Hello! I've been trying to bring us up-to-date for a while, but keep forgetting. In fact I keep writing posts and forgetting about them, so here are 2 posts squeezed into one not-entirely-coherent one. Lucky you!
This space is to allow for an interlude of about a month or two.
Well, we've now been in Buyeo for close on 3 months. It's an interesting experience to say the least, very different to our previous year. There's quite a lot to get through here, so I suppose I should start somewhere near the beginning.
So, we finished in Gwangju a day after our visas expired, thanks to our wonderful, helpful and ever accommodating former employers. Ahem. The previous weekend we spent with the wonderful Robb and Yue Yeon helping us locate a car to buy in order to actually move all our belongings out of our old place. We ended up buying the first car we went to see, a Hyundai Elantra. It's about 15 years old but runs fine so far, and it was nice and cheap. It also fitted almost everything we own in the back. The young Korean guy that we bought the car off was very funny, he seemed unsure whether he should sell us the car because he was worried it would be too small for us, seeing as we're huge foreigners. While we went for a quick test drive (and almost crashed it into a parked car), Yue Yeon convinced him to drop the price by 100,000 as the fuel tank was empty! She also helped us out getting insurance and all the paperwork sorted. Thank god for saintly friends!
Skipping over the multitude of things we've done but haven't written anything about, I'm going to move straight to the present exciting times. We are now semi-settled into our new home of Buyeo, a small town further north than Gwangju. It is very small, but seems really nice so far. We haven't had much time to explore yet, but it's a very old, traditional town and has a lot of historical sites. We're now working in separate schools, which is a little odd after having spent the last year together at all times! I'm in Buyeo Elementary and Becky is in 3 different schools, Buyeo, Gyuam and Baekje Elementary. It's a lot more work for her and a lot more hassle, but hopefully that'll be ok and she'll enjoy it. Thursday was our first day. I spent it observing my co-teacher in his 4 classes of the day, then sitting around on the internet, opening a new bank account and being force fed soju by the principal. A good start I feel! I also had to attend a teacher's meeting and stand up on stage in front of all the teachers in the school and introduce myself, which was a little nerve wracking. Becky was plunged straight into teaching, despite not having anything planned. Luckily she's a professional and didn't screw it up. Probably. That night we went out for dinner with some other foreign teachers that live here (once I'd had a lie down and recovered from my soju bender). Friday was even more entertaining. We were both at my school for the day, but neither of us had any classes, so we sat on the computers all morning, did a little lesson planning, had lunch then left to get our new car registered! Oh, by the way, we have a car now. Pretty exciting huh? Yes. I'll come back to that. We then finished early, so finished unpacking our stuff into our ace new apartment, then went out for dinner and drinking with even more local teachers. There's a really nice foreign community here, only about 20 teachers from various places and everyone seems pretty positive.
So. Our new apartment. It's older than the last one, but it's much bigger. We have our bedroom, a living room, a study, a kitchen and two balconies. Plus the bathroom obviously, which is a little old but it'll do. All the rooms except the bathroom have windows so it's nice and light inside. The rooms are pretty spacious, although we don't have much in the way of furniture which makes a bit of a difference.
My next class of the day have just come into the class and started screaming and shouting at each other, generally making it a bit hard to concentrate on what I'm writing. I'll have to do something else for a little while until they go away!
This space is to allow for an interlude of about a month or two.
Well, we've now been in Buyeo for close on 3 months. It's an interesting experience to say the least, very different to our previous year. There's quite a lot to get through here, so I suppose I should start somewhere near the beginning.
So, we finished in Gwangju a day after our visas expired, thanks to our wonderful, helpful and ever accommodating former employers. Ahem. The previous weekend we spent with the wonderful Robb and Yue Yeon helping us locate a car to buy in order to actually move all our belongings out of our old place. We ended up buying the first car we went to see, a Hyundai Elantra. It's about 15 years old but runs fine so far, and it was nice and cheap. It also fitted almost everything we own in the back. The young Korean guy that we bought the car off was very funny, he seemed unsure whether he should sell us the car because he was worried it would be too small for us, seeing as we're huge foreigners. While we went for a quick test drive (and almost crashed it into a parked car), Yue Yeon convinced him to drop the price by 100,000 as the fuel tank was empty! She also helped us out getting insurance and all the paperwork sorted. Thank god for saintly friends!
The next two days were spent frantically packing all our belongings up and squeezing everything we could into the car. We had to leave Becky's bike and a few other things behind to pick up later, but go most of our things in. It is kind of worrying how much stuff we've acquired over the last year. Once we were all loaded up and had said our goodbyes to MaeGok Dong, we headed to Daejeon to sort out our new visas, then drove to Buyeo to meet Sophie, the girl at the Chungnam Province education board. We weren't really prepared for this meeting, as it turned out we were actually going to meet almost the entire board of education, plus go to our schools and meet the principals! We were hoping to just pick up the key for our apartment and go move in, but sadly, this was not to be. After a couple of hours of being told how handsome and beautiful we are by countless nameless people we've not seen since, we were finally released and started carrying our things up to our new home. The apartment is great! It's much bigger than the old place and much lighter too. The building itself is a bit rundown and nasty looking, but the actual apartment is fine. We've since bought a sofa, but otherwise it came fully furnished. It also seems to stay quite warm, which is handy, because we can't figure out how to get the underfloor heating working. The snow started in earnest this week, so we should probably get to work on finding out what to do!
Buyeo itself is a huge change from Gwangju. It's very small and sleepy, but it is a nice place to live. We'd got used to a big variety in restaurants and things in Gwangju, and that is certainly not the case here. Seeing as our lives basically rotate around food, this has taken some getting used to, but isn't too big an issue most of the time. We are cooking more often now, particularly as we finish work earlier and also are provided with lunch at school. But this blog isn't supposed to be about food! It's about Buyeo. So. We live on the edge of town, about a 20 minute walk from the 'downtown' area where most of the shops and restaurants are. There isn't really a supermarket here, just a few small marts, so we have to go to nearby Nonsan HomePlus to get a lot of the shopping we want. It's only a 20 minute drive, so actually not too different to going to HomePlus in Gwangju! The foreigner community is a little different here too. There are about 20 foreigners around, mostly working in the public school system. There's the usual array of Americans, Canadians, South Africans and a couple of other Brits who live in the building next to us. There actually seems to be more South Africans than anything else, which is a bit of a change from wall to wall Canadians (not that there's anything wrong with either set, I'm just saying...). There's also quite a few older teachers here (again, just mentioning it...). Nightlife is a little different here too, mostly as it's basically non-existent. There are a couple of Hofs (pubs) and the usual noraebangs, but everything closes a lot earlier here. Going out for dinner after 9pm would probably be a mistake. Also, as it's such a small place, there's a high chance that someone working anywhere we want to go is the parent of one of our students, or the partner of a teacher at one of our schools, so we don't want to get caught doing something embarrassing. We are now far more discreet with our foolishness.
