First Week-ish In Korea

It's Saturday!  I had designs to head to a Capoeira class this morning, but my jet lag caught up to me all at once and I overslept considerably.  So it looks like today gets to be laundry and cleaning day, with maybe a visit to the on-campus art museum I've heard about.
The week has passed surprisingly uneventfully, Thursday is a national holiday in Korea, and Tuesday was acclimation/tour/first meetings day, so realistically I had only Wednesday and Friday to do any proper work.  Furthermore, the professors I am under have been abroad or busy most of this week, so "work" consists of sitting at my cubicle poring over reference papers they gave me and wrestling with Mint Linux on my computer.  Not highly productive, but so it goes.
Thursday Corey (my partner) and I, took advantage of the time off to see the city a little.  We chose to head into Itaewon, the "foreigner's district" in the hopes of maybe getting a little home-style comfort food, but no such luck.  All of the pretty western restaurants were pricey, so we ended up eating at "Smoothie King", a Korean smoothie chain, which definitely did not satisfy.  The district itself was pretty cool, however.  One of the older areas in the city it's where the US army base is set up.  While the main drag itself is relatively modern, a quick right turn will send you up into the old school hills where curved tile roofs still dominate. Overall the area was somewhat dirty, and the streets were crowded with knock-off clothing vendors, but it was pretty fun.  I definitely would like to go back, even if just to get a Bloomin' Onion at Outback Steakhouse.
Otherwise the week has gone pretty quietly.  I've gotten a way better understanding of the campus layout, made myself familiar with some of the grads and postdocs in my cubicle room, and learned to order lunch at the cafeteria.  Plus I've had to time to start studying Hangul, the Korean writing system.  It's pretty neat, what   I had initially thought were characters, are actually blocks of two to four letters, laid out in one of three (or six, depending on how you look at it) patterns.  Each block starts with one consonant on the left, on top, or in the upper left of the group.  Then a vowel is placed to the right of it, below it, or in a backwards 'L' shape around it, depending on the shape of the vowel.  Occasionally a second consonant is placed below the entire group (called the "floor consonant").  And that's it.  Once you memorize all the letters and their sounds you can pretty much read any word in Hangul.  There are a few 'double' letters that correspond to things like 'ss' or 'ae', but they're basically treated as letters of their own and require no special placement rules.  It's incredibly straightforward, I love it.
Anyways, it's getting into the afternoon and if I don't get outside soon I'm going to go stir crazy. Pictures to follow!