call me sergei

i am still a nomad. i moved to daejeon on monday and began staying at a hotel/motel. after two days i was moved here, to the former apartment of my boss. it is a large 3 bedroom that i will inhabit for the next 2 weeks or so, until another, closer apt is open. so i still cant unpack but no huge deal. the view is great and i have a ton of space, 5 rooms and 2 bathrooms to chill in (plus a semi balcony). only thing is that ... well the only furniture in the place is my bed. no fridge, micro, oven, etc. i have a washer, but otherwise i am alone in this empty space. and i am still stealing internet from the neighbors. for this reason, i will still hold off on posting photos. (my camera works again!).

i have been sitting in on some classes at my work, which has been really helpful. its been great to see what i have been trained on applied (or not used at all) in a real setting. i am getting really excited to start.

the people from my work are really cool. today a bunch of us met up at about 11 pm (classes end at 1030) for an intense 2.5 hour game of soccer, korean style. this was followed by some very korean beer drinking outside the nearest convenience store. i had a really good time and surprised myself by not being as bad at soccer as i expected to be after such a long hiatus.


i think that my japan visa run date is now set for next thurs, although that, i have discovered, is really up in the air. i have to go soon, so i am really excited.

anyway, there is so much going on that i would love to get in to. i would also love to respond to your emails, but for the next bit while i am stealing internet, please know that i love you all and i will get back with you when i know i will be able to have uninterrupted internet.

a less transient life

in about two hours i will be making the trip from seoul to my new hometown, daejeon. im pretty fired up about seeing my new city, apartment, job, etc. im also so ready to stop living out of a suitcase. so, the move will happen today, but i dont know the next time that i will have continuous access to the internet. i am assuming that my apartment will not have it to begin with, so it might be a bit before we are back in contact.

things here are really great, especially now that training is over. everyone has begun to disperse to their respective locations, although most of them will be in and around seoul. we signed our contracts on saturday afternoon, which was extremely exciting.

anyway, ill let you know how the move goes asap. also, my camera stopped working randomly last night, but im going to try and get some more photos up here soon.

my vision was so much better before i got here

we are deep into the week of training, a week that has been extremely informative yet also brutally boring. within each session we are working to prepare a single lesson that we will teach the first week of class. it is really helpful to see how other people would approach the same material, but if i have to watch one more mock class on the five distinct regional divisions of the united states i might stab myself in the eye with a pen.

i have also concluded that there is nothing worse than mock teaching in front of your peers. when trying to throw "childlike" situations at you, it really just winds up being annoying. i can not wait to get in front of a real class of real people. although with this material they might mutiny.

otherwise things are going really well. i have not yet drowned. (new york city can stop whining and try seoul out) and training ends with tomorrow's evaluations.

to each his own umbrella

today dawned grayer and gloomier than those we have had so far. although i have yet to see the seoul sun, today was exceptionally moody. the sky opened up with a muggy hot rain which drove me directly into the closest convenience store to purchase an umbrella. i shall not part from it again. somehow, seoul still manages to be pretty cool.

we started training for my new job yesterday, rather, we had orientation, which was markedly easier than the beginning of official training today. i had two training sessions today, and i found out that i will be teaching (and therefore training on) the "listening and speaking" and "reading and writing" portions of the curriculum. this mean that while my students can be either elementary or middle schoolers, they will all be at the intermediate level or slightly higher. they threw a lot of info at us today, and tomorrow we will have to teach mock classes to the rest of the class. its going to be interesting because we are all going to be teaching the same lesson...

today we also had several tests. there was the code of conduct test, which was pretty basic, and the grammar test, which is said to have a pass/fail ratio of 50/50. considering that we have to successfully pass everything during training to maintain our positions, some people were pretty freaked out about the test. while i wasnt overly stressed about it, i must admit that i did my fair share of gerunding and adverb clausing last night. i think it went fine. if 50% fail, then 50% have to pass, right?

after class we had to get a physical. i guess some guy in the past turned out to have TB. despite the multitude of tests, it took the four of us who went at the same time about a half an hour. had that been the us or chile, i guarantee you we would still be there. quite efficient.

below are some photos of the hotel room that alicia and i currently share. sorry, not that much exciting going on. ive been unemployed for a bit, so im trying to get back in to the swing of real life.

almost famous

the first 24 hours in seoul have gone pretty much according to what i had anticipated when deciding to move to asia; i expected to be pretty clueless and it turns out that i am. i dont know an appropriate way for a person to prepare oneself for a move to the other side of the world, so i have been making it up as i go along. and i daresay im doing ok.

the place where i am staying is comfortable, and i was assigned a roommate, alicia, by my future employer. she is not only an enjoyable person, but she also has been living in asia for 2 years now, an experience that included several trips to korea. this makes her a valuable asset.

apparently my western appearance makes me a small object of fascination here. it is not chilean style lust or machismo but rather my presence attracts not-so-covert glances whenever someone thinks i am not looking. at dinner last night a friend and i were minor celebrities with the waitstaff, eliciting both said looks and copious amounts of giggling. this evening, while trying out my very first korean dish "beep and bop" (spelling accurate to my own pronunciation), the waiter made sure to point out that "this one is for the american" (thank you alicia for the translation).

and so i am working on the story of my fame and trying to think up my "fame name", in case anyone asks. i was considering using my porn star name (ask any 5th grader if you dont know what this is), but lyn aberdeen takes about .5 seconds longer to write than my current moniker. the unacceptability of this fact is insurmountable. ill keep working at it.

in other news, my body really has no idea what is going on. a 13 hour time difference really did a number on my sleep schedule, and so training that begins tomorrow will be interesting. the session will begin in the afternoon so as to coincide with the time of day i feel the most like im back in a college all-night essay writing marathon. excellent.

--> the photo at the top is seoul from the bathroom window of a department store. many more photos to follow. major fashion trends noticed: vests, ruffles, and (cristina miller get excited!) suspenders. bonus points for combining all three.