Greetings From Korea!

Well, it's been a rough couple of days, but here we are in Chuncheon, South Korea! On Tuesday, February 2, we drove down to Chicago to have our interviews at the Korean Consulate. We stayed with my dad's cousin Skye in Naperville, who graciously let us crash so we wouldn't have to find a hotel in Chicago. We were asked questions like What do you know about Korea? and Why do you think you will be a good teacher? and then were sent on our way. We drove back that same day (Wednesday) and then went back on Friday to pick up our work visas.

Saturday we got to the airport with our cat, Gizmo, and flew to Seoul. It was a long 14 hour flight worrying about Gizmo in cargo. We managed to get a little shut-eye before landing and then picked up our luggage and found an angry, but very much alive Gizmo waiting for us. We went through animal quarantine where an inspector barely looked at Gizmo and boarded a bus to Chuncheon. It was 2 and a half hours and again nerve-wracking worrying about Gizmo in the luggage compartments. Koreans definitely don't seem to care about animals the way Americans do. Especially cats, no one seems to like cats here.

The director of the school picked us up at the bus station and it took two cars to get all of our stuff to our apartment. We will post pictures soon, but for now I will give a brief description. There is an entry with a kitchen in one room, the main room with two twin beds and a tv, the refridgerator and a small table with two chairs. We have a decent sized closet and a small bathroom. There is no shower in the bathroom, just a nozzle coming out of the wall, so everything gets wet when we shower. Finally, there is a porch-like area with a washing machine. This is the only room with windows, so we will definitely try to utilize this area when it becomes warmer.

We definitely weren't prepared for our sleeping arrangements. We have two twin beds which are completely useless as they are 1) as hard as the laminate floor, and 2) have no bedding. We brought a set of queen sheets, which definitely don't fit. Right now we are using only one of the beds since the sheets don't fit over both. Both Michael and I are suffering some jet lag. Michael is asleep right now, even though it is only 10 pm. Last night we went to bed around 10 because we were exhausted, but neither one of us slept. A combination of being cold from no blanket, having to sleep on a hard as rock mattress, and getting used to a new environment kept us from sleeping more than an hour at a time.

The director picked us up at 9:30 and we went to school. The school appears to be very nice. It has several classrooms, a teacher's room/lounge and a conference room. We are in kind of an odd situation right now because there is only one other foreign teacher here at the moment (who is leaving in two weeks) so we had to start teaching some classes right away. I taught two classes and Michael taught three. We had a Korean teacher with us to guide us through, but we had to come up with almost all of the material on our own. We were lucky to be able to shadow the other foreign teacher for all of his classes too, so hopefully we will pick this up pretty fast.

Classes go from 3-8:25 pm on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and we each only have a couple of classes Tuesday and Thursday. So on our long days we are at school from about 2 to 8:30. Not bad, huh? Today was pretty brutal because we put in an 11 hour day but I'm sure we will get used to the hectic 6 class schedule eventually. Tonight, the director helped us get hooked up to the internet. We don't have adapters yet, so we will need to get those soon if I am going to keep up with updates. Hopefully tomorrow we have time to get some apartment stuff before we have to be at the school.