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Amazing! Two Phones in One!
It’s a T-Mobile phone with a U.S. phone number! It’s a KT phone with a Korean phone number! Stop! You’re both right! It’s two, two, two phones in one! We knew that when we landed in Seoul we needed cell phones with a data plan that worked in Korea, so we could install the required COVID monitoring app at the airport. Luckily we already had T-Mobile (Magenta plan), which by default includes unlimited data (2G) and texting in most international countries including South Korea. Calls are $0.25/min, but there are easy ways for us to avoid this charge (see below). It was quite nice to turn the phone on once…
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Adventure #1: Arriving at Incheon Airport
After preparing for months for this move, it was surreal to be in the airport and ready to go! It was undeniably strange to travel through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport, where the international departures board was almost empty, and most businesses in the terminal were closed. Stranger yet was traveling with fewer than 100 people on the plane to Seoul (Incheon Airport). We could each have had multiple rows to ourselves on the 15-hour flight, although thanks to the adrenaline rush of traveling we basically didn’t sleep anyway! When we landed in Incheon after an uneventful flight, we were ready to face the hurdles of COVID screening awaiting international visitors…
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The Chemist and the Counselor Take Korea
What’s a social worker with no Korean language skills to do when her partner lands a research sabbatical in South Korea? Start a blog, of course! Does said social worker have any expertise that would suggest she knows how to build a blog? Well, no. But she has two weeks of Korean quarantine time to kill, so why not? Forty-eight hours after signing up for a domain name, many of them spent in figuring out how to get this far, here is the blog we will use to document our time in Korea. Last summer, Peter first started talking with a fellow organometallic chemist in South Korea about the possibility…
