One down Eleven to go

I can’t believe I have already been here for a month and away from home for 9 weeks! I feel like I just stepped off the plane and only my first day in the classroom. After a month I feel obligated to do some reflecting on my new life in Korea. Overall, if you couldn’t already tell I am having a blast. My life is busier then I had imagined, less lonely then I had anticipated and definitely not as scary as I had feared. One of my biggest hesitations before signing a years teaching contract was the forty hour workweek. I wasn’t looking forward to joining the 9 to 5 Monday to Friday crowd, that I had been avoiding ever since graduation but I have to say, it’s not that bad. Maybe it’s my light workload or my early bedtime but I wake up on time, for the most part and the weekdays seem to fly by.
Day to day life in Korea is going smoothly, I finally started running into some of the other English teachers that live in or near my building. I am excited to have some contacts in my area but worried in might interfere with my new 10:30 bedtime. I haven’t really ventured out too much in my neighborhood due to the lack of my Korean language skills and the frigid temperatures. I have yet to even master Hello, you would think after four weeks and hundreds of encounters I would be able to say “Annyeong haseyo” but it’s about three syllables to long. This was especially annoying when the phone in my classroom would not stop ringing yesterday. I picked up the first five times only to realize it was going to be a very short conversation, seeing how I didn’t understand a single word they were saying or vice versa. It felt very rude hanging up on someone after about 3 seconds but we were clearly not getting anywhere. Then I had to uncomfortably spend the rest of the afternoon pretending that my phone wasn’t ringing. So my Korean is a work in progress and one of the many goals I’ve set for myself in the next year.
I hate that I like Korean food so much. I was under the impression I would come to Asia and lose weight. I guess I am still in that “I’m on vacation” mode and “I’ve never had that, I have to try it!” So I have been trying every fried pastry waffle street food thing I see and I have fallen in love with several sweet snacks from the convenience stores (Korea loves 7-11 just as much as Thailand). I eat lunch at school everyday, which is hit or miss. Sometimes there are plenty of veggies dishes and other days its just rice and kimchi for me, which is fine by me when the main meat dish is DOG (no joke!) or chewy octopus! I mostly cook dinner at home, the grocery store is at the bottom of my building and I buy my fruits and veggies at the little street stands. It’s hard to go out to eat when you cant read Hongul (Korean) or verbally express anything. I have a hard enough time at the grocery store trying to play pictionary with every product, hoping I am buying what looks like soy sauce but not sure because they have an entire isle dedicated to bottles that all look like soy sauce.