Hello Korea! How can life be unfun with a panda hat ?

New adventures normally start in a whirl. This happens that happens, you are trying to find your feet and your feet are running away at some colossal speed beneath you with your body only barely hanging on. This adventure whirl was no different.

I suppose I figured that, even though Koreans spoke Korean and also had a different alphabet from me, there are so many English teachers here that everyone would know how to speak English. In fact my worry was that when I arrived I would have nothing to teach them as they had been learning the language since babyhood and would know the rules of English better than I could ever dream of.

Well, of course, I was wrong. Korea is the weirdest, strangest, out of my world country I have ever been to. At least when traveling north of South Africa and being the only white face for miles I can at least recognise what kind of food is being sold on the street. Meat, potatoes, koeksisters. It all makes sense. Here it is an abyss of the unknown.

I would love to expound on all they do for pages but I will attempt a little account of what has happened in the last 11 days and a few impressions. SO many impressions, there are so many things that people can do differently, and I am so used to my way that I have always presumed it to be the only way when really, ways in which to do things are seemingly endless.

I arrived in Korea at 4.30pm to be greeted by a man with a sign with my name on it. I’ve always wanted someone to greet me at an airport with fancy sign but it wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds. He couldn’t speak English, and after some hand signals I realized I was to sit tight for 2 hours until my bus came. So I waited looking around at all the faces around me, at the signs in funny writing, at the weird sport they were playing on the tv. I then took a bus to Pohang (where I now live) and got in at midnight where my Supervisor met me and took me to my apartment (a room with a kitchen and bathroom attached) and she said “See you on Monday”. It was Wednesday and I was alone in a strange country with no plan and no understanding of anything around me.

So I wrote a to do list for the next day that read: Kettle

Pot

Internet

Phone

Food

Bin

Hairbrush

Well I got a kettle and a pot and some bananas. I walked out of my house and found a book shop that said “book shop” happily in English. So I went inside to find ALL the English books that I figured was advertised by the sign being in English. Well these English books didn’t actually exist but the books store man seemed to take a liking to me and leant me his computer and then pointed me to the supermarket across the road which he followed me to and further, followed me down all the aisles. All I could find that looked somewhat normal was some bananas, a weird roll thing in a packet (loaf of bread? Does that exist?) and a mountain dew. He happily paid for my purchases and I went back to his shop to eat a banana with him and then continued on my way.

So with food kind of out of the way, I entered an electronic store and asked for a phone. Again no one spoke English so the store man kindly opened a google translate page on his computer and we typed a pretty hilarious conversation on google chat. Well. It doesn’t work. We said all sorts of things about phone and contract and how I didn’t want a contract but he kept on harping about a contract. And we kept on nodding and smiling and when I realized nothing was going to happen without my Korean resident card he said “I have no foreign friend. Will you be my friend?” This I actually understood and I agreed but luckily I wasn’t lying when I said I had no phone number.

So, tired of being misunderstood, I decided it was time to leave Pohang and go back to Seoul which I had come from 2 nights before and spend time with a friend that I had there and we could speak English and lament about how weird and confusing the world was together (which is way more fun than doing it alone). So after many public phones not working and phone numbers wrongly written down I jumped on a bus back to Seoul and found some friendly faces on the other side (after figuring out the mad and very intricate subway system of Seoul). I was SO happy to speak English again, my friend Shaun who I have known since early high school took me to a market which was full of Korean food (the smell of fish strong and rather off-putting everywhere and cutesy Korean clothes like animal hats and amazing fun socks and people shouting and music and smells and just madness. I was kind of hungry but buying food was so hard as I didn’t recognize what people were selling and when I DID realize what it was I wasn’t so enticed(things like dried squid chips and cabbage and deepfried sausage on a stick)

I found a motel that night and the next day Shaun and I made our way to a ski resort for a little frolic in the slopes. The snow was terrible, it was all machine made and on the other side of the mountain it was all brown and devoid of snow. We were skiing on ice and I was frightened to try anything too fancy (as fancy as I can be) but yes, of course, it was fun. 2 days in Korea and already I’m snowboarding! Although it wasn’t really what I call snowboarding. There were only 3 runs really and between the runs there was no snow so it was difficult to get too much into the authenticity of the environment. But I love a new experience and I loved the, once again, out of my normal world experience.

So after the resort was closed we decided to summon the courage to eat some Korean food and on the way to the restaurant we saw a group of people sitting around a cake digging into it with chopsticks. Well, this was a really strange sight but on thinking about it this idea really struck me as so intelligent- I mean you normally get too big a slice of cake, or too little a slice of cake resulting in being overfull or underfed. How intelligent, eating exactly the amount of cake that is right for you in a social environment (I am definitely doing this on my birthday). So we went on to our own supper where we just pointed at some unknown Korean word which resulted in some rice and a weird tofu soup thing (watery Korean soup, not my favourite) and some weird cabbage that looks like it’s drenched in blood called gimchi. Apparently this is something Koreans eat with every meal and sometimes I ask my students more often than necessary what they have for breakfast because they DO say gimchi and rice (for breakfast? Really?)

The next night was New years and we met up with some friends of Shaun in this party place in Seoul which is full of American soldiers. I was so excited when I saw “cheese fries” on the menu and ordered that only to realize that, once again, cheese isn’t really cheese in America, it is plastic gooey liquid cheese and though disappointing I was happy to eat something that made some sort of sense to me. After a few drinks and revelry we went on to some other place on the subway and had an amazing Korean meal. We were with two people who have been Korea for a while and thus know what is safe to ingest and they bought a whole bunch of communal food (salads and stews and soups) for 5 people that came to the equivalent of 28 dollars. Madly cheap for the feast we had. I wish I could describe how weird the food is but I don’t even know what I’m eating most of the time. Anyway we then went onwards to a mad Korean bar where we danced into the new year and at 6am we left and I made my way to my bus back to Pohang at 7am and fell asleep and woke up, 5 hours later in Pohang (they have reclining seats and foot rests and the journey only costs R140.)

Well after all this fun I hadn’t really had time to think of the gravity of my situation. That I had just committed to living in a strange country for a year, I don’t have any friends in my town and I wasn’t so sure if I even liked this place. I spent Sunday in a huge downward spiral of thinking I had possibly made the worst flash decision in my life and the repercussions that follow are a lot longer than I have ever had to deal with before.

So I woke up the next day and entered my school expecting about a week of training but instead I was given my schedule and told I was teaching in 30 minutes. After a rather depressing New Year’s Day this news almost brought me to tears. But after a bit of a firm talking to myself about just being brave and that it’s just teaching children, I went into my classes unprepared bu it turned out alright.However, the next day, I hurtled back down to outer freak out mode as on Tuesday’s I go to another school 30 minutes away and have 7 hours straight conversation class. When I got home at 9pm I was trying to figure out ways to get out of my contract and then I had to, once again tell myself that I need to give things a chance before I go into sincere panic mode.

Not only was teaching a deep fear but also, where I live is quite ugly. There are lots filled with litter, the buildings reach sky high and all the grass is yellow and the trees are bare. But I am assured that this is simply the heart of winter and it gets better .For when I go on my journey to the other school I teach at we drive past some rather large pretty mountain-hill things and along a very beautiful ocean.

However, as the week continued I realized that in fact things are going to be ok. My coworker, Tiffany, invited me to dinner on Friday and after a meal of sitting on cushions on the floor and sharing a big pan filled with yummy stew (they cook it right on your table in front of you) with lots of interesting nutty cabbagey salady things on the side. And afterwards we went on to an English club where Koreans and English people come together to talk English. It was actually really fun, we have discussion topics and afterwards it turns into a bit of party with wine and some sort of dancing.

So my weekend continued in a social aspect with discovering amazingly that a friend of mine from Cape Town is in Pohang right now and we had a great catch up session and ate some waffles and icecream from a street vendor and I bought some amazing fluffy socks with coloufrul hearts on them and a fluffy top with a sheep on it so in fact I AM a sheep when I wear it. There are so many amazing fun clothes to buy here and the socks are to die for. I have actually landed in the center of sock heaven.

So with a bit of social fun and realizing that teaching is actually quite fun and I will be ok I am quite happy to be here. I’m still rather culture shocked and over awed by everything but I’m so excited to learn and experience more Asian madness as the days go by.