Day One in SoKor

My first official day in Tongyeong has come and gone. It was a quite eventful day! It started off by me waking up at 7am...not exactly sure why but I couldn't sleep anymore so I just got up. After watching a old movie on an English station we found on TV, Kami and I hit the town to find a bank to exchange currency and to find breakfast. Apparently, Dunkin' Donuts is really big here, so we headed there where I was excited to get an iced coffee and a flatbread thing for about three bucks!! Made me quite happy!

This is the view outside of our hotel window. We're right by the ferry terminal.

This is the street out of our hotel. We're in the "old town" but we'll be moving to "new town" in a few days.

Me very excited about an iced coffee!!

After our short journey around, we came back to the hotel to get ready for our first day at work. When we were coming here, we asked to have an observation day so we could see a little bit of how things go. Most teachers that come here just get here and start teaching the next day...we didn't really want that...we wanted to see how things were ran a little. So after taking a $3 taxi into the other part of town to meet Barbara (a Canadian teacher at our school that is leaving Sunday) for lunch, we went to the school to begin the fun!


My first impression of the school is that it is really well organized and very structured. The director (Ryan) and his wife (Sara) are very nice and really seem to care for the school. From what I gathered from the first day, students come to the school for an hour and 25 minutes. In that time, there are two periods. One period, the students will have a Korean teacher teach them English for 40 minutes and in the second period, a native speaker will teach for 40 minutes (then there is a 5 minute break for all you math people that were adding). There are three native speaker teachers and three Korean teachers.I shadowed Greg, a Canadian teacher that is leaving next Sunday. During our day, we had all different levels of students and all the kids were just so cute!!


Because Barb is leaving this weekend, there was a going away gathering in her honor. It gave Kami and I an opprotunity to meet some of the other English teachers in Tongyeong and it was a fun night. I'm not sure quite the story behind it, but for some reason, they wanted everyone to have mustaches. It was quite funny. Here is a pic:

One thing we had heard about before we came here was something called a noribong. It is very popular here. What it is...there is a room that you and your friends go to with couches and TVs and you sing karaoke all night! It's quite crazy...but very cool! It's def something you have to experience in order to really understand. I really enjoyed it though...haha. It's very entertaining. I took a pic to try to show you.

So that was our first day in Tongyeong. It was a good day...an eventful day! Today our director and his wife are going to show us around town some and take us to dinner tonight, so that should be fun! Good times await!