8 months down the line

This post is a copy of a story I wrote for our local newspaper at home 'The Greytown Gazette':

17June 2009
8 MONTHS DOWN THE LINE ............ IN KOREA

My boyfriend, Julian Barker, and I (Jessica Cockburn) have been teaching English in South Korea for just over 8 months. There have been many fun times, so I could say ‘time flies when you’re having fun’, but saying this may imply that the experience has only been fun or at least mostly fun, which is not an entirely true reflection of our experience here.

We had a tough start: culture shock hit us much harder than we had expected. The language barrier seemed impenetrable – nothing vaguely resembled our alphabet and the strange sounds we heard held no meaning! We were surrounded by people who not only looked different, but who openly stared at us because we looked different! They seemed inaccessible to us: mostly because we speak different languages, but also because we have different cultures, different approaches to life, different histories.

When we first arrived, our only links to ‘the rest of Korea’ were our co-teachers: they were our assigned ‘chaperones’ and did everything for us: from buying us furniture, to taking us to the doctor. We, who had set off on our Asian adventure as intrepid, independent travellers found ourselves totally dependent on strangers. The most frustrating part to this was that our co-teachers themselves spoke only broken English, and battled to understand our South African accents.
8 months down the line I can almost look back at those early weeks with a smile on my face. I say almost because it was a very difficult period, and as much as I’d like to, I’m not quite ready to smile about it!

But we have come so far. We have done an amazing amount of travelling and exploring -. we spent 10 wonderful days in the Philippines during our winter vacation, we have seen many of the famous Buddhist temples in Korea, have visited Goeje island: a lovely holiday destination off the south coast of Korea, spent several days skiing and seen many famous historical sights in Korea. We have walked in the lovely forests around our town Sangju, and scootered through the recently planted rice fields.

We have also explored and absorbed Korean culture: Julian has, uncomfortably, swayed arm-in-arm with my male colleagues singing love songs in a ‘Noraebang’ (i.e. karaoke room), we’ve eaten very fresh or even live! seafood taken straight out of a tank outside the restaurant, seen dogs in cages off to be slaughtered for dinner, been invited into an old Korean woman’s house and given kimchi (the national dish of fermented cabbage), been to public bath houses where everyone wanders around starkers without a care in the world, been semi-harassed on the street by Koreans trying to practice English, had our arm-hairs and eyebrows touched and pulled at because they’re white or yellow (not blonde), …the list goes on.
It has been an amazing 8 months. The teaching has itself been an adventure: we teach at government middle schools which has not been without difficulties. We have been left to our own devices with little in the way of guidelines, which in the beginning was frightening but which we now use to our advantage: we can run our classes as we like and do anything we fancy to help the students practice the little English that they know.

We really do miss home and our families very much: one of the most important things that being in Korea has made us realise is how much we love and miss South Africa despite all its faults and problems. We will certainly be back: armed with a multitude of travel stories and a better understanding of the world.

Where we live

OOOOhh the greenness of it!

One can see emdless numbers of photos and still not quite picture or understand the atmosphere and feel of a place if one has never been there. Despite this, I'm going to post some more photos of our little city Sangju, so your picture can hopefuly come a bit closer to the real thing.

As Jules has written somewhere, it has grown on us. In my mind it has moved from being ugly and grey-brown with higgledy-piggeldy, ugly architecture, fields and huge apartment blocks adjacent to one another, garbage and other discarded items at every turn, an almost constant smell of sewerage...to a place I could almost call a 3rd home Now when I picture Sangju, I see it surrounded and interspersed with bright green rice fields, onion fields, cabbage fields; Ajummas and Ajoshis (the male form of the Ajumma) everywhere; a lovely tree-lined path along the river (which looks so much healthier now that the first spring rains flushed out the junk and filled it up a bit!); friendly if curious and rather insensitive people, an easy lifestyle, a place one can happily and safely walk everywhere, a place where one has a few similar-minded foreign friends, some less similar-minded but still genuine Korean friends, and a place which is starting to feel familiar!

A place where within 5 minutes on a bike/scooter one can get away from teh bustle and be in the forest, halfway up a mountain or simply amongst fields of green. A place which when one gets off the bus after a long weekend bussing around as a tourist, feels sweet to come home to! So here are some pictures to show you our sweet Sangju. Still quite ugly and with higgeldy-piggeldy architecture but now tempered by a constant green-ness and a nearness ot nature - albeit farmed nature - which I had missed, and I feel I have re-discovered!

Sangju from halfway up one of those small mountains

Our apartment is somewhere near the blue arrow. In amongst all the love motels! :)

The building with the big blue roof is the auditorium at my school.
To the right of it are the main buildings of my schools - I am quite lucky to have both my schools on the same property, very convenient. The balloon was in honour of Buddhas Birthday on May 2.

The next few pics are of the fields I walk past on my way to school in the morning. Life's sweet isn't it? I really enjoy this 'agricultural' vibe in Sangju!

And then there are the lovely green broad-leaved forests just a few minutes outside town - literally all around us.
Birds cheeping and insects buzzing around. Being out in the forests makes me want to start an insect collection all over again! I have ordered a bird book online and am eagerly awaiting its arrival so I can at least get the bird-watching going!

And in these forests are cute little purple irises...



and REAL wild violets...



And bumblebees doing their thing!



Life is indeed schweeet!