You just don’t know how happy I am. I’m connected to the world again!

Greetings from Daejeon, South Korea!

I am currently sitting at a Paris Baguette, a bakery chain, near my apartment in Daejeon, South Korea. As of now, I still have no internet, but that will soon change.

I have been in South Korea officially one month and two days. Within this time, I’ve met a ton of awesome people, have a possible love interest…well maybe two, nearly got hit by cars so many times that I have lost count, had a few teaching fails and triumphs, gotten abducted (nicely) by a few members of the “Church of God” and escaped being baptized into the church, gotten lost in Home Plus for a few hours, and went to Seoul to see a friend I haven’t seen in 11 years.  There has been many more adventures that I haven’t listed. Sometime soon, I will sit down to write and make videos about my journey here so far.

What I can say is that within these 30 days, I felt so much growth. I’ve opened up so much, which is something I found hard to do back at home. I think it’s something that you can’t help doing. In Korea, you have to go with the flow of things. It’s definitely different in a good number of aspects than in the U.S., so there are a lot of opportunities for (mis)adventures. Those opportunities can sometime seem like  pain-in-the-ass inconveniences, but if you look at them like that all of the time, you won’t make it here.

So if you do plan on coming to live in South Korea for a year, take heed in what I say: “La vida es como la espuma, por eso hay que darse como el mar.” I’m sure some of you know where I got that from. Here’s what it’s translated in the subtitles “Life is life the surf. So give yourself away like the sea.”  Yes, it’s from Y Tu Mamá También. I’ve always liked that line, and I find it to be true in this situation. You must be able to take the ebb and flow of things here. If you get caught up in the differences, then you simply won’t make it. So take each sharp turn as an opportunity to make your experience that much greater.

Actually, take this advice and apply it to your life regardless of whether you’re living abroad or living at home. It’ll make the hard things in like a little more tolerable.

That’s all for now. Hopefully, the next time I write, I’ll have internet in my place :)

I received my passport back to day from the Korean Consulate. My journey is on!

I realized that I have been incredibly calm. It will be the first time that I’ve ever been away from my family at all. It’ll be the first time that I’ve lived on my own. Now I’m about to move to a country of which I have no friends and barely know how to speak the language. When I told my co-workers and friends about teaching in Korea, they all ask, “Aren’t you scared? I’d be freaked out.” I don’t feel nervous or any sense of fear. Maybe it’s because I really wanted this challenge.

I wanted to do this to find myself again. The last two years of high school was hell for me because of deep internal issues. I was deeply troubled by somethings that happened in my past, and I simply suppressed my feelings about them. When the people that caused this pain appeared back into my life, I ended up experiencing a mental implosion. It affected me so much so, that I couldn’t recognize myself anymore. I had no faith in my abilities, no confidence. I felt like a shell of my former self. It affected everything. It took me nearly six years to feel somewhat like myself again, but I still feel like something is missing from me. I don’t really know what it is. What I’m hoping to gain from this experience is to try regain the balance in my life that I once had, to accept myself fully, and to trust in my abilities to adapt to the circumstances in this journey of life.

In short, I am not worried about what challenges I am to face on my trip to South Korea because I welcome them.

For the past few months I’ve been sending documents back and forth, here and there, to different people. I’ve gotten farther than I did last time. I’m excited!!!! I’m going to start again working on my travel blog. I’m debating on whether I should make one on Blogger or on Wordpress. Decisions, decisions.

• O.K. I am so damn tired of this checkpoint (exam). It has seriously took me four days to do. Apparently, I’m not the only one who has had trouble with it because I have been finding a number of forums where people were asking others to help them out on the questions. I am not about to redo this checkpoint over again, so I’m trying to give thorough and correct answers, but I’m over this shit. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to get my ass up early and finish the last few questions I have and submit it. I’m also going to call them and ask from a letter of enrollment.
• Which leads me to point out that…I PASSED MY INTERVIEW WITH EPIK!!! Yay!!! So now it’s about getting my paperwork in. Of course I have to wait for my FBI criminal background check to come. I hope it will come really soon. And again, I’ll need a letter of enrollment from the director of my TEFL program. I sent the copy of my B.A. degree to get an apostille certificate today, so I should get that back sometime next week.
• I’ve been working on making a wordpress blog about my stay in S. Korea (if all goes well and I do actually get to go). I’m going to still post here, but I think wordpress would be a better fit since I could organize my content a little better on there.

I just finished having my interview. I think it went well, and the questions asked were exactly the ones I figured they would ask me. I was pretty prepared, but I feel like a rambled a bit. I just tired to be myself, to not speak too quickly, and to show how enthusiastic I was about the prospects of teaching in South Korea. However, I realized in retrospect that I didn’t actually talk much about what I learned about South Korea. I told her how I became interested in the culture almost 10 years ago and wanted to get to know the culture on a more intimate level. In 2 to 3 days time I will see if EPIK accepted me or not.

I had a jolt of reality today when I found out that EPIK is now accepting applications. I sent an application to Korvia (a recruiting agency) about a couple of months ago, but I haven’t heard anything from them so I’m going to give them a call on Monday to make sure they have my application. If not, I’ll just apply to GEPIK or EPIK directly. In the mean time, I need to work on my cover letter and personal essay, get my passport photos, get my FBI background check and a ton of other things.

The biggest thing I’m doing is working on getting my TEFL certification. I’m doing it online because I couldn’t afford to take actual classes. It’s a good thing I took a Teaching Academy class in high school. The TEFL course is more of a refresher for me than anything else. The English grammar portion is also a refresher. Because of my past experiences with editing for writing classes as well as editing newsletters at my previous job, I was  beaten in the head with a grammatical rule book.  Today, I finished two modules and I hope to finish two more tomorrow.

I think now is officially the no turning back point of Operation Getting Employed in South Korea since I’ve invested a nice chunk of change to this endeavor.

I signed up to Korvia Recruting Service today, meaning that I’ve taken the first step towards getting a teaching job in South Korea. I’ve been working on gathering all of the documents I need and I still have a lot of things to do. I hope that the weather here stays clear. This winter has been erratic, one day we’re snowed in and the next it’s spring time.

So I talked with my mom today about going to teach ESL in South Korea for a year before going to grad school, which I thought would be really hard. I didn’t want to just up and do it without her blessing because I know how it’s going to be difficult for my folks to let me go like. I’ve never been away from home. However, she’s okay with it as long as I make sure that I can get everything I need there. YAY!

Of course, over the next few months things could change a bit, knowing her. But, I’m going to go over all the information with her about the hiring process and all that stuff so she knows. I kinda had to exaggerate how much I would get paid (I said I’d get $2000 a month, but really it’ll be more like $1800 (if I get a teaching job with GEPIK, touch wood). Now I need to talk to my loan counselor at my alma mater and a few of my former profs to get letters of recommendation.