, got some insight from Dr Seuss's Oh! The Places You'll Go!

Met up with some of the people who I had no idea would become some of my best friends in the world. Thought some of them were kinda weird. Realized I was too. Passed around some awkward balloons.

On Monday, I would see my cretins for the first time. For the weekend, though, my primary task was surviving the cold.