… Is a weird city. Very industrious here. Actually, this is the city where Hyundai manufactures all their cars. Everything is Hyundai Hyundai Hyundai, even all the heavy equipment. And, it’s a shipbuilding port. I have never seen so much heavy machinery in one place in my whole life. Yesterday after napping (since I only got a couple hours sleep at night), I went out to HomePlus (Tesco) to do the survey. I had almost finished and someone stopped me to ask what I was doing and told me no. A girl younger than I was. This made me mad. Of course, I didn’t have the name of the manager who told me it was alright and apparently she couldn’t reach him (it was around 11pm at this time, he had probably gone home from this 24 hour supermarket). Man, was I frustrated! I could feel my blood pressure rising. She ended up letting me finish since I was almost done, but she clearly disapproved. This pissed me off.
I got home much too late (I couldn’t believe for a second that it was already 12 am!) and room service wasn’t operating. I couldn’t eat dinner; I hadn’t eaten since about 7 am. I tried the well-expired Pringles and some well-expired mango juice from the mini-bar to hold me over. I couldn’t finish the Pringles though, they were very stale.
Once again I went to bed much too late. So, I didn’t get up until noon. I went to the front desk to ask about translator help and a girl offered to help me, well – a guy at the front desk offered for her actually, haha. She didn’t think it looked like many calls (little did she know) so she said she’d help. It took about two hours, and we weren’t finished but she needed to go to a meeting. She reluctantly said that we could continue when she was working on Saturday. But, then I offered her a good tip for her services. She refused, refused refused, but I insisted over and over and finally she accepted, but she wanted to take me out to dinner with it. What a deal, right? Not only that, she said she would prefer to come in on her day off to help me out and then we could go to dinner together. Good deal.
After that, I assumed incorrectly that part of the survey was at the Hyundai department store that was right next to my hotel. I wasted time asking for permission there. Good thing I planned to go to Lotte department store before finishing up with Hyundai, because there was another Hyundai downtown (where Lotte was – about a good 20 minutes from my hotel) that I was suppose to go to. When approaching Lotte, I saw it so I needed to double-check my notes. Getting permission at Lotte was very frustrating. I asked a manager who spoke little English. Literally, we went back and forth on the phone with a girl who was helping out in English trying to explain both of our sides to each other. He made about 1,534,574 phone calls before saying that he was sorry but he couldn’t help me for some reason that the “translator” gave me that I couldn’t understand. Then, I said well I did the same thing at the Lotte in Seoul and for some reason this created a different story. He made another 2,533,645 phone calls and finally said that it was OK, and I thought he said it was OK because they had confirmed that I did the same thing there. If that was the case, that would be funny because we got a very unofficial OK from the supermarket manager who said that “normally this is a very big process but I’ll close my eyes if you do the survey today”. This whole painful experience put me off about a full hour which sucked. When I finally walked away, I turned back to see him with his head down laughing hysterically (or maybe he was crying? Haha). Well buddy, I need to deal with this daily, so it can’t be that bad.
Then, I decided to re-ask at Hyundai downtown. Apparently my co-worker Joe was stopped and scolded by a manager, but I walked right up to someone who was not a manager (when I was looking for a manager) and they said it was fine, so I just proceeded finishing the survey without asking first. It was grand, I had no problems, and everyone was very willing to help out.
I went to Outback for dinner. Apparently you can order a Korean dish at Outback, so I did it. The meat wasn’t that good, but the shrimp and veggies on skewers was. So was the fried rice. I was starving, my stomach was beginning to eat itself since I hadn’t had a decent meal in days. I’m still so happy to be completely full. All for today, more tomorrow!
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