It's been entirely too long since I last posted, 71 days to be exact. And i'm dedicating this post to Stephen Hattersley, because he asked me 2 months ago for a post. Sorry for the delay!
Also, this is going to be a long one... So grab a hot cup of coffee (or preferred beverage)
and enjoy!
I've been in Korea for three months already, and so much has changed since I last wrote in May. I've fully settled in to my apartment (which now boasts a reclaimed couch, a plant for the center of my kitchen table, and some much needed wall decorations) so it finally feels a bit more like a home! I'm now a functioning employee at Sunflower Language School, no longer the random bearded blonde guy who was stumbling around the school trying to figure out what to do. So things are going exceedingly well there!
I leave for Thailand this Friday with my friend and co-worker Brienna (she's in some of my FB pictures). I couldn't be more excited for this trip! I've heard almost entirely amazing things about Thailand (except that there is potential for crime, something almost non-existent in Korea), so i am cautiously optimistic! : )
I've also been traveling around Korea a bit as well, and I have been pleasantly surprised! The city I live in is admittedly not the most exciting place in the world, and when I first got here I figured I would have to wait for Thailand to see some beautiful sites. I was miles off on that assumption! South Korea is indeed a very beautiful country and it's quite compact as well, so it's easy to catch a 5 hour bus ride to the opposite end (or a 2 hour high-speed rail ride).
Two months ago, my director (Suzie) took me, Brienna, and one of our foreign teachers (Julie) to a famous area with a large collection of Buddhist temples that straddle a small river in the mountains; about an hour from where we live. It was POURING the entire time. In fact, it was raining so much that my umbrella couldn't even effectively do the singular thing it was created to, and it started leaking through the center (it's a good umbrella too! haha). But aside from that, the afternoon was great. It was really interesting to see the history and tradition that has been in Asian cultures for thousands of years. They were very welcoming and happy to see me and Brienna visiting their places of worship. We even had tea with Suzie's monk, a very funny man who really enjoyed visiting with us!
More recently, I joined the local foreigner soccer team in Ulsan for a friendly against a recreational Korean team. It's a great group of guys who play teams from all over the area. It's off-season right now, so I was able to join the guys in the friendly, which was super nice of them considering none of them had even seen me play before! They put me in at center back (defense) and I basically did just did my best not to screw things up too badly, haha. I played about 65 minutes and we lost 3-2, but it was a great time. It was my first time playing an actual match since my days of kicking the fuzzy green ball around in Modesto youth indoor soccer. So i'm hoping after my vacation that i'll be able to play with the team more and improve my, admittedly, less than stellar skill on the ball!
At school, we held our annual open-house for the morning kindergardeners, and it went really well! It's quite different than an open-house in the US. In Korea, it's basically an excuse to have the parents come in and watch the foreign teachers do, what amounts to, a "mock" class. Everything was well scripted and practiced for about 6 grueling weeks. Yeah, imagine trying to keep the attention of 6 & 7 year olds every day with the same lesson about friendship... That was my reality for a month and a half! But it all worked out for the actual open-house day, and the parents all wrote good reviews, much to the relief of my extremely nervous director. Private schools out here are a very competitive business and many of them fail, so they all try to maintain the image of perfection daily. The one I work at, however, has been around for 25 years in the wealthiest area of town, so i'm pretty sure we've got little to worry about! : )
The kids also put on a play the following week for their parents. This was all run and organized by the Korean teachers, thank God! haha So me and the other foreign teachers got to sit back and watch them perform Pinocchio and Cinderella. It was priceless to see them on the stage reciting their lines in English! We also took a trip recently to a small bamboo forest that runs along the river front about a 15 minute bus ride from our school.
Three weeks ago, about 50 of us foreign teachers rented an overnight noribong bus (Korean for karaoke, the japanese word that we use... haha) and we sang our way up to the Boryeong Mud Festival (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boryeong_Mud_Festival). It's an event where thousands of us foreigners descend upon a small beach town in North-West South Korea (yes, you should be slightly confused here, lol). The area is known for it's mud that is said to have many benefits for your skin, but that is a side note to what is really just a giant mud party! They have a great beach with restaurants all along it, and one big area with buckets of mud and huge blow-up obstacle courses also covered in said mud. So me and my friends slid the day away through some of the obstacle courses, and wrestled in an above ground pool filled with mud! We then spent the rest of the day on the beach enjoying the sun that finally decided to show up around 2:00. It was definitely a weekend to remember!
The weekend following the mud festival, I went with some friends to go cliff jumping in the mountains about an hour outside of the city. It was a great time. I jumped off a 25 foot cliff with terrible form and suffered from a painful a$$-flop for the following hour, haha. Just this past weekend I was able to go to Geoje Island, the second biggest island in South Korea. It was just a 2 hour bus ride from my area, and it completely surpassed my expectations! I went with some of my favorite people here and we had a great time. We stayed at a cheap "pension" for the night where they give us a room with blankets and pillows, and little else, but it was perfect. Saturday night we sat outside at a picnic table by the beach playing cards until the early hours of the morning. It was a welcomed reminder of the many great vacations I've had with my family, who I was missing a lot since it was my nephew Blake's first birthday party this weekend! : (
Korean does when they take a picture, haha.
Now it's just one more week of work and then i'm off to Thailand!
If you've gotten this far, thank you! I sincerely hope you've enjoyed reading about the last 72 days of my life in Korea! It brings me great joy to be able to communicate and share my adventures with you all. I am humbled and grateful for your readership : )
