Hi dear friends back in the US of A and elsewhere. I have arrived safely in Seoul, and I'm becoming nice and cozy in my strange little apartment in Junggye-dong. It has a bunch of sliding doors, a shower sans curtain, and a washing machine with only Korean controls (fortunately the deputy principal of my school instructed me on how to operate it). Things are going quite smoothly here, even for a vegetarian!
How do I begin to describe this crazy world of neon crosses (yes, those are for churches)? Well, hardly anyone speaks English, and most of the menus have only Korean characters. Observe:
웹문서
I actually don't know what that means. I just copied and pasted it from Google's homepage. Every time I go to a Web site here, EVEN Google, these characters magically appear where I used to find English. I think 웹문서 might mean "search."
We're living on the third floor of a GINORMOUS apartment complex. I'll post pictures soon enough. My refrigerator smells like kimchi, the omnipresent Korean staple of spicy pickled cabbage.
People are exceedingly friendly here, even though no one can understand anything I say. Miming, my friends, is the new black.
I visited my school today, and the teachers and directors are all very kind. Apparently my Brown degree gives me serious street cred, and they believe that I can do anything. For real. I was talking with the deputy principal about what I will be doing at work, and she was explaining that we will be teaching and prepping for the TOEFL exam. She was like, "We'll train you, but I'm sure you know how to teach it better than me." This is a 30 something teacher with a master's degree FROM THE US. Here's to a crash course in TOEFL prep!
Anywho, jet lag is catching up to me, and I promised Sam a game of cribbage. So until my next post, I leave you with the Google Korea homepage.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Hello from Korea!
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