Wow how it's been so far. Right now I'm on duty (see we have to have some people man the ship, terrorists and all that. So I'm just hanging around doing odd jobs. I get liberty tomorrow all day.
Yesterday (January 11) was LONG and awesome. Woke up 0430 for our mooring evolution. Tied the boat to the pier around 9-10ish. I am probably on Korean television and newspaper since I was one of the first people off the boat to secure the lines to the bollards (the posts we tie to on the dock). Since I was the only U.S. sailor actually WORKING (they were taking pictures of the admiral and the captain before) I got my picture taken by around 50 journalists. Cool.
We were the last off the boat since we're Deck. (we had to secure from the mooring stuff THEN clean all our spaces. Since while we were mooring, the rest of the ship was already doing that....deck, engineering and security tend to get hosed getting off the ship last efter we pull in)
So 1400 is when I ended up getting off the ship. Went with Stevens and Pulsipher along with Perschbacher and Thomas. They're quickly becoming my best friends here. Stevens is 25, SWCC drop and getting married after deployment. Pulsipher is 23 married, seal drop. Persch is 27 and was a teacher before joining for CTI when he dropped since he couldn't pick up the Arabic. Thomas is 22 and getting married, CTI drop as well. We kind of formed our own gang here on the boat. Good times.
Anyway we got off, saw the area on the pier where they set up a food tent and Korean vendors. Saw the LONG line for the ATM that a Korean bank set up and then decided to skip it and hopped on the first bus we saw. Didn't know where we were going or nothing and no money. Lucky most ATMs in Korean have English as a 2nd option and work international.
So we pulled of Texas street (yes that's the actual name of the street) really really really lame. It's like Americantown with a bunch of clubs and bars. So we ditched that and started walking to the downtown area in the opposite direction. BEST. DECISION. EVER. We just wandered around on blind luck and a big language barrier. No one knew any English where we ended up. First, we got some street food: dumplings in fish soup. Very good. Then some potsticker like things fresh from the fryer. We shopped a little. I bought a leather motorcycle style jacket. Took in the sights. Korea is VERY modern. It's a lot like Japan but without some of the batty insane aspects of Japanese culture that are completely baffling.
Weird things though: there's squat toilets. Theres not a single trash can ANYWHERE but even so the streets and places are pretty clean. And there's this Korean Michael Jackson like pop star that's everywhere. Oh and every store sells a coffee maker. The GOLF STORE (yes an entire store for golfing. Its huge in korea) was selling coffee makers. Same with the fishing store (also huge in Busan) and the Korean Best Buy.
Anyway we stumbled into the most homey looking resturaunt we could find.
Shoes, off. No chairs just a pad on the floor. Heated floor though. Real mom and pop type place. Fore exmaple, the bathroom had a medicine cabinet with the owner's things in it.
So no English. Pulsipher just took the initiative there and just started pointing to the menu. They gave up and they just started bringing us food. It was BBQ so it was cooked on coals in a grill in the middle of our table. Second course they brought out some soup and rice and you poured the soup into the rice. All these courses had a million different add ons sitting around you threw into everything. The owners thought it very funny we kept breaking traditional rules. For example, they brought out apple slices to cleanse the pallet between meals and we ended up throwing them on the grill and carmelizing them with this sweet bean curd stuff slathered all over them. They found that funny. Whole thing cost us around 50 bucks, we found out tipping is a no because we clearly left the $50 and the $15 in tips in two separate piles and they brought the money back thinking we didn't understand how much.
After that we hung out some more. Hung out in parks, took in the sights and came back to the boat to find half our department wasted. So good decision on that end.
We're trying to hit up a budhist temple tomorrow. I'll fill everyone in when I can.
Alex
Quotes:
"I'll take out 5 won and see how far it gets me"
"Thomas, the max withdrawal is 100,000 won. Figuring most atms have a $100-200 dollar limit you're taking out less than a penny"
"how bout we go to that convenience store...see how much a coke costs....then figure that's how much a dollar is"
"Ok after trying for 5 minutes to talk to the guy I can safely say we're not going to find a trash can"
(lady puts our bbq into a lettuce leaf and wraps it up"
"AH HA! The burrito! A concept I understand!"
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