Finally, Korea!

After 5 months of planning, waiting and anxious suspense, I have arrived in South Korea, also known as the Land of the Morning Calm.

First of all, thanks for visiting my blog. I will do my best to make it entertaining and informative, but please, give me a little leeway for a first time blogger. Please note that as of right now all romanized spellings of Korean words and names are extremely approximate. This first post may be a bit long, and feel free to skip ahead to the lowdown and dirty, but first a little background...

Why did I come to Korea? I had been working as a cook in San Diego California. I loved San Diego. I just didn't like cooking anymore. It has been a love of mine since I was a small child. One of my first memories is being about 4 years old, standing on a chair in front of the stove making scrambled eggs. After years of working on and off as a cook however, my love of cooking had waned, and I didn't want the life of an executive chef with the long hours away from friends and family, the stress and the being tied to a restaurant. With the career path of a cook being at least 5 years to become a decent executive chef, it made no sense to continue working in a stressful job that paid terribly, when I didn't want to become a chef anyway.

So instead of just complaining about it, which I did anyway, I began to look for something else, my next adventure. Every night for about 2 months, I would come home from work and scour the internet, trying to decide what to do with my life. No pressure though. And then one night, there it was: Come to Korea and teach English! Save lots of money, travel, experience a different culture. No certification or experience required, just a bachelors degree in any discipline.

Having explored teaching ESL (English as a second language) a few years back but not really being motivated enough to get a certification, and thinking that teaching might be a good career for me, and totally dissatisfied with my life as a cook, I applied immediately. With our economy in the tank, and few other options, Korea sounded just right. If I did it right I'd be able to save around $15,000 over the course of the year, find out if teaching was a viable career option for me, and still be able to live a good lifestyle and travel all over Korea and the rest of Asia while I was at it. Too good to be true? No, just another amazing blessing in this charmed life of mine.

To make a long story short, after countless hours of researching different recruiters, areas of Korea to live in, teaching in public school vs. a private language academy (hagwon), and learning about Korean culture and customs, I landed a position at a public elementary school in Gwacheon, a city just south of Seoul. I wouldn't start until September 1st so I packed my bags, said goodbye to my amazing group of friends in San Diego (I miss and love you all!) and headed home to Santa Fe New Mexico for the summer to spend time with my family. It was a great summer. Santa Fe is an incredible place and I fell in love with it all over again. That however, is another subject for another post.

The details: I live in Anyang, a satellite city of Seoul about 20 minutes south of the city, but a city in and of itself. I teach in Gwacheon, just 4 subway stops north. Most teachers here live within walking distance of their schools, but Gwacheon is pretty much just government buildings with little in the way of culture or things to do, so I'm quite pleased with the arrangement of living in Anyang and taking the subway to work each morning. And with Gwacheon being host to much of the government, most of my kids come from upper-middle class to upper class families and as a result are a bit better behaved with a higher level of English than students in most other schools.

As of tomorrow night I'll have been in Korea for 2 weeks and I've already seen and done so much. My first weekend I went to Busan, a city in the south of the country known as "the San Diego of South Korea." I mean, how could I resist? I really wanted to go surfing and Busan supposedly had some breaks.

I traveled there with David, the other American teacher at my school, his girlfriend Andrei and his friend Dan, who was visiting from Seattle for a couple weeks. We had an amazing time. We left Friday right after school let out and took the KTX (bullet train) down to Busan. We shacked up in a love motel in downtown Busan. While their purpose is basically for what it sounds like, love motels aren't dirty or seedy like you'd think, but are generally sparkling clean and quite nice for the price, around 30,000 or about $28 for the night. Ours even had a collection of free porn, Asian themed obviously and complementary condoms in the rooms. In the stairwell there was a sex toy vending machine. Nice. You stay classy Korea!

The next morning Dan and I found a bakery, grabbed some grub for the group, and off we went to Haeundae, the big famous beach in Busan, and we found a new motel a block from the beach. There was a surf competition going on, but absolutely zero swell and it was hilarious watching 40 guys just sitting out in the water, pretending something was going to happen. Haeundae was really packed and touristy though so we headed to a smaller, more local beach a bit north, Samjeong. We swam, napped on the beach and generally just had fun in the sun, before heading back to the hotel to get ready for our big night out.

Andrei wasn't feeling well and stayed in, so us boys went to the hip university area in Busan for some rowdy adventure. David soon went home early to be with Andrei, but Dan and I stayed. We somehow ended up meeting these two Korean guys who offered to take us out on the town with them, their treat. Korean hospitality is legendary, and this is very common.

After them taking us to a couple western bars and us explaining we didn't want to do that, after all why come half-way around the world to hang out with the same douchebags you can find anywhere in the States, they took us to a very high-class norea-bang. Norea-bang is the Korean version of karaoke, but instead of being in a large room in front of strangers you get a private room just for you and your friends.

So we're sitting there in the room, just looking at each other and communicating as best we can, which wasn't very good. I'm thinking, "so are we gonna do some singing or what?" An attendant comes in with a huge tray loaded with a bottle of scotch, beers, ice buckets and mixers. Uh oh. One of the Korean men, he wanted us to call him "Older Brother" puts two ice cubes in each glass, a shot or so of scotch and then pops a beer. He shakes it up and sprays the beer into the glasses. Interesting. Beer and scotch. Actually not that bad, though I don't think I'll be ordering it anytime soon.

Then we just sit there, drinking and looking at each other some more. I'm still thinking, "so now are we gonna do some singing or what?" Then Older Brother and his friend, Henry, start saying something about girls. Crap. Look fellas, I appreciate the hospitality, but I don't want a prostitute. Now, I'm not into that kind of thing, and Dan has a fiance back home, but we don't want to insult the guys so we say, "sure, girls" figuring we can just run out of there if it gets too lewd. A couple minutes later 4 Korean women come in and stand in a line. They're all pretty good looking, maybe 20-25 years old. Older Brother turns to me and says, "you pick." Don't remember the last time I was that nervous. I say, "but they're all so beautiful" so as to buy myself some time. The girls all giggle. Finally I point to the tallest and prettiest one of the bunch. Then Dan chooses his and Older Brother and Henry get the last two by default.

It turned out to be very innocent. The women were just there for companionship, pouring us drinks and standing next to us while we sang. For two hours many songs were sung by us all, many scotches and beers drunk, much laughter. It's all a bit hazy, but at one point there was a dance-off, Henry kept saying, "you touch your girl. You touch your girl!" the girls sang a lot, and Older Brother sang many impassioned songs. Koreans take their norea-bang very seriously. Dan and I also dueted Under the Sea from the Little Mermaid, rocking it out and getting 100% The Koreans were amazed!

Then, all of a sudden time was up and the girls said "bye-bye" and left. Henry and Older Brother paid the bill, which I'm sure was hundreds of dollars, norea-bang is cheap but this was a really classy place. By this time it was very late, I have no idea how, just that the streets were deserted and people stay out late partying in Korea, and we went our separate ways, but not before we promised to email Henry and Older Brother pictures from the night.

The next day, against all odds, I woke up feeling pretty good, aided by a swim in the ocean. We went for a hike, the taxi got lost on the way there, we couldn't find the temple in the woods we were looking for, we had to decline many invitations to picnic with hikers in the woods because of a time constraint, and hopped on the slow train back to Seoul, opted for because of the desire to see the countryside. All in all it was a great trip and amazing first weekend in Korea. I feel very blessed to have met Henry and Older Brother and experience some real Korean culture so soon.

Having been here two weeks I definitely have more to share, but this post is running long already so I'll just catch up over the next week and then hopefully up to date.