so I forgot last week...

Wow an update, crazy right? Photos from SF this afternoon (Korean time), I promise.

So the week after I got back has been hectic to say the least. I was at work a lot (10ish) hour days though the middle of the week, I got all of my stuff from customs (finally), and pretty much crashed this weekend. The week was a bit busier because one of the residents is out of the office getting his VISA so there's just two of us to cover the same workload. Also I built and gave a presentation to several of the Doosan managers on one of Westinghouse's practices, so that ate up a lot of time. The presentation went over pretty well, I had about 45 minutes worth of material and spent most of it as a Q&A / town hall type of session. I thought that it was pretty well received and that I was able to convey the message that Westinghouse would have wanted me to.

Life outside of work was rather busy too. I did get all of my stuff set up around the apartment, which is nice, and I made a few trips to the grocery store to fill in the gaps (things that I thought I had packed, things I was missing like hangers). So that was rather hectic too, which lead to me crashing this weekend. I mostly slept and played video games (mario kart wii) so it was nice to just chill out and not have to worry about much.

I got my first round of bills too. Its interesting getting them here because: 1. they are entirely in Korean, 2. they are really colorful. Its quite the contrast to the US bills which are only in black and white. Most of the bills had charts and graphs (in Korean) but I could get the idea of what they all were saying even without reading them. Since I got this round of bills I thought that it would be a good idea to break down the prices of a few things, to compare them to the US prices. I'm going to use $1 = 1250 Korean Won because it normally hovers around that (between 1220 and 1320 while I've been here).

Apartment (19th floor, new building, short lease) - 2.5 million Won per month ($2,000)
Apartment management fees and utilities (one person, AC set around 75F, lights usually off)- 250,000 Won ($200)
Electric - 83,000 Won ($66.40)
Cable / Internet - 51,000 Won ($40.8)

Rental Car (long term lease, 2 door, technically a "sports car"...) - 790,000 Won ($632)
My last tank of gas (44L or 12 Gal) - 75,000 Won ($60)

McDonalds Big Mac Meal - 5900 Won ($4.72) [only 3000 Won 11am-2pm, just saying]
Frozen US Beef (about 3-4 servings for me)- 9000 Won ($7.2)
0.5L of Gatorade (16.7 oz) - 960 Won ($0.77)
Hite Draft (Korean beer)- 3000 Won ($2.4) [surprisingly more than Pittsburgh]

I'll add a few more as I think of them.