New Home, School, Everything...

I’m writing this Tuesday night but I won’t post it until tomorrow because I don’t have internet in my apartment yet. I’ve had a really busy and exciting past few days. Yesterday, we left orientation and went to our separate areas. They took all the Daegu people to this place with an auditorium where they called us up by district and matched us up with our co-teachers. It felt a little weird because we were kind of on display until they called our name and we left with the teachers. I’m working at Dongbyeon Middle School (동변중학교) in the Seo-bu district of Daegu. I got picked up by a teacher named Kim Hwa Ok and a woman who works in the office. Hwa Ok speaks very good English and is super friendly. She looks really young, I wasn’t sure if she was a teacher when I first saw her. But when I told her I was 22, she said she was jealous that I was so young. So I basically have no idea how old she is. (By the way, asking someone’s age in Korea isn’t considered rude.)

(If you copy and paste 동변중학교 into Google Maps, you can see my school.)

We went back to the school and the first person I met there was the principal. He didn’t speak English but he was very nice. We had coffee in his office and Hwa Ok translated between us a little. After that, we went upstairs to meet the other English teachers. They had brought some food for me, like muffins and stuff, which was nice. Everyone was super nice and excited to meet me. And then the students came into the picture…I felt like a unicorn or a yeti or something. The students acted like they’d never seen anything like me their lives. When classes ended they kept coming in waves to meet me. It was kind of cool, they asked me a few questions and a ton of them told me I was pretty or beautiful and one said I had big eyes, which kind of made me laugh. 

When school was over, I went back to my apartment with Hwa Ok and Suh Sang Sun, who will be my main co-teacher. Basically, she is the main person responsible for helping me get everything set up. Mr. Im, who is in charge of the finances met us at the apartment and decided he wanted to come shopping with us. We went to a huge department store called Home Plus. Sometimes in Korea I feel like I’m in the future. Home Plus had escalators but they weren’t stairs, they were ramps so you can bring your cart on them. Genius. It was a little weird being with a group of people I just met and we were only shopping for me. Also, they said the school was going to pay for my bedding and dishes so I wanted to be careful not to pick expensive things. Mr. Im doesn’t speak English, which didn’t help because then the three of them would be speaking Korean and I didn’t know what was going on. Just when I started to feel like we should hurry because they all probably wanted to go home, Mr. Im suggested we take a break and eat some topokki at the store. An interesting difference between Korea and the United States is their opinions about foreigners. In the United States, if someone doesn’t speak English people assume they’re stupid. In Korea, it’s almost the opposite. For example, Mr. Im and the principal both said they wished they could speak English and the principal said he would like to sit in on my classes if I do some for the teachers. So instead of thinking I’m dumb because I don’t speak Korean, they’re more focused on the fact that I can speak English. 

This is topokki. The round things are rice cakes and the flat things are made of fish. It's a little spicy but very good.

When we finished shopping, we went back to my apartment and they helped me bring everything in before leaving for the night. So then I was on my own the first thing I did was clean up. The previous teacher must not have been the cleanest guy in the world. The floors were pretty dirty and there was a lot of dust. Luckily, he did have cleaning supplies which he left behind. After cleaning the apartment, I unpacked a little and went to bed around midnight. Because of the typhoon, school was delayed until 10:30 the next day, so it was actually a pretty good night’s sleep. I’ll talk about the actual school days in the next one because this is getting kind of long!

My apartment video won't upload here for some reason so here's the link to it on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=3517073646865&set=vb.1272690024&type=2&theater

This song is super big here right now: 

Artist: SISTAR

Song: Loving U

Album: Loving U EP

Released: June 2012