We made it!

Here are some lovely pictures of my first day in Korea. The food shown was a traditional Korean lunch but we had a very interesting breakfast of hot dogs, rice, and salad.
We are currently in the small remote southern island of Wando. It has been constantly shrouded in a mysterious blanket of fog so I honestly can't say what Korea looks like. We are staying in a run down provincial building used for camps and meetings (final picture). It kinda looks like a prison, huh?
As you can also see from the masked woman taking my temperature, they are extremely worried about the swine flu and among numerous pamphlets and questionnares asking us to name any possible symptoms they have decided to quarantine us from the general population for the whole first week. What you can't see in the picture is that the local news crew was filming our health check to pacify the locals. Our rules are that we are allowed to wander around but we're not to get to close to the civilians and we definetely shouldn't approach them in large groups as it is too intimidating. It feels like we've been here a lot longer than a day. It's also weird to think we lost a day (it's 16 hours ahead here).
Getting here was took over 24 hours. We flew to Seattle and had a layover. Then flew Asiana airlines (which was awesome-touch screens with games and movies) 11 hours to Seoul. We were then almost immediately taken to a bus and were forced to sit still again for another 5 hours. It was so surreal because it felt almost exactly like a trip to Mexico...only I can't read any of the signs here. It smells like fish here. Actually, it doesn't I just wanted to see if you were still reading.
It is very hot and sweaty here. When I got up from sitting on the stone steps you could clearly see my cheek prints. It was very unsettling. We hiked to a temple this morning which sounds a lot cooler than it actually was. Most of the day was spent wondering what we were supposed to do. The highlight of the day was that Christine and I were able to find someone who was willing to switch camps. It was between staying here and another (much bigger) city of Mokpo. We won the coin toss so we'll be going together to Mokpo for the teaching aspect of the trip. For those of you who didn't know, we were placed in separate camps and told that we might not be able to switch. Yay! The Koreans are being very accommodating under the circumstances, they really want us to be comfortable here and are even going on a beer/soju run for us!
Much love to you all!
Annyong hi-ka-say-oh!...or something like that....