'Karak'-Dong in Seoul...Part 2

There were other huge new surprises when I first arrived in Seoul.  The extreme humidity hit me like a ton of bricks as soon as I reached the end of the 'tunnel' while exiting the plane.  Canada would have been a lot cooler.  Now, Canadian weather has gotten warmer recently, but back then September and sometimes August were cooler and never would have reached a steady 28 degrees Celcius in daytime like I experienced in Seoul that September.  My roommate from Alberta had gotten Mr. Kim(the 'boss') to put an air conditioner in the room I shared at first with her.  We put it on for the first month during the night.  The nights are like tropical zones in Seoul, even in September.

I had never had to sleep in an air-conditioned room before.  The whole time I was in Korea it was like I had been transported to another planet in many ways.  It made everything scary and fascinating at the same time.

The main old downtown.  North Korea is beyond these mountains.  You can get a sense of being able to see mountains all around the city by looking at this picture.

Also, a horrible smell of what seemed to be rotting garbage hung heavily in the air in my neighbourhood when I arrived at my "institute".  At first, I thought it must be what Korea smelled like.  I didn't know that it was because the largest abattoir in Korea was across the road.  The market across from my building was the largest agricultural and fish market in Korea, I was later told by students, and an abattoir was there as well.  The heat and humidity made the smell worse.  A subway stop nearby was called Karak Market because of this market's location.
I had other obstacles to deal with.  The sound of roaring traffic never stopped from the 9-lane highway outside.  I would wake up at 3 am and listen to it.  I would marvel on my bed in the dark that I was really in such a place.  The reason I would wake up  is in part because of the time change.  It was 11 or 12 hours, depending on Daylight Savings time, as Korea did not use savings time like North America does.  At 3 am it would be 2 or 3 pm back  in my hometown, so it was surreal sometimes trying to sleep.  Another problem was that the other foreign teachers from Canada were cold and hateful towards me.  They did not want to accept someone from a small place and constantly said rude things.  I did not expect that, and it really bothered me, but I learned to embrace Korea and it's people more because of it.
Additionally, I couldn't believe that I was expected to start teaching immediately, on that very evening when I first arrived!  Fortunately, I sat in on a class on the 3rd floor, where the classrooms were, while an American teacher talked to one nice Korean student for an hour.  We all talked about Korean culture, which became a welcome, unending theme in most of my future classes.  As a 'teacher' there I never ran out of topics for discussion because I could always ask about Korean customs and then explain the difference between those and Canadian ones.

My building was the 5-storey brick one on the left.  This road, which was a major throughway out of Seoul heading south, was 9 lanes wide and always busy.  You can see one of the small, blue 'Daewoo' trucks that were common on the streets out in front of these cars. (Note:  Along this the road(Songpa-daero) near my old brick building it's all built up now with glass and silver-coloured buildings and it's hardly recognizable to me at all)