And 6000 miles later here we are!

Check out our photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/21121589@N00/

Well, the plane ride went really fast, as with the 3 hour busride to Daejeon, our employers seem really friendly, and our apartment is nice! So far, so good!

We arrived at 3pm Korea time (midnight our time) and got on a bus at about 4pm. I'm sure it would have been a very interesting bus ride but we were both so tired we hardly stayed awake for more than an hour of the trip. I think we have figured out how they manage to have 21 million people in the Seoul area - thousands and thousands of massive apartment buildings! (I will try to get pictures up of this).

We arrived in Daejeon and Mr. Moon and Ms. Kim (our employers) were waiting for us at the bus stop. They were both very friendly and spoke English well enough to ease our fears. They took us first to the school - very modern and clean. We each get our own classroom and desk! Since by that time it was around 7pm in Korea - 4am SK time we went to our apartment from there. Which happened to be extremely close to the school. Maybe 50m. From the school we walk through a short alley and half a block down the street and bang-there we are.

Anyway, we were quite happy to see our apartment is pretty reasonably sized (maybe 500sq ft?) and quite nice. It has a small deck and spacious kitchen/dining room. The only things that are really small are the appliances (i.e. the fridge/freezer is maybe 3 feet tall). It also has two bedrooms (which Tara is happy to report are both larger than the one she left at home), one with attached bathroom, and another larger bathroom. The bathrooms are pretty interesting but I'll let Tara describe that.

Okay... so the bathroom is pretty much a tiled room with a toilet (western style - thank god!) and a shower - which is attached to the sink. As Andrew put it so eloquently "This is awesome - I can use the toilet, brush my teeth and shower all at the same time." I can't say I'm as enthused as he is... it'll definately be something to get used to! Other than the wierd bathrooms, however, the apartment is really nice. It's clean (no unwanted roomates so far) and pretty cosy. We have a TV, phone, dressers, desks... life is good.

So today we woke up REALLY early.... like 7 am. This was after forcing ourselves to go to sleep for another few hours at 4am. I keep thinking about the time as in Saskatoon time - so at 4am it was actually 1pm. Anyway, we got up at 7 and had some peanut butter/banana sandwiches (compliments of Ms. Kim) and spent a few hours unpacking and cleaning. I cleaned those bathrooms top to bottom - they were a bit grungy. After that we (I) got ready and set out to get groceries. We got to the corner and were standing in front of a giant map looking like confused tourists when a man stopped his SUV and came up to help us. Koreans are probably the most helpful/kind people I have ever met. There is the biggest language barrier, yet the second you start looking confused they are right there to help you. Anyway, we somehow got the message across to him that we were looking for a grocery store named Carrefour. He told us where it was but said it was too far to walk - and then offered us a ride (which we happily accepted)!

The grocery store was something else. The store itself was on the 2nd floor, but the rest of the building was a mall. It was beyond overwhelming! Even finding the simplest thing - say, garbage bags (which we still don't have) took forever as the packaging for goods is usually entirely in Korean and the pictures offer no help as to what the product is - maybe a cute cartoon character/space ship on a carton of cleaning supplies. We were basically like spinning around in the aisles looking clueless. We did manage to get cleaning supplies (Andrew's got some tidying to do), some cooking supplies and I found a FABULOUS straightener (cheapy, cheapy). The seafood section was AMAZING - it was all fresh, cheap and in HUGE amounts. There were fish in there that I had never seen in my life. We're definately going to be cooking some of those up when we get more settled in.

So, we took a cab back from the store and dropped our stuff off and went to 7-11 (7-11!!!!) to buy phone cards. Butttt, we realized that there were no public phones in sight - so we'll have to wait until our phone is hooked up to call home.

We just came from a restaurant which was recommended to us last night by Ms. Kim. It was quite good and very cheap. I had my first taste of Kimchi (Andrew already has eaten it).... it was good but very interesting. I think we'll both have to watch that we don't eat too many spicy foods for the first while.

Well that's all we have for now. Hope to hear from you all soon!

Miss you already!

T minus 35 hours

My intentions were to start this blog when we received our plane tickets. For the past few weeks we were under the impression we were leaving on Sunday, Sept. 10th and our tickets (the school is paying for these) would arrive 1-2 weeks in advance. Well this morning (Wednesday the 6th) I awoke to an email with e-tickets saying we are leaving on the 8th... giving us barely 48 hours notice.

So right now this is our situation:
We are leaving for a year to teach conversational English to 6-15 year olds. The city we are going to be living and working in is Daejeon, South Korea. It is in the middle of South Korea, which will be really nice because we would like to travel around the country as much as possible when we are there. In addition to paying for our airfare the school is also providing us with accommodations. We were told it will have two bedrooms, one living room/kitchen, and two bathrooms (two bathrooms?). Our teaching hours are between 12:30 and 8:30PM and this also includes prep time.

So, barring any more last minute changes, we should arrive in South Korea on Saturday the 9th. We really want to hear from everyone throughout the year, so email us or post comments. We'll try to keep this updated as much as we can. Also we will set up a photo gallery as soon as we get to Korea and get some pictures taken. Have a good year everyone!