Adventure!

Sorry for the slow updates, been extremely busy the past week or so. Anyways…

So finally comes the last day of our orientation. I was excited to be leaving for Daegu soon, but also sad that we would all part ways. Although it’s all been fun, it is wise to remember that we are all here to work as English teachers and that should come first! So anyway, Sunday was the day we had to do our lesson demonstration in front of our class. Overall, our presentation went okay. We ran out of time and couldn’t do the final activity, but I think we covered it up pretty well.

Garrett and I after our demonstrations. Looking sharp =P

Our invite to the farewell party. But before that, we had to meet some people from our MOE and find out which school we’ll all be teaching at…

My official contract and other info. So I’ll be spending the next year teaching at YeongNam Technical High School. I’ve heard many things about technical high schools, i.e. the students generally do not speak much English and are not inclined to learn English. So I’ll have to work extra hard to try and motivate these kids!

Hope Hall! This is where the farewell party was held. 

We had a banquet before the entertainment. There was so much FOOD!

The stage for the performances. My class (class 6) was the furthest away from the stage, but the closest to the food. A fair trade off in my opinion. =P

The farewell party had a talent show for each class to participate in and showcase our talents. For our class, we decided to do a dance to Jay Park’s Tonight, Wondergirls’ Nobody and LMFAO’s Sexy And I Know It. I’m not gonna say anymore because it was sort of embarrassing, but fun lol. Thanks to Wendy who organised everything!

And of course we went out drinking that night. =) Didn’t stay out very late though since we had to wake up quite early the next day.

Overall, orientation was a blast. I met so many people and made lots of new friends. It was a great way to introduce all of us to the Korean culture in a guided environment you could say, albeit being a little too short in my opinion. The EPIK staff were awesome and I’m surely going to miss them. So now comes the real challenge! We all went our separate ways, each of us put into a different school. It’s time to really experience Korea!

Day six and seven were pretty quiet days. Decided to take a break and work on our lesson demonstrations which I forgot to mention. We were put into groups of three and given a topic which corresponds to a grade level. In our groups, we had to create a lesson plan and demonstrate the lesson in front of our class on the Sunday. Our group were given a 2nd grade middle school topic, “Response to Compliments”. Will talk about it more later. So days 6 and 7 of the orientation…

Ham for breakfast. Awesome.

Found this nice courtyard right outside my Korean language classroom. Which I also forgot to mention. During the orientation we were required to go to Korean language classes for three nights. There were 4 classes you could choose: Levels 1-3 and K-pop. Levels 1-3 corresponds to your Korean language ability. I decided to choose level 2 since I could already read Hangeul and know some basic words and grammar structures. K-pop classes were for those people keen on performing a k-pop song in front of everyone at the farewell dinner. I considered doing it, but decided against it in the end. I would rather improve my Korean than spend 3 nights trying to sing and dance Replay by Shinee. And that didn’t even work out in the end. But I will talk about that later =P.

My other EPIK homeroom teacher, Sun. He was also my Korean language class teacher. Very nice guy, hope to see him again soon.

My level 2 Korean language class. The two on the right, closest to the camera are from New Zealand!

Korea has this nice bakery franchise called Paris Baguette. They make the nicest pizza bread ever! They also sell these weird combo cream breads. One I had was peanut butter and grape jam. It was AMAZING. The best thing is that they open from 7:00am until 12:00am midnight! There’s also another bakery franchise called Tous les Jours that’s really close to my apartment but I haven’t tried it yet.

Felt quite sick in the morning and only had about 5 hours of sleep the night before. But it was well worth it. Although I did realise that I have no phone yet so I wouldn’t be able to call the girl. Day five was very tiring but also quite a fun day. We had a field trip to the Traditional Culture Centre.

On the bus.

The Traditional Culture Centre!

Scary masks.

Our first activity was this traditional Korean dance (sorry I forgot the name!). You wear those masks and dance to the beat of the drum.

Some people volunteered to do the lion dance.

One of my EPIK homeroom teacher, Haesol. 난 이미 그리워요 ᅲᅲ

Next activity was to decorate this small box with traditional Korean paper called Hanji. We were running late and I wasn’t able to dry mine so I didn’t take a photo. I’ll remember to take one later.

Our final activity was traditional Korean drumming. I played the 꽹과리, a small gong that makes a very loud noise.

And then we went to lunch! Bibimbap + side dishes, yumm.

Afterwards we had a tour of Hanbok Village near the Cultural Centre. This place is a school.

A huge tree in the courtyard of the school. It is said to protect it from evil spirits.

Not sure what’s inside this building, but I’m assuming these are classrooms.

A classroom.

A cute little cafe. 

A cute restaurant.

Bought 녹차라떼 at a street vendor for about $2.50AUD. It was so milky!

I think this was a photo hall of one of the old King of Korea. Can’t remember, sorry!

Bamboo!

Yea…

After the tour we had some free time to walk around the area. Came across this nice church. Afterwards, it was time to go back to Jeonju University. But I wasn’t ready to call it a day yet…

Met up with the same Korean guys as the previous night. I bought them some soju, beer and fried chicken, and they bought us some dried octopus and 막걸리 (Korean rice wine). It was a blast! We decided to meet up again on Sunday and go to 노래방.

OKAY, so I finally took the night off from partying so I can update my blog. Day four was a pretty cool day:

My room mate.

Inside one of the classroom.

Star Center - where we have most of our classes. 

This one’s for Ben. Courts right outside the Uni. Waaaay too cold and busy to play though. Then in the afternoon we had…

Taekwondo!

The Master and my half formed smile. Like the previous day, we went out again at night time. This time to a different bar.

Our table was probably the biggest that night.

So much soju in that fridge!

Drinking hite and soju. After this point, I was too drunk to remember that I had a camera. There was a group of Koreans next to our table, and after I had a few drinks, two of my friends and I decided to go introduce ourselves for practice. As soon as we approached them and told them our names in Korean, they became really excited and started barraging us with questions in semi broken English while pouring us beer and telling us to drink. So this went on for who knows how long but I ended up with one girl’s number (mid you she has a boyfriend), and she told me to call her the next day to hang out again. AWESOMELY FUN NIGHT.

Last night was AWESOME! I’ll update later if I have the chance.

Okay, so I’m a bit drunk atm so forgive me if this post doesn’t make much sense. So we started lectures on the second day. Had the opening ceremony and the welcoming dinner on the second day. We also had a lot of free time, so I was able to scout out the neighbourhood.

The view from outside my room.

Inside the dorm lobby.

The university.

Around the uni.

An in-line skating place apparently.

First lunch!

Drawings around the uni.

Day three. First time in a Korean bar. Had fried chicken and soju.

Went to another bar afterwards. Had strawberry soju. Was pretty good.

Okay I finally got internet working in my room. So that means it’s time for photos!

At Sydney International Airport, approximately 7:30 in the morning waiting for my flight. I decided to buy a cheap point and shoot camera since my phone camera is quite bad. I also bought A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin to read on the plane.

Yup, I sat at the very back of the plane.

Korean Air’s entertainment system was AWESOME! Heaps of newly released movies, music and tv shows all for freeeeeeeee. Screen was a bit small though. I managed to watch a few movies and tried reading A Game of Thrones. But I got motion sickness so I decided to try and sleep… which never happened.

My breakfast which consisted of fried rice with bok choy, a muffin, yoghurt and some fruit. It was pretty decent. I forgot to take a photo of my lunch because I was too hungry by then (~3:00pm Australia time since Korea is 2 hours behind). We could choose between bibimbap or this beef dish. I wanted the bibimbap but it ran out =( thanks to me sitting at the very back. Nonetheless, the beef dish was quite good. They also gave us a bread roll with butter. Love it. 

I kept listening to track 3 over and over again on the flight because it’s an awesome song. The MV isn’t too bad as well with Lee Hyori in it. Check it out if you want: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3IdAgWPvxg.

Flying over Queensland.

First views of South Korea! (Sorry for the crappy quality. These were taken through the window of the plane)

First views of Daegu!

First views of Seoul!

Loopy.

Half frozen river.

A very long road across water.

A man made island off the coast of Incheon.

A very long bridge that connects Incheon to Seoul… I think.

Finally arrived at Incheon Airport. Could only take 1 photo because I was rushing around so much and tired as hell. The airport was huge and quite nice. I landed at around 5:20pm (or 7:20pm Australian time) but only got out by around 6:30pm since immigration took quite a long time. I then walked all the way to the wrong side of the airport before going back the other way and meeting some of the other teachers.

Some of the Footprints teachers I met at the airport + Mr. Scott Kim, the person in charge of Footprints in Korea. Mr. Kim was pretty cool, he told us to call him if we had any questions about anything or if we wanted to know a good place to eat or travel to. I told him that I would call him some time to go out and eat samgyupsal and drink soju.

The EPIK booth at the airport.

Finally got on the bus for the long drive (3.5 hours) to Jeonju University. This was at approximately 8:00pm (10:00pm Australian time). Since we had a medical check up the next morning, they told us not to eat anything past 10:00pm. If I had known that we weren’t going to stop over somewhere to get food, I would’ve bought something at the airport. My last meal was lunch on the plane. Also the temperature at this moment was probably in the negative.

Arrived at Jeonju University at around 11:30. This is from the entrance of my dorm room. The floors are heated which is AWESOME.

The bathroom. Nothing special. No bidet =(

The beds. Rock hard. Also got some free stuff from The Arrival Store and EPIK.

The lock on the door is so high tech and it makes cool robotic noises, lol. There’s a keypad on the other side of the lock for the password. 

So that was day 1 in South Korea. Glad everything went quite smoothly. I’ll try and update day 2 asap. I didn’t take many photos since I was too busy meeting people and frankly I just forgot I had a camera =P. Will try to do better in day 3. I promise.

Just a quick update to let you guys know that I’ve landed in Korea safely! At Jeonju University atm freezing to death and exhausted, lol. Took heaps of photos so I’ll upload them when I get the chance. Gonna sleep now, gnight!

Just a very quick update before I go to bed. As a follow up from my previous post, basically I got an interview and passed it, spent a bunch of money sending documents overseas, and all of a sudden I’ll be leaving Australia tomorrow morning to start my new life in South Korea for the next year! 

So I’ve decided to change this blog into my way of keeping my friends and family up to date with my life in Korea. I’ll try to update this frequently with lots of photos and interesting stories hopefully. As for now, I’m both scared and excited at the prospect of being independent in a country I barely know the language of. It’ll be the first time I’ll be overseas by myself! I’ll definitely miss my friends and family in Australia and hope that I don’t get too homesick too quickly. I know I won’t be able to sleep much tonight, but I better try. Next time I update will be from Korea. Scary.

Just submitted my application to EPIK… Hope I get an interview!