2! Gimpo!

Well! It has been quite a week, my friends. I am FINALLY settled in to my new place here in Gimpo, just west of Seoul. I am basically 30 min away from Seoul and Incheon, which is a pretty nice location I think. By American standards, my apartment is mostly a dump. However! I tend to like it. Its cozy. Or, let me rephrase that. It will BE cozy once I manage to get some furniture, clean up a bit, and find a comforter for my bed that isn't pink frilly flowers. Or just a new bed. Mine is hard as a rock :(

Anyways, Its been a while since I have updated. And for good reason! The first 2 nights in Seoul were a complete whirlwind. Since my last update was sunday morning last week, I believe I have quite a bit to tell you all! First off: our friend Jeff took us out on Sunday to show us a bit of the ropes. We had Korean BBQ which is fantastic. I mean seriously...you sit there, grill meat, eat strange things out of strange bowls, and it is all delicious. He wound up taking us to a "sexy bar" which, well. Its interesting. We started walking downstairs, underground, and the lower you got, the seedier it seemed to be. We stopped at around the 3rd level below, sat down, and started drinking. Now - a sexy bar is this: the girls walk around in bikinis and they sit at your table and talk with you while you drink and eat and make a fool out of yourself. It was pretty fun. Oh, except for the part where Jeff bought mike and I a bottle of Grey Goose. Feeling obligated due to kindness and politeness, we drank the entire thing. The two of us. Keep in mind in the morning was our first day of training. Which, I might add, brings us tooo.......

TRAINING!

Well. What can I say about training. Maybe that it was seriously, no doubt, the hardest week maybe I have ever experienced. I mean just think, you are in a new country, want to go out have fun, etc. Instead, you get a crash course in how to teach English as a second language, go to classes from 930-445 with a 45 minute break, and oh! Also! If you fail, you get sent home! So I guess you can say this was the end of our fun for the week. Well not really. I had lots of fun. I made a ton of really great friends there, and I hope to keep in touch with the majority of them throughout our stay in Korea. We are all GENERAllY within an hour of each other, so its not too bad. Anyways. I am teaching 2 separate classes: Reading and writing, and listening and speaking. I really enjoy listening and speaking. Reading and writing, not so much. It is a pretty strict curriculum, but I am pleased to say I only work M W TH F and have Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday off. How nice!

So also, I live in Gimpo. It seems to be a pretty nice place. I took an hour or two wandering around, getting a little lost, investigating, and forcing myself to not take the easy route of KFC or McDonalds when I had no clue of what to eat here. Don't worry! I'm surviving fine!

I met a girl here and she took me out to a bar which was nice, we had a few, or quite a bit more than a few, drinks and then headed back to our places. It is strange being "the white person" here. If you see another one, it is always a bit exciting, hoping you might get to chat with them. It is definitely a big change. So here I sit now, having had some good food and a few beers, with another sitting next to me, and thinking about maybe going out to try to find another bar where people might be sitting at that I can talk to. Anyways, I will leave you with a few pictures of my time so far!

This is our BBQ cooking. That arm and shirt you can see is Luke. He was born in Korea but lived in the states for a long time, and his gf, Soo, was here training with us. He is about to had to Vietnam (i think) on a mission trip. Really nice dude. We hit up the arcade at one point!

This is the aftermath of about 14 of us going out to Korean BBQ. It is so delicious. They bring you nonstop sides of egg something-or-another, pickled veggies, kimchee, and other things I don't know about. You then dip the meat in sauce, or roll it up in a leaf of lettuce and make a spring roll type thing. It is amazing!