Reflections on 7 months in Korea

I am currently waiting, and frustrated. As many of you know, I'm starting a new job soon in another part of Seoul. I'm tremendously excited, but the person replacing me (for whom I must wait) has had a few delays, so I'm waiting and frustrated.

I suppose, then, that it's a good enough time as any to look back at my 7 months in Korea.


The first couple months, as I remember, were characterized by a whole rush of overwhelming, sometimes contradictory feelings: excitement and wonder at being in this new place, boredom and loneliness in between work periods, stress and reward from learning to do my teaching job, homesickness but also a sense of fitting into a new social group.

I think I expressed this duality well in my first-month retrospective:

In one sense, it feels like I have only been in Korea for about a week. This is because on my work days, I exist only between home and work, with a little stretch of Korea in between.
...
But in another way, I feel like I have been here for long time. It feels like forever since I've gone into a store or restaurant and was able to communicate fluently with the staff, and my adventures of the first weekend feel like the distant past.

In the first few months, my experiences were very much informed by my weygook - foreigner - status. My friends were all English teachers from Canada and the U.S. and for the most part we did things together: eat, party, go on weekend trips. This was fun, and still remains a core part of my life - this weekend, for instance, I'm going to a friend's birthday party in Hongdae, where we foreigners will roam around the area doing a scavenger hunt.

In the summer, when the sweltering heat was making walking to work seem like being on a treadmill in a sauna, I started expanding my horizons a bit. I found a Korean volleyball team to practice with, and even played in a few real games and one tournament. I also went to the Seoul LGBT film festival and met some gay friends - Korean and foreigner. Unfortunately these two groups often clashed with each other - usually I had a choice between going out with gay friends Saturday night or playing volleyball Sunday morning.

This was a pretty good time - I was exercising and playing volleyball, I was meeting new friends and enjoying myself in Seoul, and overall Korea seemed less like a grand mystery than a living society that I was becoming part of. (Granted, I was only becoming a limited part of it.)

My blog posts reflected this change - I no longer posted about the details of my daily life, instead highlighting the details (the Boryeong mud festival, my Malaysia vacation) while interspersing the blog with other tidbits about life (the World Cup, Korean and international news stories, and the stuff I find to read on the internet). This online transition reflected the transition I had from clueless foreign tourist to acclimatized semi-clueless foreign teacher.

In the last couple months, my headspace has been slowly taken over by my new job. You may recall my post about the Asian Debate institute at the end of August - since then, I've been slowly transitioning. This last weekend, I ran a tournament at ChungAng university, which was a whole lot of fun.


However, the job switch which was supposed to occur in September hasn't happened yet, for the reasons I alluded to above. So while I've been winding down my involvement in volleyball and not planning weekend trips, I've been stuck in Beomgye, continuing to work at my hagwon. It's certainly not all bad - I still like my teaching job and have fun things to do on the weekends - but there's a feeling of being "in transit", as my friend Erin would say, but in a more abstract sense than being on a plane.

It's time to go to work, so I'll leave you with a picture.