Alan, meet Korea.

I need a brake pedal.

So it wasn’t even 24 hours past my flight’s touchdown in Korea when I was thrust into training at the school. More on that in a second.

When the flight touched down I found Korean immigration at the airport to be much more easy and relaxed than I remember for Japan. I practically just walked through it.

Although once I got out I was shown to a cab driver by my recruiter, and from there I began my shuttle to the school. The oddest thing about the ride to the school was that when the cab driver asked me (in English, he wants to learn it while he’s here) if I knew any Korean. I said I recognized some words because they’re much like Japanese in sound, and he lit up. He was like “Oh so you know Japanese?” and I told him, Yes I do.

From there the rest of the cabride was in Japanese. I landed in Korea to teach English and I spoke Japanese for the first hour. Oh well.

Anyway, I got to see Cortlyn for the first time in like 5 years and it was great. I feel like I’m kind of alread overstaying my welcome though. He’s come down with a respiratory infection and needs plenty of rest and everything.

Today is my second day training and I’ll be teaching twice at the end of the day. More later I suppose.

Aug
27th

Sat

Prologue

So, this is my inaugural post in this blog. It’s about 9pm the night before I leave for South Korea. I still don’t really know exactly where I’m being placed, I just know that I’ll be teaching at DYB Institute, either in Daechi (Gangnam-gu) or in Bundang.

I was hired for the job in May, and I’ve had to wait to leave until tomorrow morning to leave mostly due to paperwork taking forever to process. Regardless, it’s done, and I’m going to South Korea.

Since my flight takes off at 7:20 in the morning, I’m going to stay up all night and sleep on the plane to avoid jetlag. And pack. I haven’t started doing that, yet.

I was excited about moving to South Korea at some point, but I don’t remember when that was. I’m kind of exasperated now. There has been so much about this process that went wrong and exhausted me, so going there is both exciting and a little—weird. I don’t know the word for the feeling you get where you know you have to do something and you’re going to do it but you can anticipate how hard it’s going to be so you’re not like really excited. That’s what I also feel.

Yes, I’m going to a country where I don’t know the language and the countryside is beautiful, but I’ll be working very hard. Most of this blog is probably just going to address that.

My next post, should there be one (I hope so) will be from South Korea.