First week of teaching.

Before talking about the new job, let’s finish with the hagwon. My last day was last Friday. And I had new teacher orientation at my university on Thursday. I could only stay for an hour or so because I had to work at my hagwon later that day. Saturday Ben helped me move to my new apartment. I am living on campus in the “Techno Building,” which is professor housing. It is nice and spacious. We took two trips to complete the move, which was a challenge because we took the bus here, two buses actually. So, the bus began to fill up and we had to almost sit on my boxes/suitcases. I arranged to pick up the key from a coworker on Saturday. Kyunpook is a nice university, except when students/professors drive their motor scooters or motorcycles all over the place. People that drive these things do not follow any traffic rules. They drive on the sidewalk, run red lights, weave in traffic, do U-turns in intersections, and whatever else.

The teaching reminds me of my old hagwon. I have a textbook and lead the students on the material. The students know a lot more English than I perhaps thought. But it’s not a bad gig. One day I have two classes, then another day I have three. The other days I have five classes. I am done by 4pm everyday. I share an office with a former army crime scene investigator from San Francisco, and two Canadians. The guy from SF was stationed in Korea for several years, and is of Korean descent. He wanted to come back to Korea to experience the culture and food, as he was unable or too busy during his tenure in the army. I played soccer Saturday night with some people from church. The “foreigners” played a middle school soccer team. They were quite good, but we were a bit rusty as well. We gave up several goals. But yesterday we played much better and were aggressive. My rotating pastor was married on Saturday at 10:30am. It was a traditional Korean wedding. At the beginning of the ceremony, the bride and groom stood at the back of the room and walked to the front of the stage.
After the ceremony, we had a group photo, probably about 100 or so people in various degrees of dress. Then we took the escalator up to our buffet lunch. It was quite scrumptious. In one side of the room there was Korean food, and across the room was French food (snails), Chinese, and other fare. Needless to say myself and my eating companions made several trips.