Korea Ketchup

Us at a Samsung Lions baseball game in Daegu

In honor of our two month anniversary of leaving the states, I thought I’d treat you all to a blog post. But where to begin? If you’re at all familiar with the brutal EPIK application process Jamie and I went through, you’ll be happy to know that we did not end up in the middle of no where. We live in a suburb of Daegu, the third largest city in South Korea, called Chilgok. It is about a 40 minute bus ride away from the city. It is quite a large suburb however, and has all the necessities and a substantial downtown full of restaurants, cafes, phone shops, even batting cages. It has been difficult to find other foreigners in Chilgok, though we do know they exist as every public school is now required to have at least one native English teacher in addition to hagwon, or private academy, teachers (bringing the grand total of native English teachers in Korea to over 43,000).

We have two studio apartments that are about 7 minutes walking from eachother and 2 minutes walking to our respective schools. Jamie’s apartment is in a newish building and is very clean and nice looking in a feminine kind of way (wallpaper with huge roses, pink detailing, etc), but quite small. My apartment is bigger, but was quite dirty when I moved in and there is a serious lack of natural light. Both are completely manageable and I’ve definitely lived in worse, but it’d be nice to have one place we could share.


Jamie's apartment

my apartment
Our rice cooker

Jamie and I both teach grades 3-6 and have three co-teachers, two female and one male. My co teachers are between the ages of 28 and 35 and speak really good English. Jamie’s are…older and speak varying levels of English. In fact two of them are currently in the hospital so he has had complete control of the 5th and 6th grade classes for the past few weeks. My classes are about 50/50 with my co-teachers. There are usually 3 sections to each class so we divide them accordingly. The system seems to be working well. The students are great and really excited to have us here. They love saying hi to us in the hallways and are delighted when they see us outside of school, which they often do since we live so close to school. That said, I find the job challenging. Yes the children are under control discipline wise and they are speaking the phrases we tell them to, but I wonder how effective my presence really is. Anyway Korea has decided we’re worth our weight, which is great, because we are making excellent money.

So far we have had one break which we spent in Japan with our friends Jackie and Zach, who are teaching in Ulsan. We flew from Busan to Fukoaka, took the train to Hiroshima, then Osaka, Kyoto, and finally Nygoya. I will post about this later on, maybe with pictures..