The First Day(s) in South Korea

I have been here for 9 months now, but when I arrived in South Korea I obviously had a lot of thoughts and responses to moving across the globe. See below for the first few days...

Finally! After 600 years of applying for positions, sorting out visas, figuring out what to pack and making regular sacrificial offerings to the gods of bureaucracy (oh my god first time in my life I’ve spelt that right in one try)- I’m living in Seoul. Huzzah! I’m here to teach English in a hagwon, and am living in a lovely area with a lot more going on than I thought from my first Google. To quickly rifle through some FAQs (because I’ve gone over this all so many times in my head, I forget that other people haven’t):

· A Hagwon is a privately-run academy, and the one I’m working at is an academy for English (like a lot are). This means it is essentially a business selling classes, and is not run/regulated by the government in any way. This has its upsides and downsides, as you might expect.

· The hagwon/school is a 20 minute walk from my accommodation, which was (as is common) provided by the school itself.

· I’m living in Sangam-dong (if you need to laugh at ‘dong’, do it quietly now: it just means neighbourhood) in Mapo. It’s in the Western part of Seoul, just above the Han River. Kind of like where Hammersmith is in London.

· My flat is essentially a room with an attached wet room. I have a kitchen in the sense that I have a stove and a sink, but it ain’t much more than that. And I can see both from my bed. That’s fine though- it’s certainly hard to lose stuff here.

· My hours are roughly 14:00-20:00 each day (win) and the kids I teach are between 6 and 16 as far as I can tell.

· Yes I’m teaching English. I have no other skills apart from a great memory for useless trivia. Until they make the visa for that, English it is.

· Yes everyone is being nice to me and I’m eating don’t worry (that one’s mainly for my Mum).

I arrived here on Monday after leaving the UK late Sunday, and have been here for 4 days. A quick run-down of what I’ve done:

Monday: Arrived at 16:00ish. Boss picked me up and drove me to my new flat, showed me the basics, then took me out for snacks. Nearly wrote snakes. She didn’t take me out for snakes. Then I went to a big supermarket called Homeplus to get some immediate essentials I didn’t have (towels and soap) so I could cleanse myself.

Tuesday: As is customary with jet lag, it makes you tired and also unable to sleep at literally anytime that is useful. So I fell asleep at about 3am Tuesday morning, regardless of having had fantasies consisting of falling into plump bedding for most of the day. I am light sleeper, and so was in and out of sleep until literally 17:00 when I thought I should probably move. Went to Homeplus, got some more essentials, including a kitchen bin. Except when I got back, I discovered I’d taken back just the packaging for said bin, and nothing more. Damn. I then explored the immediate area around me (there are loads of restaurants) and ended up having a meal of chicken and chips in the intriguingly named “Chicken Bus”. Came back, bimbled, and failed to get to sleep until 7AM. Hahahahaha fun.

Wednesday: Woke up at 13:30 (due to aforementioned late bed time), gathered myself together and headed to Hongdae to meet my lovely friend Oonie. This is when I remembered how labyrinthine Seoul subway stations can be: a significant part of your journey can be taken up with finding the arsing platform. The trains are cleaner, comfier and more reliable though, so swings and roundabouts. Oonie and I wondered around Hongdae, eating at a restaurant that served the Japanese ‘Omu’, which is essentially a fuck-off fluffy omelette that they put on top of another, completely unrelated meal. We had one on top of risotto, also topped with pollock roe (?!) and another on top of a carbonara. My Italian friends would have had an aneurism, but it was all delicious. Slightly challenging with the chopsticks, but I’m not a lil bitch so I persevered. We then wondered around the main street in Hongdae, famous for bright lights and street performers (often dancers doing k-pop covers), bought new bags (my old one finally completely broke, after hinting strongly that it would do so for about a year) and ate in a ridiculously cute café covered with flowers. Oh, and we took selfies in a photo booth. Came back to the flat/room (floom?) and discovered I can make the shower in the wet room a bearable temperature if I operate the tap incredibly delicately, only touch the shower head from a certain angle and say an incantation to the God Anubis. JK but not much.

Thursday/today: again sleep is still a bit of a fight. Was planning to go to Homeplus before my first day of training, but I was too exhausted and so woke up late with just enough time to get ready and go to meet my boss. She drove me up to the hagwon where I’ll work, introduced me to the staff (in that way that people do where you take in pretty much none of it and hope to God no one questions you) and left me to watch two lessons with the guy (and thus the classes) I’m taking over from. It happily all seems easy enough so far, and he mostly had good stuff to say about the job (easy, good hours, you don’t need to take it home etc). It was a smidge awkward as he didn’t actually want to leave his position, the school just sort of decided it, so he was a bit miffed, though not at all at me. And it meant he was happy to give pointers on the not so good stuff too (mainly lack of communication, slightly odd practises regarding the bureaucracy) which is really helpful. After that I found a salad to eat on the way back, then headed off to Homeplus once more (I legit think I might get a member’s card, as I know I’ll be visiting at LEAST two more times) to actually get the bin I’d bought to start with. For dinner, I went out into the local restaurants again, eventually settling on a place that I picked entirely due to working out that it did chicken. I was pretty out of my depth in this place- there were no other customers, and the only staff was one older guy who spoke no English. There were only four set menu options (restaurants in Korea tend to serve variations on one dish/type of food, rather than the wide range you see in the West. For example it might be an octopus-based restaurant, selling three or four slightly different octopus dishes….aaaaand that’s it) of which I kind of panicked and picked the cheapest. I’d hoped it would just be plates of food but alas, the stove on the table top came out and a pot of things was placed on it pretty swiftly. This pot of things was delicious, but a) the guy gave a lot of instructions on how to prep the dish before eating: I understood none of them (I think he got annoyed pretty quickly) and b) it was effectively a kind of stew with noodles, Korean rice cakes, veg and chicken chunks. Operating moving this food from big pot, to serving plates, to my mouth, was horrendously messy. All over my trousers and the table. He gave me wipes and a dishcloth, and probably thought I had coordination issues. It was also pretty darn hot, both spice and temperature wise, which only made me look more elegant. I ate fairly quickly, vamoosed, stopped by a cornershop, then came back here to try and work my new WiFi router, which of course needs another component I wasn’t sold in the box. Amazing. Guess where I’ll probably go to get this component.

This is, of course, not the most exciting of beginnings to read about, but I hope it gives a sense of what I’ve been up to. One of the things most prominently in my mind is just how much more gubbins I need to buy for my floom, including nearly all kitchen utensils, a kettle, a little mini-oven, a hair dryer and a chest of drawers. I’ll leave off the last one for a few weeks- let’s not go mad here, I’m not Louis the bloody Sixteenth. And of course I have actual work to start doing: like anything it will take a while to get my head around, but the vibe I got from today was that this will be easy enough to do. Here’s hoping! And honestly, the thing that has amazed me the most about my time here so far is my mental state, in that I’m coping perfectly well and have been this entire time. Most people who know me know I actually tried teaching abroad before, in Italy, and hated the whole thing so much that I quit after a month and came back to the UK. When I went that time, I was miserable from the moment I left my parents at the airport, and basically had a prolonged break-down type thing for the next few weeks, feeling mentally shitter than I ever have before. It was proper bants. Maybe I’ll write about it in full some time so you can all read something cheery. That experience looms so large in my brain that I was fully geared up to go through the motions again when here, and hopefully just ride the storm out like I couldn’t last time. I was ready to feel awful, scared and alone- and I haven’t. Not yet at least. Of course I miss my family, friends and home life, I always will, and I cried when I had to hug my tearful parents goodbye. I hate seeing my Mum cry, and I’ll never be OK being the cause in whatever way. But after drying my tears, getting on the flight and arriving, I’ve been pleasantly, err, pleasant. In Italy, I cried (and when I say cry, I mean full melodrama sobs) on all except 2 days. I haven’t cried once here, or even close. I think it’s working, I think it’s going to work, and I think I’m happy.

I’ll keep you posted.