First Week Living in Korea!

I love this place so far. Everything is really clean and efficient and well organized. Stores and restaurants are open super late and sometimes 24 hours. The food has all been delicious so far. I love the fashion here and I’m not normally into fashion. I love walking into a pop up store and having no idea what’s going on. I love having the beach right next to the city. It's still a little disconcerting seeing sandy beaches right beside skyscrapers.

Gwangalli beach

I’ve already gotten used to the mask mandate. Even though it’s only for crowded areas and indoors, pretty much everyone wears a mask on the streets too. We are allowed to take our mask off in the teacher’s office though which is nice.

I could write a whole essay about how transit is so much better here. We still only know maybe 4 words in Korean but it’s easy to find our stop because it’s a transfer stop so they play a specific whistle tune. The stop before ours is a beach stop so they play seagull noises. Their version of google maps (naver) tells you everything you could possibly need to know - like how many steps and calories and crosswalks to your destination. It would really be helpful to know more hangul though so we can recognize street names and other things. The only hangul I can recognize is 노래방 (norae ban) which means "song room" AKA karaoke. There are at least 10 of them within 300 meters of our apartment.

Our teaching gig is actually pretty sweet. We have to do more prep and grading than some hagwon (private English school) jobs but we only have to teach 4 hours a day and we have the same group of kids the whole time that we are here. The kids are also pretty great. My grade 5 class has a lot of introverts who are very quiet. My grade 4 class has a few students who were held back (apparently that’s common - I actually have a grade 7 in my grade 5 class too) and some of the boys in the grade 4 class are quite rowdy. I’ll have to figure out what works to get them to behave.

The kids sometimes call us our names but mostly call all the teachers “Teacher!” whenever they have a question. Here are some types of conversations I had:

Student: “Teacher! Do you have a dog?”

Me: “Yes, I have a dog back in Canada.”

Student: “Really??”

Me: “Yes”

Student: “What’s her name?”

Me: “Bonnie!”

Student: “Really???”

Me: “Yes, she’s a little white dog.”

Student: “Really??”

Student: “Teacher! Are you going to be teaching us?”

Me: “I’m going to be teaching the grade 5s.”

Student: “Really???”

Me: “Yes..”

Student: “Ohhh. Teacher my sister is in grade 5! I think she will be so happy to have a girl teacher.”

Me: “Oh really? What’s her name?”

Student: “Sarah”

Me: “Oh I met her!”

Student: “Really???”

So far we've been to Gwangalli beach, Haeundae beach, and the market at BIFF (and some of the surrounding markets but to be honest, I'm not sure where one market ends and another begins). We've also walked around Seomyeon where there is a ton of nightlife, gone for Korean barbecue with some of the other teachers, and visited a number of department stores in our hunt to furnish our apartment.

korean bbq

We thought that maybe it would be easier to buy a few things online so we set up a Coupang account (Korean online store) and discovered that you need a Korean credit card or bank account to order anything. In order to get a Korean bank account, we need an ARC card. In order to get an ARC card, we need to do the mandatory health check for immigration. And our school has booked that for us for the earliest possible date which is September 28th... So we'll have to continue our process of subwaying to a store, buying a bunch of things, and cabbing home. Or pay the international shipping fees on Amazon.