I'm alive!

I haven’t had much of a chance to write anything, and when I’ve had free time I’ve either been socializing or sleeping. My life has been a whirlwind since I landed in Korea on the 16^th.  I’ve now carted 100 lbs of luggage through three different cities in three completely different parts of the country. I finally got to my school and my apartment yesterday afternoon and am so glad to no longer be living out of a suitcase and finally have a place to call “home”.

I spent my first few days here in Seoul with some of the self proclaimed EPIK ninjas.  Fantastic time with a wild group of people, they remind me quite a bit of my group of friends from Boston in some ways, and that’s a very good, comforting thing when you move to the other side of the planet. I suppose we gravitate towards people that we already know we will get along with.  I really loved Seoul, it reminded me of New York, but cleaner. I saw a lot of places that the locals go to, and we went to an awesome bar in Hongdae called Suzy Q’s. It’s a little hole in the wall owned by a husband and wife, he’s been collecting records since he was 17. The guy must be in his 70’s now and if you request a song he has it. He plays all the records on his original equipment and his collection is worth over three million dollars.  Out of all the watering holes we went to, that was my favorite for sure.

            I did some shopping as well in Myeongdong which is where a lot of Japanese tourists go when visiting Seoul. Holy land of free samples. They have these girls standing outside all the cosmetic stores that give you free samples and if you accept then they drag you into the store. I ended up buying  some BB cream which makes you look like an airbrushed movie star, so that was a good buy. I did however have to look around for one that doesn’t have a bleaching agent. Most Korean cosmetics have whiteners for your skin, and since I am already pretty fair I don’t need to worry about looking like Michael Jackson so I’ll have to be careful.

I spent the last week at Jeonju in orientation. It was like college on steroids. We had classes from 9 AM until 8:30 at night and we had a midnight curfew. It was exhausting and wonderful all at the same time. I met a lot of new people from all over the planet and I’m sure we gave the only bar in town a lot of business. I had three Korean classes and feel confident enough to go and order food in a restaurant or ask where the bathroom is. I’ve discovered that smiling, bowing and saying thank you go a long way here when I don’t know what I’m doing or saying.

Yesterday, myself and the seven other people going to my province played a serious game of luggage tetris on our mini bus and then took the 3 hour trip from Jeonju to Changwon. We all said we felt like orphans being adopted and practiced saying “Hello!” “Nice to meet you!” “I look forward to working with you!” in Korean the whole way there. I tried some Squid jerky during our bathroom pit stop. I didn’t like it. I’ve been playing this game since I got here where I buy foods that I don’t recognize and then try them.  It has worked out for me so far. I didn’t buy the squid jerky though so it doesn’t count.

When we got to Changwon we went up into this big conference room where we met our co-teachers. I seriously hit the lottery with my situation. Once I knew I was going to Gyeongnam Province I hoped that I would be teaching elementary school in Changwon. I am. Right in the middle of it. My apartment is only a 10 or 15 minute walk from school and it’s in a nice and safe area. My co-teachers are very nice and so is my principal who I met yesterday. He doesn’t speak any English so my main co-teacher translated for me. He is very smiley and told me that he likes me face which I guess in Korea is a very good compliment and means that he has a good first impression of me. I’m glad for that.

My main co-teacher is essentially supposed to act as my babysitter if I need anything. And honestly thank God for that because I don’t know where the hell I am or what I’m doing. And because of the cultural difference in Korea, they are very concerned about me living alone. People tend to live with their families here until they get married, no matter how old they may be when that happens. My co-teachers seem especially worried about whether or not I can fend for myself because I don’t have a phone or internet in my apartment yet, which by the way is adorable. It is so much more than I could have hoped for. I have a kitchen, a big bedroom with a queen sized bed and a little living room. I also have my very own porch! A married British couple lived there before me and the woman taught at my school so I think that’s why I have so much space. My school also ordered me a couch and a new TV set. The place is very clean, and I am very lucky.

My co-teachers took me to open a bank account and apply for my Alien Registration card last night, and then to the café that I am in right now. It’s a tiny little place owned by a sweet girl who doesn’t speak any English but lets me use the wifi and gives me free homemade chocolates. Right now I am drinking some kind of sparkly grapefruit beverage that I ordered solely based on the color. The game of mystery foods and beverages continues.

I start school on Monday, but was told that since my students are likely to be very curious about me, I probably wont do any actual teaching until Tuesday or Wednesday. I think I will make an about me PowerPoint this weekend to show them.  I found out that most of my students are wealthier, some of them already speak English well because they have lived abroad for their parents jobs, but that I may be the first foreigner some of the others have interacted with. So my lesson planning will be interesting. Maybe they won't eat me alive. Here’s hoping. 

Why am I doing this?

Aside from people asking me how I've been dealing with the emotional process of moving to the other side of the planet, the most common question I get is: "Why?". It's usually posed as a general question, not, "Why South Korea?" not,"Why do you want to teach ESL?" just "Why?"

Why the hell not? No really, though. Essentially, I found myself in quite a rut back at the beginning of May of last year. I graduated college two years prior and started to get a really bad case of the woe is me's. I had a Massachusetts teachers license but no one really seemed to think that qualified me to do anything in a classroom and get paid for it. I was basically told that I had to student teach, which would be nearly impossible to do because I was no longer in school and also that I could substitute but that didn't seem like a viable option either. While I loved the people I worked with and made great money, I also didn't want to schlep tables forever. The whole thing just looked like one big mess of something I didn't want to deal with. Cue the angsty scene of me walking around with my head down, scuffing my feet in the dirt. Even if I DID get a permanent subbing job (some teacher, somewhere--get pregnant, PLEASE!) and then eventually became a permanent staff member, I was still going to have to wait tables in order to make ends meet to pay my loans and that also meant something else: I was never going to move back out of my parents house. Please understand, I love my parents very dearly. I love them to bits. But as I'm sure other post-grad blues havers are aware, your pride takes a little bit of a hit when you show back up on their doorstep with your tail between your legs because you don't have any money and can't both pay rent and feed yourself anymore. It happens to the best of us. But I started getting really disenchanted with everything, started wishing I had never gone to college in the first place, wishing I had been naturally good at math and science and majored in something else instead of English and Sociology. If you happened to graduate from college in this economy, I'm sure you know the drill. 

The only real, honest regret I had from college was never studying abroad. I had the opportunity to but didn't for all the wrong reasons. It was expensive! I wanted to party with my friends every night! I had an apartment that I was already paying for! I was TWENTY ONE, DAMNIT! Now I'm twenty five, which somehow feels a hell of a lot older and my God do I feel wiser, and I should have fucking gone. I started finding myself really jealous of the friends I had who just had the balls to pick themselves up and move wherever for however long. I knew two people who had gone to teach in Korea one of which I have known since I was born and until last spring I also pretty much had wondered "Why?", about her decision. In May I filled out an initial application for an EPIK recruiter and then kind of figured "we'll see what happens". He e-mailed me back and told me that I was too early for the February intake but that he'd e-mail me back In August with the application if I was still interested then. Around the same time I found out that a friend who bartended at a bar close to mine was actually going to teach there in August. Initially I felt jealous and then thought, "Wait a second, you already looked into this. Nothing is moving along here, do this. You can do this. You SHOULD do this." And everything about the opportunity looked amazing. I was going to make decent money that would go a lot further, have benefits, paid vacation, an apartment that was picked out for me and paid for, and an opportunity to learn a new language. I started researching everything I could about Korea and figured that if I was going to do this, what better time than now? I have nothing holding me back here and I am still young, but I surely will not be getting any younger and I know that if I let this slip through my fingers that I will wake up one day when I'm forty and really resent myself for it. Angsty is only cute for so long, amiright?