Dazed and Confused at Kosin University

I'm currently blogging from my office on the second day of school. It's nice to be in my office, since it's decidedly larger than my apartment. Getting here and starting has been interesting.

We left the Wierenga's, who graciously hosted me for a week, on Saturday morning and arrived here late Sunday night. We didn't get any sleep to speak of on our flights, so we were pretty exhausted arriving on campus. We were revived for a couple of hours afterward by Justin's enthusiasm and some Korean sweet potato alcohol, but were still pretty wiped by the time we headed for bed. Em and I were planning on living together, but my apartment is a couple of floors above hers, so our plans were foiled. Nevertheless, she was going to sleep in my room because we only had one alarm clock between us.

Shortly after we plugged my clock in and turned out the lights, I noticed that the clock went blank and began to smell like smoke. Apparently the adaptor I had didn't do the trick. We decided that the first night in Korea might not be the best time to burn down our apartment, so we tried to find another method.

We visited a convenience store to see what they had, but we were out of luck. In our exhausted stupor, Em and I decided to take shifts with the remaining hours left. I stayed up from 2 to 5, and then she did from 5 to 8.

When we awoke, we still weren't sure on what the time was, so we decided to explore the still-empty campus. As we were walking around the buildings, we tried to find some clocks to determine what time it was, as we had a morning meeting. The clock tower said 9:30; a clock by the lounge, 11:20; yet another clock, 8:45. Discouraged, we wandered on. We wandered the halls aimlessly, finding at least a dozen ranging from 8:15 to 9:45.

Finally, we ran into Gloria, the secretary of the English dept, who easily singled us out as the clueless new American teachers. She graciously led us into the Dean's office for our meeting where we discovered that we were at least an hour early.

I was actually about to comment about how since we got a good night's sleep last night, things should look up today; unfortunately, Emily just wandered in wondering why no one was in the classroom for her ten o'clock. We wandered next door to ask our Australian colleague the time...and it's 9 am.

We struggle.