The first three weeks

I should have started this a while ago but life has been a little bit more hectic that usual. I moved to Korea July 31st so I have been here for three weeks and I still know almost nothing about this place. I have done a little site seeing and shopping and a very small amount of Korean language study. Mostly I have just worked. I work about 40-50 hours a week depending on the demand. I like my job, but it can get a little monotonous depending on the student. Normally it is pretty good though. Being a vegetarian is complicating the situation, but I am determined to learn how to use my Korean rice maker (even though I have never used an American one)

The flight over was very interesting. John and I brought our two cats with us on the plan and I was terrified that the cats would: get loose, crap all over the place, cry the whole time, or just plain die. Happily none of those situations happened! The kitties were perfectly happy and handled it all very well.

Here are two pictures of the kitties coping in their little cages. I think they did way better than I expected them to do. I am really quite proud of them.

I took the kitties to the bathroom about once every 3-4 hours and finally Chance went, but Leeloo never went, I don't see how she could have held it for that long! When we got to the airport in Seoul we had to go through customs, which took about 2 min, and then to quarantine where we just showed our papers, and not our cats, and walked on out to Seoul. Well Actually we walked out on to Incheon, which is an island about an hour away from Seoul. It was a rather long car ride to our temporary apt, so it will be interesting when we finally get some visitors, I don't really know how we will travel home, but I'm sure we will figure something out.

Well we went to our apartment, and then we were showed where the subway is, and basically how to use it so we could get to work tomorrow.

The next week we did some training with several teachers. We watched their class and thought about how we wanted to start teaching right now. Then on Thursday (8/3) we went home hunting. We must have seen 10 apartments and they were all sub par. I just didn't want to live some place I was going to hate for the next year. Well when we were sitting in the realtor's offices trying to decide our recruiter (who was with us at the time and was such an awesome help) got a call about another apartment that a landlord wanted to show us. The place was just down the street so we walked to meet the landlady. She was really nice, and so was the place. 750,000 won a month, and with our stipend from our job it actually comes to 400,000 won a month. You really cant beat that.

I absolutely love this place. I know it isn't really big, but for what we need I think the size is great. It is also really easy to keep a place like this clean. Its got really nice windows and the laundry room is really cool. We don't have a nice view or anything, but very few places do, unless you live on a high-rise building. We are only on the second floor, which I like.

We've done a bunch of exploring since we got here, nowhere near enough though. We took a bus tour of Seoul, it wasn't amazing since most of it was in Korea, only small portions were translated. We walked around city hall and saw the outside of one of the palaces. We didn't go inside since the line was extremely long. We have some photos of these excursions online.

Tour bus
Palace and city hall
Our apartment
Our temporary apartment and surrounding area
More from the flight over
The office we work at

Well thats no where near to everything that has happened since we got here... I didn't even mention the time they put mayo on our pizza, or the time we got lost looking for HSBC, or anything about what soju tastes like. So there is much more, but I just wanted to start this thing up so I can hand out a URL you can watch. I plan to update this several times a week, but I don't have my own camera yet, so I don't think my posts will be this colorful for a short while... I get paid September 10th, so maybe I will get a cute phone then :)

I the meantime, I love you all, and you are all invited to pop in for a visit!