My New Adventure

I graduated from Colorado State University in Dec 2015 and decided to find a new adventure: Teaching English in Korea for the next year of my life! Follow along here as I try to document how this next year goes!

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Busan!

Ok, so let’s just get this out of the way: you have to go to Busan. If you are going to venture outside of Seoul, go to Busan. But Kim, you might ask, isn’t Busan about as far away from Seoul as you can get? Yes, yes it but it is well worth the trip. 

Especially for me, living in Gyeongbuk province, Busan is a great weekend trip. Not too far, with plenty to keep you coming back. I’ve been a few times, so let me round up a few of my favorite things. 

The Diamond Bridge (Gwangandaegyo)

If you are near Haeundae Beach at night (which really, if the best time to go), you have to take the time to stroll to the end of the beach and about 2 blocks further. If you follow the water, you’ll end up seeing the Diamond bridge lit up at night and it is absolutely stunning. Well worth the extra few steps (plus there is a fabulous ice cream store on the way with the sweetest shop owners)!

Haedong Yongungsa (The Seaside Temple)

A temple situated right on the rocks on the ocean, this temple is gorgeous and definitely worth the long transportation to get out there. You can climb the stairs to get a stunning view of the temple tucked back against the water. 

It was a bit too crowded for my taste, despite arriving around 9:30 in the morning, so I would say go earlier, and definitely wait out a tour group (like say, a Royal Caribbean tour group or 4) in the food alley leading up to the temple. 

Try the hotteok in the food alley, a sweet pancake that they will fill with a nut mixture! It’s a sweet dessert and if you smile and try to chat with the vendors, they might even give you 4 instead of the 1 you wanted.

Gamcheon Culture Village

A workout and sightseeing all in one! Honestly, this was probably my favorite place in Busan. It’s a colorful village with cute cafes and photo ops. It seemed a bit like a tourist trap, but it’s fun to wander around and talk with some of the locals and shop owners. You can buy a map at the front office for ₩2,000 (~$2USD) and then collect stamps on the back at various locations littered throughout the village. It was a really fun way to encourage myself to slip down little alleys and off the main road into art exhibits to find the different stamps! 

Plus the 45 degree hills are fun when you get to the last two stamps, so you get a workout in to justify those amazing snacks you can buy along the way!

What to skip: Jagalchi Fish Market Honestly, if you’ve been to a fish market here in Korea, this is much the same. It’s cool to see, as it is Korea’s largest seafood market, but unless you’re going for freshest meal while you’re in Busan, I would pass. There were some legally-questionable catches and some fish prep that was truly a test of my willpower. 

If you haven’t seen a fish market before: Go. 

If you have? Spend your time elsewhere in Busan.

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Sports Day!  Possible my favorite day from the first semester. All of the students donned class shirts and circulated through a variety of activities to earn stickers for their team, and therefore their class.  This was one of the first days I got some of these students to talk to me outside of the classroom and we even got some students to practice English for the game (which was kicking the shoe off their feet to see whose would land further... it’s apparently a common kids game)!

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Semester 1- Finished!

I can officially say I survived my first semester of teaching English in Korea!  Life took over and this blog fell by the wayside for too long but now with summer and many exciting adventures ahead, I’m going to keep it up a bit better (probably). 

While the school semester is finished, my job as a teacher certainly isn’t! Starting right back up on Monday morning is my first English camp, a 4-day summer school for students wanting to keep up with their English over the 4-week long summer break. 

I have 3 different English camps before my vacation and they’re all very different, so I will be posting about those after I complete them so you can see all the fun pictures of my many hours of planning!

Now if only it weren’t so humid, summer camps would be a welcome break...

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I’m terribly sad that cherry blossom season has come to an end, but here’s hoping the rest of spring here brings just as much beauty!

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Just a short walk away from downtown Gumi is the stunningly beautiful hike up to Mount Gumo (Geumosan). 

You can take a cable car to the top, where there is a Buddhist temple, or you can hike up the mountain and see waterfalls and old structures along the way! It’s probably my favorite part about Gumi right now!

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Side dishes galore!  Probably my favorite thing about eating in Korea is the plethora of side dishes served with every meal! They are collectively called banchan (반찬) and they are sometimes my favorite part of the meal!

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Wall art is everywhere around here! Couldn’t resist posing in front of this gorgeous mural!

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It’s nearing the end of cherry blossom season here, so I went for an evening stroll along the river to make this beautiful season last a little longer!!

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I spent last weekend walking through Gumi (구미)! I found the downtown area through an adorable market, and I even hiked to an upstairs cafe to get some perspective!

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My lil pink apartment here in Korea is cute and cozy!!

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My apartment is small but actually quite comfortable!!

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The traditional Korean folk village was very cool to see! Despite the cold, there were a lot of amazing sights to see!

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That awesome moment when you read something in 한글 and understand it..

It’s just like..

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Day 3: The Medical Exam

Day 3 felt like the longest day yet because our day started with probably the biggest stressor of the orientation: the Medical Exam.  They warned against using any sort of pain medication, medicine, sleeping meds, or putting pretty much anything in your body for the week leading up to the medical exam. If you don’t pass the exam, you can take it one more time, but if you don’t pass it, you don’t get to sign a contract.  The medical exam costs 50,000 won, which is about $50 USD, so no one is really keen on taking it again. You also can’t eat after a certain time the night before, and you can’t drink either, so none of us looked forward to it. 

My roommate and I chugged water before we slept, which meant we both could not wait until we needed to give a urine sample around 7:30. After talking to some of our friends, it seemed pretty much everyone woke up stressed, impatient, and with a full bladder (and a head full of the previous night’s nightmares). 

Even though our class was going first, my roommate and I decided to get down to the dorm lobby at 6:40. We tumbled out of bed and stumbled our way downstairs from the 10th floor only to find probably 10 other people who had already been waiting. We ended up lining up a few minutes later, as most of our class ended up arriving early in hopes of getting the exam done with as fast as possible. 

The test has multiple parts: Height/weight check, eye test, blood pressure test (with a misplaced chest measurement??), hearing and color-blindness test, urine test, blood test (where they draw 2 tubes of blood), and a chest xray.  The chest xray was a little worrisome, as we went into the xray room with two other girls, and then we were also exposed to their xrays. Fun times for new teachers, right?

We did get a whole one piece of bread for breakfast though, so it was clearly a winning morning!  We then had a few hours to kill while the other classes went through the exams, so I caught up on emails, read a little bit, practiced some Korean, and found rice balls (I don’t know the Korean name yet, so I still call them onigiri) in the little mini mart downstairs and just hung out until our two lessons after lunch.  The lectures were helpful in giving us a little more of a clue for what to expect for our daily classes, after school classes, and camps, and they also gave us some tips on making your English speaking as effective as possible for non-native speakers. 

After dinner, we had our first Survival Korean class! It is being taught by an EPIK staff member, and one of our class teachers, David (David is my favorite). While I was definitely excited for this class, I somehow ended up in the Intermediate Korean class which I think is a bit of a mistake. The test was whether or not you could read basic hangul (the Korean characters), which I can sort of do, but I don’t think I can keep up with some of the things the teachers are trying to teach us. 

Either way, it was sink or swim in that class so I just tried to stay afloat. We learned how to write our names in hangul, and a few different ways to introduce ourselves and some things about ourselves (ie where we are from and our hobbies). Our poor teacher and co-teacher were astounded at our incapability to play a simple game, but we weren’t even struggling with Korean. We were just struggling to keep a beat!

The Survival Korean class is definitely going to be useful for adjusting to life in Korean, but I am still not sure I can pick it up quickly enough.  After that, I was thoroughly exhausted, as were the rest of my friends, so we all scattered to rest up for Day 4, which was our first full day of lectures. Oh what fun!

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Day 2:안녕하세여!

(That says anyeonghaseyo, or Hello!)  Day 2 was the actual beginning of our EPIK Orientation. 

We had breakfast and met with our class leaders David and Cathy for a quick “Campus Tour” that really just showed us the Lecture Building and the Auditorium, where the rest of the events would be taking place.  After that, we had the Opening Ceremony where some of the big leaders from the national organizations joined us and introduced themselves. We also got to meet all of the EPIK staff who are helping with our orientation, which was nice to meet everyone. 

There was also a really cool drum dance done by some performers that is a type of traditional Korean performance, which was probably the most exciting part of the day! We also had a quick lecture from Walter Foreman, a former EPIK teacher from years ago who stuck around to keep teaching for a few more decades. He gave some really great cultural information and sort of set our minds at ease, which was exactly what a lot of us needed right then. 

After lunch we met with our class (I’m Class 1!) and we talked about emergency procedures, picked a class representative, and discussed what all we would be doing for the rest of orientation. It wasn’t the most fun, but it was definitely good to figure out exactly what we are doing for the rest of the week. Oh, and we also got our topics and grade levels assigned for the Lesson Demo that we have to do on the final day! I’m a bit stressed about doing a demonstration for a high school lesson plan, but everyone else seems stressed about it too, so I think we are all in the same boat here. 

We had a few hours of downtime, which was really nice especially after we found out that we have ethernet cords in our rooms, instead of trying to find the spotty wifi in the freezing lounges of the dorms. So my roommate and I holed up in our rooms for an hour or so (before we went to go get coffee with some of the other teachers) enjoying internet and answering emails in the nice warmth of our room.  Then we had a “Welcoming Dinner” that was just a normal dinner except they finally started serving us Korean food instead of the weird/scary mix of Korean and Western food that they had served us for the past few meals. Some of the boys had been told that they needed to dress is business clothes for both the Opening Ceremony and for the Welcoming Dinner, but there was never an announcement about it, and most everyone dressed just in jeans and such. There have been a few things that have come up where us new teachers are a bit confused because most of us read a lot of blogs about previous EPIK teachers’ experiences and they change a lot from year to year to no one really knows what is happening most of the time. 

Finally, we had eating restrictions that night because we had our medical examination in the morning. We couldn’t eat food after 10pm and we couldn’t drink any liquids after midnight. Of course, we chugged water right before we crashed around 9:30 (we’re all still adjusting to the time here), and of course we woke up around 4am needing to relieve ourselves instead of holding it for the urine sample that we would need the next morning. Add that stress to the general panic among all the teachers about the medical exam (even if we haven’t taken medicine in months, we were all worked up over whether or not we would actually pass the test) and we were all talking about the weird dreams we had that night. It was an adventure, to say the least.

That’s about it for Day 2, but Day 3 was utterly exhausting!

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Orientation Schedule!

The EPIK Orientation schedule is very long but seems like it will be incredibly helpful for my time here! I’ll type it out real fast in case any of y’all are interested in what I’ll be up to for the next week and change. Day 1 (Thursday):

Arrival/Registration-- really just a travel day

Day 2 (Friday):

Campus Tour

Opening Ceremony (w/ a traditional percussion performance!)

Lecture on History/Culture

Meet with your assigned Orientation Class and discuss the week

“Welcoming Dinner” (first real Korean meal, all previous meals are meh)

** NO Food after 10pm, no drink about 12am this day!

Day 3 (Saturday):

Medical Examination

Eye, hearing, blood, blood pressure tests

x-rays, medical interview, etc

3.5 hours of lectures

Survival Korean class (you are placed in either Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, or Kpop class)

Day 4 (Sunday):

Lectures (9am-12:30)

More Lectures (2-5:30pm)

Survival Korean (7-8:30pm)

Day 5 (Monday):

FIELD TRIP DAY

go to Korean Folk Village and explore/ participate in cultural activities 

BONUS: It’s on Jeongwol Daeboreum, which is the first Full Moon of the Lunar New Year, which means there are special activities happening that day that only happen once a year!

Day 6 (Tuesday):

Lectures

More Lectures

Survival Korean

(repeat of Sunday)

Day 7 (Wednesday):

Lectures

More Lectures

Time to work on lesson plans (due the next morning)

Day 8 (Thursday):

Lesson Demos (everyone is incredibly stressed out about these)

15 min demonstrations of your fully planned 50 minute class

judged by everyone else in your class

Meet with your POE/MOE Supervisors

I am in Gyeongbuk POE (Provincial Office of Education), MOE is Metropolitan Office of Education

This is where you sign your official contract btw

Closing Ceremony

Farewell Dinner

Day 9 (Friday):

Load luggage onto bus and go to your location

Get ready to teach in like 3 days

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Dolsot Bibimbap on Day 1 (with some banchan)! Dolsot Bibimbap means hot stone pot bibimbap, so the bottom layer of rice gets crunchy and it’s such a nice texture at the end of the dish! 

Banchan means side dishes* so we added our kimchi and ate the little mini eggs separately. 

The gochujang (the hot pepper paste) was being brought over as I took this picture, and it definitely makes the dish!

*I’m pretty sure that’s a close translation? Still trying to learn the proper names, but it’s day 2! There is time and I will ask our teacher tomorrow.

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Here is the Welcome Banner for our EPIK Orientation at the entrance to Kyonggi University in Suwon-si! We are so ~official~ !!