Finally... Korea

Or rather, lets start with the first night... after travelling 23 hours from Toronto through LA to Incheon, the ever-wonderful Colleen and my new supervisor, Scully met me at the airport with a cardboard name sign (which I kept!!)... I guess in case I couldn't recognize the other white Amazon girl in the airport as my uni pal :)

So we bussed to Juckjeon, had some bipimbap, dropped my things off at my new HOME, and went drinking. Oh, no ordinary drinking, mind you. We did a Korean slum crawl. For those not in the know, it's buying cheap beer at a convenience store, drinking it at the tables outside (put there for that purpose), getting another beer, and drinking it on our way to the next convenience store. Six GS-25s later, we camped out, met a Vince Vaugn lookalike, drank too much soju, and around 6 am dragged ourselves away.

My first week at school was hectic: I sat in on each of the classes, met ALL of the kids (who love Kathryn Teacher- for now), tried to remember the important things, had some beers after work, and tried to orient myself in the country without steet names.

SO: Colleen's last night, on which she swore not to drink a drop, Sue and I convinced her (really, it wasn't hard) to take her backpack (read: worldly belongings for the next 4 months) with her for ONE LAST DRINK (at midninght... her flight left at 9 am). Now, honestly. If she actually expected to have ONE drink, she wouldn't have brought her backpack with her, now would she have? So many beers and lots of soju later, after saying goodbye to the sweetest Korean boyband-lookalikes, we packed her in a taxi for the airport, hoping that she'd sober up enough to be allowed to fly. No sweat, Colleen pulled through, and is now happy in Thailand. Woo! We got ourselves back to our houses at 6 or 7...

My first real week was good with the kids: Kindergarten kids are high strung!!!!! I have wonderful Junior kids too, whom I appreciate a LOT. Everyone is adorable at my school. The other teachers are super nice, the Director is a sweetheart, and his wife is really sweet also. The walls are all velcro and decorated really nicely, there are lots of games, and it seems pretty good. For my kindi class, I teach them math, science, cooking, english, and "how to be good people", though we are currently working on the difference between "compliment" and "compassion". Oh well.

I really like it here. I'm in a small part of a big town near the end of one of the Seoul subway lines. The teachers at my school and I are the only foreigners in the area, apart from the fundamentalist Christian and the Gun Man, both of whom we tend to avoid. It's not really Party Korea, it's Korea Korea, but the party atmosphere is close enough (40 mins on the subway)... and a cab from Seoul is only 20 bucks. Yeah. I know this year will be a good time.

I kind of feel like it took a long time to get here, even though it was really only a month since I decided that I would definetly do this.