It is funny for me to think that last week was my first week where I worked 5 days straight. The first week I came, I didn't arrive until late Tuesday evening; so that was only 3 days worth of work. The following week there was the Korean/Chinese/Lunar New Year. While technically the vacation began on Wednesday, I worked Monday through Wednesday and got a comp day for my work. Last week was 5 days of 11-12 hour work days. We arrive at around 6:30 AM in the morning and leave around 5:30 PM. The view below is something that I see every morning. I think it looks awesome with the lights and all. It is a drill rig.
While that may sound grueling, it has not been that bad. I am still getting up to speed at work with what the project has to do and how I can help it along. But I met with my project manager and construction site manager who both told me that this is a learning period for me. That this whole assignment is for me to be surrounded by tons of experience and then it is up to me to glean that knowledge. My supervisor here told me the same thing and is asking me to get as involved in safety as possible. I now have some projects that I am going to be working on over the next several months, with more coming.
As for some other updates, this Tuesday I should finally be receiving my air shipment from Houston. Finally, I will have all of my clothes, my books, DVDs, etc. I think that I will finally feel like I am moved into South Korea by that time.
The language will be much harder than I really thought. I had forgotten how frustrating it was to not understand what was going on around me and to almost be ashamed that I could not communicate with people in their native tongue. But Korean will take a lot of work, and I wonder if I will ever be very proficient at the language. I can say a few phrases and read the alphabet very slowly, but at least that is a start. I am organizing some Korean classes for the younger engineers here on the project and hopefully that will give me a good boost.
I also want to share something that makes me laugh every time I turn on the TV. Dustin had told us how Koreans really took to computer gaming and I had heard that StarCraft had become almost a national sport, but I never realized how serious it was until I came across two TV channels (TWO!) that show StarCraft matches most of the days. Who would have though that computer games could be televised.
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