Der Zweite Monat

Second month in Korea;

So this starts the month where I actually start doing things. My first month of being here could very well become my favorite month, because I was doing so many things and teaching was pretty easy. The weather was perfect, I was exploring my new town (Gwangyang, 광양) and found out that I have this BOMB-ASS CHINESE RESTAURANT in front of my house. Like literally, right in front of my house. I go there almost every week, sometimes multiple times per week. About a seven-minute walk from my place is the town's biggest intersection, with an incredibly large bridge for pedestrians that need to cross the road without the stress of streetlights. My friends that live near me affectionately refer to this bridge as the  Spider Bridge, due to its many arms and legs, and central "hub" area to cross. Despite what sounds like a busy area of town, my town is still small enough to not have big franchise supermarkets like HomePlus, or eMart (basically Wal*Marts and Super Target). All in all, my town is about the size of Mizzou's campus, including the stadiums and the "off campus, on campus" engineering buildings on Providence. It's pretty small, but I'm enjoying every bit of it.

Taking a 40-minute bus ride to the northeast lies the small village of Jinsang and within that, my happy, joyful school known as Jinsang Elementary. Every day I come to school I see a large, beautiful mountain overlooking my school from the north, and hear nature at its finest while I work in the library. The TaLK scholars around me tend to have "English" villages at their school, an entire section of the school dedicated to learning English, while my school must use the library as the main area of English learning. Even though my school isn't as well equipped as others, the school works perfectly fine without an English village, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

i wonder how many people will even be reading this

So it turns out that I need to keep a journal due to my online class at Mizzou, and seeing as I'm in Korea, I feel that this would be a perfect opportunity to get this done. Here's to resurrecting my old blog that I created 3 years ago on my previous visit to the motherland.

LET'S BEGIN. Today is November 4th, 2012.

Putting things in a chronological perspective, I've been in Korea for exactly 3 months, and this first entry will entail the first month. August (from the 4th through 28th) entailed an orientation which my friends and I learned nothing from except for one statement: If you die in Canada, you die in real life. Keep in mind that this orientation was to prepare us for living and teaching in Korea for the next six months at the least. But I digress. It was great meeting new people, and touring around Korea was a blast. The TaLK program failed to teach me about how to turn on my heater for the winters, how to deal with the bus system, any true teaching techniques besides games, and to tell you to avoid tap water like the plague. Thankfully, I was informed by my parents with the intel to never drink Korean tap water, but a few of my friends fell "typhoidically" ill thanks to the failure to debrief the students. Other things they failed to include: how to throw out trash (as it is almost all recycling), how incessantly annoying mosquitos are, and premonitions of Korean schoolchildren and how they -will- attempt to hit you south of the belt if you are a male. The TaLK program, however, correctly emphasized the general cultural differences, highlighting the drinking culture and the importance of age in society. Overall, the orientation itself was largely uninformative, but the orientation experience was one that I'll never forget. It's truly fantastic to see how many cool people you can meet from just the simple common interest of wanting to teach in a country abroad.

Anyways, stay tuned for the next month. Where I actually start teaching!

PS: Please do not pay attention to the previous posts from the past. They're practically irrelevant. I was also a huge idiot.