Settling in harmoniousely?

Well here we are three weeks in. We are are closed to getting settling in...there are a lot of things we are really appreciating about Korea and each other.
There is just one snaggle tooth in our path.
We have a great, decked out apartment in Samchoek that we have finally started to dig, despite the view. We love the town we live in. We love the kimbap place across the street. The kids at the school are super excited to see us everyday (even though we are still sitting in the office most of the day). The difficulty is this: our commute. We walk 25 minutes to the bus stop, get on the bus, leave the bus station at 8:10am, spend 45-50 minutes on a bus, then walk the last 15 minutes to school. Ah!!!
this is costing us roughly $14/day (about 19/day if we take a taxi to the bus station). A boulder girls nightmare!
We brought this up with our school and engaged in a meeting yesterday afternoon. Wow! The meeting was like being in the twilight zone. We met in the principals room with the VP and another administrator. There with our translator (I use that word so very loosely) we let them know that the commute was very challenging and was there anything they could do to remedy it. All we needed to hear was that they had discussed it and they did not have a solution. But instead, in what I am learning is the Korean way, they proceeded to tell us in 5 or 6 different ways why it was not possible to help us. First they let us know that Hey the principal used to take the bus, the vp lives in Gangneung two hours away, many people commute...
Then...they spoke about Dogye (the town our school is in) saying it's a bad environment for foreigners. Michael said, "You mean pollution?". "No there are no cultural places like Home Plus" (home plus being that Target-ish dept. store in town. Okay... :-)
Next..."You will become familiar with it (the bus) and it will start to become an experience you will know about".
Lastly, the Principal asked us if we could just do a favor for him and take the bus.
All of this was 30 minutes of "no we can't help you out". Wild. They want to preserve harmony so much and I guess they thought that would appease us. All it did really was boggle the minds of two Americans and make them really irritated.

Don't worry though. We talked it over with our foreign assistant coordinator in town and our recruiter...they seem to think the commute is out of control and will do everything they can to fix it. Keeping our heads up!