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As part of the orientation, we were all taken to see a baseball and soccer game in Gwangju. Of course we all crapped our pants when we found our picture on the front page of the local paper...Especially considering that Gwangju has a population of 1.5 million people.
Even though the attendance was pretty poor at the "Kia Tigers" game, the cheering squad tere made up for it by getting all the foreigners up in front of the crowd to carry out feats of strength (embarassment). Unfortunately for me, the head cheerer publicly declared me "TOO TALL" (Who knew?) to compete in the team jump rope competition and we had to go find a replacement in the crowd to jump with Steph!!! Worst part was that I dragged Steph up on stage only to be disqualified myself, and setting her up to jump with one of our buddies. Sweet show!

Cool things so far:

Children go to highschool from 7:30 am to 10:30 pm, and some will even stay at study school until 2am... Serious!

We've woken up to 3 bigtime car accidents in front of our apartment.

I've seen 2 kids in Gwangju that were almost as tall as me... It does happen.

Motorcylces and scooters here have no rules at all. They drive on the sidewalks, run red lights, they never wear helmets and they have insurance, but they don't really.

No turning back now!

Is it too late to back out?
Ha! I joke.

Our 14 hour direct flight from Toronto left 11:30pm on Sunday the 16th, after a good hug-fest with the fam... the entire day was pretty emotional. There was an obvious sadness that hung over the day... you could feel it from everyone, but we really tried to avoid it.

We arrived in Incheon, South Korea at 2:30 am on Tuesday (lost a day in the flight) and then had to endure a 5 hour bus ride to Gwangju (Kwangju 35 09'15 N, 126 54'09 E). For some reason, even though we got our emergency exit seats with 12 feet of leg room, I barely slept. The best part of the 12 feet of leg room (besides the leg room) was that we got to pile all the crap we were reading, wearing, discarding at our feet... the guy beside us probably wasn't too happy... probably thought we were homeless.

The next week will be filled with being put up in the Prince hotel in Gwangju, taking orientation/culture training, booting around the city and getting "bubbly tummy" from the cuisine. Tastes good going in though!

A couple of things we thought were wild:

• Two barber poles side by side means "more than just a haircut"
• Korean apartment buildings - 25 to 30 floor concrete monstrocities grouped in clumps of 8 to 30 of them! Many are owned by multinationals that rent them out to their employees. The density is unreal.
• Most Koreans believe that if you run a fan in your room, and you close the doors and windows, you will die.

All good things...

You really don't realize how tough that last day is going to be until you get there.

I didn't know what to say to people, how to tell people how great it was to work with them, and how much I'm going to miss the day to day dynamics we had.

I'm still upset with the fact that I was so busy last week that I didn't leave any time to properly say goodbye to most of the people that made each day so rewarding. Trying to get everything done, the whole time I knew there was no way I was going to get it all finished.
I guess we always think we could have done things differently...

It's funny how, over almost 6 years, you develop a certain special "back and forth" with each person... some are ridiculous and you can't remember how you let the dynamic get there, but there really isn't anything you can do at this point... so why fight it.
Some of these "storylines" include:

• General Lies/fibbing about taking my dad to hockey games on my Lear jet, whistling and foot tapping with Glenn.
• Chris's "not so Hetero" inuendo, bike stories and "email exchanges".
• The constant good natured bashing exchanges (of each other) with my officemate, Joel, with frequent bitch sessions that allowed us both to always go home clear headed.
• Graham's brilliant balance of work management (could he run the entire department on his own?) and websites with furniture in compromising positions... Hehe.
• Dan's relentless willingness to drop everything he was doing to help me with whatever stupid request (and there were a lot of them) I may have. Sometimes he even threw in a good dig.
• Ben's ability to be better than the whole group at pretty much any activity he tried... He might have even got some work done too!
• My use of grammer corrections to counter any email from Andy that was too cleaver (love the irony?) to reply to (which was most of them).
• Hough going to great lengths to create a "family" feeling among us both at work and outside of it. Not to mention the extortion and the seat soakers (I know about your last day plans Mike!!!)
• Martin's indifference to where we went to lunch, his techno music and spongebobsquarepants songs, and 13" tv.
• Paula using Chris' daily "bonus" to save for her retirement, all the time having a little more edge to her than people think. (You da bomb, Blain!)
• Blossom always seeming to be at the center of a "boy vs girl" battle.
• Harb with his stories about everything... no matter what the event was, when Hussein told you about it, you couldn't turn away.
• Teresa with her contageous laugh, forgotten questions and her desk drawer filled with everyone's pens.
• Fred's hand gestures, workhorse mentality and warmth.
• Evan's "out of the blue" hilarious comments and knowledge about pretty much everything once you get him talking.
• Winston's hockey talk, Vit's bike talk.

Well... that went on longer than I thought it would. But point being, it takes a group of good people to create an atmosphere where you actually look forward to coming in to work. Hot Mill Automation was that place... good, fun people with professional additudes to boot (most of the time).

I'm going to look back fondly on this time in my life.

Dofasco @ 43 16'19.91" N, 79 49'11.42" W