Hello Family and Friends!
We made it to Korea! We arrived late Tuesday night and were warmly greeted by our bosses and wonderful new friend Natalie (also a Bethel grad, and the one who got us the job!). We got to our place and unpacked a little... slept for a few hours and awoke to 5am jet lag!
1st day of teaching was at Dong-Pyoeng Elementary School, a 5 minute walk from our apartment. It was an unusual day as we were settling in, meeting many new people, and thrown into the teaching arena! Wednesdays are different than the rest of my week as I only have 2 classes and they are 2 hours long, I think I will get to know these students by far the best since all other days we only see our students for 40 minutes.
The students are, for the most part, pretty excited to meet us and are interested in hearing about who we are. Some students ask about Kyle's "yellow" hair and one asked if I was Korean... this is just an example of how homogeneous it is here. If someone is not Korean, I can pretty much assume they are either also here to teach English or possibly that they are in the U.S. Army.
The kids are cute though, curious, and very rambunctious! Kyle and I have taught 3 days already and feel like we are starting to understand more about what the expectations of us are and how to teach well. We have felt small feelings of success everyday which is great :).
Here are some details about where we live!: We live in Daegu, a city that is in the southeastern part of South Korea. It is the 4th largest city and is in Gyeongsangbuk-do province. We, more specifically, live in the neighborhood of Chilgok- about a 30 min. busride northwest of downtown Daegu. Our apartment is right next to the river. Chilgok is more quiet and slow than downtown- it has been fun to explore, but there have been definite language barriers as there are few people here who speak English and unfortunately our Korean has not gotten past a few words!
Our apartment is nice- it has a kitchen with a stovetop, a small laundry area, one bedroom, one office, and a bathroom. We are starting to make it more home-like, and our neighbor is our landlord who is the sweetest old woman ever! (She just brought us a bunch of bananas!... along with the breakfast she made us the first morning and the chinese food she ordered on Friday night, and the energy drinks she keeps bringing over when we have guests.!)
This weekend we explored a downtown with our friends Natalie and Micaela, we met Kalie downtown too and went to a Mexican restaurant owned by a Canadian then got to see a little bit of the drunk foreigner scene. Kyle and I went off on our own most of the weekend- shopping for things for our home and we went to a flee market in the subway.
Overall, this has started off as a great adventure! We are happy we decided to come and think we will enjoy our jobs and the people!
Thank you for all of your support- more updates and pictures to come!
Love,
Shana
Things I miss the most: being able to read "hypo-allergetic", a soft bed, my family and friends.
