The Seoul Stumbler

Time in Korea... is different.  I guess more accurately, time is thought of differently here in Korea.  You don't do things in advance here.  You have to plan a field trip? You do it that day, in the morning. Everything here is last minute! And because of this, it drives me completely insane.  The first month was horrible.  I'd show up to class and no one would be there. Oh, it was cancelled last minute.  I show up to class, and I have double the students. Oh, they need to be combined today. We're going out to eat today? Okay, ill cancel my plans. An hour later, oh, we're not going now.  Even now, I start a summer camp next week and they haven't given me the schedule yet... It can be very frustrating.... but you have to learn to live with it.

People also tend to not be on time. When I first saw this is really annoyed me because I think its rude to show up late to a meeting. Then, as time when on, I started to realize why they were late. Public transportation. You can plan and plan, and still be late. It's happened to me several times. I'll plan to be there 15 minutes early and end up 5 minutes late.  Maybe there's traffic, or maybe your bus doesn't show up for another 15 minutes, or the subway car too. 

Don't get me wrong, the buses and subways aren't behind, its just hard to know when they come.  I've finally got an app on my phone that tells me their schedule, but before that id just have to wait and wait not knowing when they'd. (Max about ten minutes, but add that to ten minutes for a subway wait and thats 20 minutes behind already)