A Beginning

Our blog is hosted on google. By some miracle of the internet, all of the buttons are now in Korean. It made posting this a lot more interesting.

After a two-hour drive from the airport, we arrived at our apartment around 8:30 last night. My coworker and another local English teacher met us and took us for dinner and a bit of grocery shopping at E-Mart (the Korean version of Target or Wal-Mart). Even though we were eating at a little fast-food place, our food was still served in a cast-iron pot. We bought some fruit and bagels (and coffee) and went home.

Our apartment is big, even by Toronto standards. They’ve installed all new appliances – microwave, toaster oven, refrigerator, tv, washing machine. Our furniture is pretty nice, too; they’ve given us a bed, dresser, table and chairs, sofa, and a desk. We have two bedrooms, a living room, a main room (where the kitchen is) and a back room that functions as a sort of walk-through closet – it runs the length of the back wall and has shelves and a thingy to hang our clothes on). Our toilet has a squishy cover with a picture of a girl walking in a field of flowers. It says “The Cosmos means the purity and love. Let’s feel the clean cosmos.” Paul wants to replace it.

This morning, Paul went off to training in another city for a few days, and I went to meet the teachers and administrators at my school. Gorim Middle School is a fifteen minute walk from our apartment -- just past Yongin stadium and the local driving range. The school is enormous and brand new and really, really nice. The students kept coming by the office today just to say “hello,” to see if I would talk back to them. When I would reply, they would laugh and run away. I said “goodbye” to one girl, and she went screaming with her friend down the hall. In the cafeteria, everyone looked and shouted and waved when I walked in. Being a seventh-grade English teacher is the closest I’ll ever be to being a rock star.