A Little Moore Perspective AFTER Korea

2 new albums have been added to the photo gallery. The first is a “virtual tour” of our apartment where you can see a sort of walk through our place. The second is a panoramic album, which are many photos that have been stitched together to make a single large photo of an area. Many of them are from places seen in the other albums.

I’ve also created a new Map page you can access on the right. If you are interested in knowing just where we are in Korea, as well as see the location of many things we write about, check it out. There are currently three maps on the page. The first shows a satellite image of the city of Chuncheon. The second shows the places we have been in Korea. The first two maps are fully interactive, so you can pan and zoom anywhere you like. The last map, which is just a picture, gives you a view of how the province we live in (Gangwon) sits in relation to the rest of the country. Enjoy!

Things have gone smoothly since we arrived in Chuncheon, home of the famous chicken ribs!  We still have yet to find them…. But don’t you worry, my students made a map for me because tonight is the last night of the Chicken Rib Festival and they made a sign for us to give to the taxi man so that he knows just where to take us.  I am a little worried though, because I don’t know exactly what it says and there is a little heart on it, but I am thinking it says, “Please! Take me to the Dakgalbi!  I love it!”

I started school Monday, September 1st.  Again, it is an all girls high school.  In the United States I would hate teaching at an all girls high school because the girls have such bad attitudes most of the time.  The boys provide the relief.  But here is different because they are still so innocent and eager to please.

I have to walk about 15-20 minutes to work, uphill-seriously like a mountain hike, and I woke up to rain the first day.  So I had to stop at a little market near our apartment to get an umbrella because somehow in our mounds of luggage, we have no umbrella.  Then, first thing every Monday morning there is a teacher’s meeting so, naturally, I have to give a speech.  It was pretty short, but did the job.  Just a basic intro.  My main co-teacher, Ki Eun (pronounced Keyoon) whose job it is to take care of me, told me that probably most importantly they want to know what country I am from and how old I am(more on this later).   Ki Eun asked me if I was nervous to give my speech to the teachers and when I said no, she said, “Really?  The other teachers are nervous!”  Ki Eun is awesome!  I am so excited to be working with her.  I already love her.  She has a husband who owns a restaurant and a daughter who is two.  Her husband’s restaurant is very tasty!

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I added a new album to the photo gallery of our visit to the Seoraksan National Park that we took during orientation. The park and mountains are simply amazing, and as I said to Sarah, one of the closest things to “breathtaking” I’ve ever seen. The mountains are so tall and so close together, covered in beautiful pine forests with smooth rocks and crisp, clean rivers running through it. The trails are well worn and enhanced by bridges crossing the river in many places. Something of note is that you do not find trash anywhere in the park. The Korean people are very conscience of littering and most of them go out of their way to clean up if they do find something laying around.  This is definitely a place we would like to come back to visit again.

On another note, I also added a couple of links to our location in Chuncheon on Google Earth. They are located in the links section to the right. If you open these, it will zoom right into our apartment complex, as well as the school Sarah teaches in. Keep an eye out for more locations to come as we talk about them in our posts! Google Earth is a free satellite imaging program you can download at http://earth.google.com

Hello!  Thanks for checking on us!  All my (Sarah’s) posts will be in orange so you can always tell it’s me!

Ok, so a taxi came to pick us up from Jongnowon on Monday morning and whisk us off to the other side of the country for orientation.  Let me remind you, Korea is the size of Indiana, so the other side of the country isn’t really that far away.  We drove about 3.5 hours.  Orientation was held in a resort on the beach.  It was beautiful!  From our balcony in our room, we could see gorgeous mountains and when we walked out the back door of our hotel, we were 2 minutes walking distance from the beach-the East Sea (That’s if you are from Korea, if you are looking at a map, it is the Sea of Japan.) We got to go for several walks on the beach. Ezekiel was a little scared of the water, but overall had a good time.

Our room was pretty nice, with wide open space, a kitchenette, a bathroom, and an extra room.  But we took for granted that we had a nice double bed.  We found out later that many of the other people didn’t have beds, but instead the traditional mats to sleep on the floor.  We were able to turn the sofa to face the wall and create a little bed for the kids.

Tuesday was the first real day of orientation.  We could eat breakfast as a family in the hotel’s cafeteria that served buffet style meals.  David was so happy because they served rice at every meal!  And Cadence and Ezekiel found a new soup they loved for every meal, but we aren’t sure what it is.  Maybe Doen-Jang??  I’m not sure.  But we were able to eat every meal together along with all the other people hired by EPIK-English Program in Korea.   There were about 200 of us.  Two other couples brought children.  Another couple with 2 children, the husband working, the wife staying home, and another couple with 3 children, both parents working so they brought 2 nannies with them!

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Orientation for Sarah’s teaching position was to begin Monday, August 25^th. However, we were able to get plane tickets significantly cheaper by leaving Wednesday the 20th instead of the weekend ($650 between the 4 of us to be precise). So we decided to go earlier and use the money we saved to stay in a hotel for those 4 nights. What a great decision! In addition to getting adjusted to the jet lag, we were able to explore Seoul for a couple of days and just relax and get used to things a bit.

After our first night in Incheon, we hired a taxi to take us to Seoul, about an hour and a half to downtown. We decided to hire a taxi again because we did not want to try to drag our luggage to the nearest bus station, get it and ourselves on the bus, all while trying to figure out how the system works and in the pouring rain. I had a picture in my mind of us getting off at the bus top in Seoul, lost and trying to find our way to this motel, dragging everything behind us. Suddenly the $80 taxi fee for door to door service was not looking too bad!

Someone on Dave’s ESL Cafe (An online ESL community) had recommended Jongnowon as a decent little place to stay, so we decided to go there. ‘Little’ was the keyword. A third of our room was taken up by the double bed, and another fourth by the desk with the TV on it. Our bags pretty much took up the rest. It was really tight, but we actually did OK there and got used to it very quickly. They had A/C, an included western breakfast (AKA cook your own eggs and toast), free laundry service, and high speed wireless Internet. You couldn’t beat it for $40 a night! Plus it was down a couple side streets right in downtown Seoul, a perfect place to strike out from and explore the area.

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I’ve added a photo gallery page and a few photos of our trip to the site. Click “Photo Gallery” on the right to view them!

We officially left for South Korea on August 20th, 2008. Here’s how things went:

August, 2008

I’ve been working on closing out the last of my business jobs and setting things up to work remotely for the past month, while Sarah has been supporting me, taking care of the kids and house and gathering things we will need for the trip. We had hoped to be done with everything back home a week early so we could ease into packing and gearing up for the move. However, that really can only happen in a perfect world, so I of course ended up working through the weekend before we left and we started packing our things Monday. We quickly realized we needed more room and were out buying additional luggage Monday night.

August 19th

Complete most of the packing and run last minute errands. Scramble trying to fit all of the necessary goods for 4 people for a year (including winter gear) into 6 pieces of luggage with 3 carry ons. For International travel, each ticketed passenger is allowed 2 checked bags on United Airlines. Even Cadence was allowed 1 50lb bag as an infant. So you would think 350lbs of stuff would be plenty, right? We did too. But then you have to consider that the big bags go easily over 50lbs, while the smaller are hard to even get to 50. So suddenly you have a big logistical puzzle on your hands. We spent hours moving items from one bag to another just trying to get the right size/weight ratio, cutting out many items in the process. As we’re doing this, I start thinking about how in the world the two of us are going to move around with 6 large bags, 3 carry on bags, 2 kids and a stroller. Nevermind. Don’t think about that. This is seriously the hardest packing we have ever done.

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Welcome family and friends! Our web site is finally back online. And we are officially living in South Korea! We will write about our adventures and post pictures here, so stay tuned for more to come.

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