Settling Down

Orientation has come and gone and we've been in Cheongju for almost a week. It has been pretty hectic. We left Jeonju Monday morning to meet our co-teachers in the Chungcheongbuk-do province. We are placed in Cheongju, the capital of our province. I've never lived in a city before, but I love it already!

My co-teacher, Jenny, is wonderful. We went with Andy and his co-teacher to lunch on our first day and I was glad that we had the chance to get to know them while sharing a delicious meal. After lunch, we parted ways to go to our respective schools.

 

 My work shoes!

  

A view of Jungang ES

The English classroom.

My desk

Monday night was my first experience at a staff dinner. Our Vice Principal is retiring and, although I was invited only hours before about the event, I thought I should attend the dinner to show my support. I am glad I did because I was able to sit with the cafeteria and maintenance staff and learn their names. They were so sweet and laughed with me as I tried to pronounce everything correctly. They were shocked and pleased when I tried ALL the dishes served and used my chopsticks.

 

My first day of work began on Tuesday (Andy didn't have to start until Friday!) but there weren't any students that day because of the typhoon. It was a pretty unnerving experience. The wind was incredibly powerful and there were fallen trees in the park near my school that only 24 hours earlier had been growing strong.

The weather on Wednesday was back to hot and humid. It was still a great day because I finally met my students. As expected, they were excited to see me but even more excited to ask how tall I was.

I taught my first class that day: Grade 4. I knew that I needed to keep things simple but, having never taught elementary students, let alone ESL elementary students, the experience proved to be more difficult than I anticipated. Fortunately, my co-teacher was there to support me and I am learning to speak in a slower, clearer, and exaggerated way. I find myself talking this way with Andy when I come home from work. It's as if I need to rev up my speech to conversational mode again when I'm with native speakers.

Cheongju is a great place to live, at least in our area of the city. The people have been so friendly. We have several managers for our apartment and the one gentleman, Mr. Lee, speaks excellent English. He is very helpful and I love talking to him when we come or go.

The buses are constantly running during the day and taxis are incredibly cheap. It makes traveling throughout the city easy and affordable. Andy and I have taken 15 minute rides and paid a total of $5 or less.

Certain foods are quite expensive. We can basically say goodbye to cheese for the year; a pound of American cheese is at least $10. We can't find any Mac & Cheese or hot sauce, so there goes our specialty. The cost of fruits or vegetables vary depending on what's in season.

It's not bad, though. We've found some great rice dishes and eggs, chicken, and pork are decently priced. Fortunately, we don't have many bills for the year so we'll be fine.

I've had my moments of homesickness. I knew that living in a different country wouldn't be easy, but I underestimated how frustrating the language barrier would be at times. In spite of that, I'm starting to fall in love with this place. There have been too many cute moments and I've befriended so many kind people that I know this is going to be an amazing year.