My First Month In Korea

-I should start off by saying I am going to try to update this blog at least once a week so that I can talk about things more in detail. Since starting school I have been super busy I have not had time to write, so sorry this post mentions a lot of things without going into detail!-

Warning: super long blog post ahead:

It has somehow been one month since I landed in Busan, and I have now finished my second full week of teaching 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade at Dongcheon Elementary in Namgu. Last week started off with PowerPoint introductions where I showed my students pictures of my family, my friends, and my home, and told them about myself. After they learned a bit about me they would ask me the same 3 questions: "Do you have a boyfriend", "How old are you?", and "Why Korea?". It got to the point where the boyfriend question was so popular that my co-teacher would just ignore it and move on.

I have two co teachers at my school; Soojin teaches the 5th and 6th and Sunny teaches 3rd and 4th. Sunny is hilarious and a joy to work with as will hopefully become a good friend during my time here, Soojin is on the shy side but is friendly and just wonderful at teaching and controlling my 5th and 6th graders when they decide to not listen to me. Both have their own ways of teaching, lesson planning, and speaking English, which honestly makes planning a bit hectic for me but they are both nice women who are very good at their jobs.

On my first day I realized that most of the children at my school do not know much English. I guess I naively thought they would know at least know a little, but wow was I wrong. My 6th graders do know a bit, but the other students sometimes look at me like I have 2 heads when I ask them questions in English, and then immediately look to my co teacher for a translation. I am hoping that with some work we can get them to retain the language more than they have in the past, and hopefully not need so many translations. But I should mention that even though my students don't always understand me, they still scream "Marisa Teacher!" when I walk down the hallway and say hello which is cute and a good start to using English.

So apart from teaching I have been doing a bit of exploring. I have been using the subway system here which seems a lot more intimidating than it actually is, but have not braved the buses yet cause rumor has it they're just as intimidating as they seem. I have found different areas close to mine that I like. I've discovered a few food places that I enjoy going to (god bless this amazing Indian restaurant that does take away), a place that has ramen for ₩3,000, and a Starbucks that has the only Chai Tea around. I also was able to finally see Black Panther and holy crap was it good and really fun to see my new home in the movie as well (if you haven't seen the film yet- part of the movie was filmed here in Busan, not too far away from where I live!).

So at risk of this becoming too too long, here are a list of things I've discovered/realized about Korea in the past few weeks:

1. People do not have the right of way on the roads here- cars do. Which often makes my half hour walk to school scary since I forget and will try to walk when I am not supposed to. Also going along with this, the delivery motorbikes/ vespas will occasionally drive on the sidewalks so it's just another thing to look out for.

2. You can get just about any kind of food delivered here: noodles, fried chicken, pizza, and most importantly McDonalds.

3. Korea is all hills. I fully expect to be super fit by the time I leave just from walking around.

4. Food here is good, but very different than home which is obviously expected. But also I have never eaten this much rice in my life. Again, glad there are so many hills I have to walk up here since I probably eat half a cup of rice a day at school. Also, 번데기 (silkworm pupae) is common to see at street markets and served as an appetizer at a fun restaurant named "Tony's" where they sell lots of traditional Korean food.

5. If you tell people you don't speak Korean they will say "Okay" and then continue to talk at you in Korean, I've become good at nodding and pretending I know what people are saying.

6. All my studying the Korean language and the classes did not do much. My Korean is horrendous and I need to start working on it or else I'm gonna be stuck ordering the same kind of coffee for the next year.

Cheesy Pajeon and makgeolli at Tony's

Alright, this post is getting too long, and much has happened in the past few weeks that if I wrote it all in this post it would be way too long and I wont do that to you. So, I will try to write another post this week about my school, my students, and the area I'm living in.

I'll be back with more soon! (I promise!)