The Beginning

It's hard to believe we've been living here for almost 2 weeks now. So far, we arrived after a long but blissfully uneventful day of traveling (and time travel, as I'm 15 hours ahead of Chicago right now)... spent the first 2 nights in a motel... had a work "orientation" (it was a test day so we didn't get to actually observe any teaching)... and then got so sick that I was throwing up and feeling terrible for the first weekend we spent here. Jason held my hair back and took care of me like a champ as I recovered and attempted to adapt to the food here, but that's still a work in progress. Going from a vegetarian diet to a full-on meat eater has been a real adjustment, regardless of the markedly different style of food. We definitely underestimated how difficult it would be to communicate and go about our daily lives here because absolutely everything is written in Korean. Right now we're still working on finding a regular tutor, but it is our plan to learn the language... hopefully at least one of us picks it up quickly. If we were in one of the bigger cities (like Seoul or Busan, which are the 2 biggest) life would be a whole lot simpler right now. But I think I speak for both of us when I say that although our town/the lifestyle here will take some getting used to, there's nowhere in Korea we'd rather be. 


There is a very tight-knit foreigner community here, which is great, because if you run into a non-Korean on the street you'll probably end up eating dinner together... or at least exchanging phone numbers and a friendly smile. We were surprised to find out that there are very few Americans teaching here. Instead, we've become pretty close with a lot of people from England, a handful of Canadians, and a few South Africans. Today we visited an island off the southern coast of South Korea called "Geoje" with 3 other foreigners. Conveniently, one of those friends has a car and we were able to stop at a lot of hot spots along the way, like a beautiful place on the shore called "Windy Hill", a local beach, and even a foreign grocery mart. Although we've only been here a short time, seeing food labels in English was crazy refreshing. But overall we decided that town was TOO full of foreigners, and we left feeling more appreciative of the community that we call home here. 


Our home is on the 8th floor of a 16-floor apartment building. Strangely, I haven't seen any single family homes here. Everybody lives in apartments (I'm sure there are exceptions but I've yet to see any). If you think about it, this country is roughly the size of the state of Indiana, but there are almost 50 million people living in it. So really the only way we can all fit here is to be incredibly efficient, and they do that by building up instead of out. 


As for the teaching, the kids are ridiculously cute and, for the most part, very well-behaved. We teach anywhere from 5-8 classes every day, which start at 2:30pm and end at 9:30pm. The kids are as young as 7 and as old as 17 (interesting side note: in Korea they count age differently so on the day you are born, you are actually turning 1 year old). For our first week of teaching, we went in early (12pm) to start planning our lessons for the day, but generally we are only expected to go in an hour before our first class. The school we teach at is a hagwon, or private academy, where the kids go after their regular school is over. Some kids get out of their public schools, come to our English academy, then go off to even more hagwons for things like math, science, music, and even bowling. It's completely ridiculous how much time these kids are required to spend in school... so much pressure! That makes it really hard to discipline them in our classes for not doing homework or being too tired to participate. We still have a lot of learning to do as far as taking-the-books-and-making-them-our-own goes. 


Clearly, we're still working on absorbing all of the differences here, from the heated floors to the hard beds, weak beer, and unique showering system (to name a few, pictures to follow). But overall we've learned so much in just over a week here, and we're both very happy and excited and confident that this is going to be a big and wonderful collaborative adventure.