Cousin's Visit

In the middle of September, my cousin Joanne came for a visit. She had planned a three week trip to South Korea and decided to visit us for a part of it. While she was here, she came for a brief visit one weekend and joined our house party. She got a tour of our place and the room where she would stay. After the weekend, she went back to Seoul to continue her tour. A week later, she came back down to join us. 

One of the best part about Korea is it's transportation system. It's so easy to take day trips across the country. On the KTX it took Joanne about 3 hours to get to Gwangju (4 hours on the bus). We took her to Yumsem for breakfast and she did a daytrip to Mokpo. While she was here, unfortunately our working hours left her a lot of alone time. We did manage to show her the joy of home delivery - mmmm chicken. On the weekend, we went downtown and had sol bing and did some make up shopping at Innisfree and Etude House.

I absolutely love the free samples from these makeup stores! I got 10 free samples of paper face masks, some serums, some lotion, some cotton pads and make up samples too! It's so amazing. One day I'm going to collect all my samples and take pictures of them. 

House Warming Party!

After settling into our new place, Neil and I decided to have a house warming party. We invited all our foreign and Korean co-workers to come. Unfortunately because it was on a Sunday and it was the only day the Korean teachers had the day off so none of them showed up. But all the foreign teachers showed up! Lily even bought a homemade chocolate cake. It was really delicious. The other teachers also bought some drinks to share. 

Before the party, Neil I had made sure we cleaned up the place and prepped some snacks and drinks. Neil had some chili, I made some cocktail sausages, cucumber sandwiches and yogurt soju cocktail. There was also chips and veggies and dip. 

The game of the night was Cards Against Humanity. It is one of our favourite games and some people has never heard of it so we were really eager to introduce it to them. Joanne made a real strong impression by winning a lot of the cards. If you don't know what the point is, it's a game that showcases our worst thoughts. Each person gets a set of white cards that contain phrases and words. Each person gets to turn over a black card and which has a sentence with blanks. These blanks are filled by a white card. Everyone puts their choice in a pile and the person who turned over the black card picks the worst choice or one of their choosing. Whoever is chosen gets to keep the black card. Once a person collects 10 black cards, they win the game. This is a simple explanation, you might be better off googling it. :) 

Boseong Green Tea Fields

A month after our arrival, my friend Jini from Daegu came to visit us in Gwangju. She offered to take us out to Boseong Green Tea Fields in Boseong. Jini and her boyfriend picked us up from our apartment and drove about an hour to reach this place. She's only been there once and I'm not sure if her boyfriend's been there before. They used their GPS which looks like a video game, it's so detailed and colourful!

It was a really nice day and we parked in the lower parking lot and walked along the path to reach the entrance. Entrance fee is about 2,000 won each, pretty decent. We walked towards the fields and it is built upwards. It winds upwards so it's not that steep, but parts of it was still very steep. We saw a sign that said "ocean" and decided to follow it. I was excited because I thought we were by the ocean but the path kept going upwards?!? It turns out the path leads us to a look out point where we can see the ocean. So what happens when something goes up? It must come down, so we trekked back down. I felt bad for Jini because she was wearing heels. Good thing I decided to wear my runners. It was still very difficult.

The best part of the field was the green tea ice cream! I had the green tea ice cream while Neil, Jini and Jini's bf had the green tea yogurt. It was the best green tea ice cream I've ever had. It didn't have the chalky aftertaste I find with most green tea ice cream. If I could eat more, I would've eaten more and buy some home. 

But instead, we went to look for some real lunch instead. We ended up at a samgupsal place where the meat and dishes were green-tea infused. It was so much food! But super delicious! Jini generously paid for our meal.

First week of work

Even as I write about our first week of full-time work, I still need to take a breath and remember it's all over. We had decided to forgo cooking during this week since our place was still not quite ready and set up yet and we doubted we'd have enough time this week to do it. On top of many other things that happened, this was a great idea!

After the BIG move, we spent almost every night cleaning and rearranging things. We moved the furniture in the bedroom around. I set up my make up desk/table. The dining table originally in the living room, we decided to put it in one of the spare rooms to create more space. We dubbed this room the dining room. There was an old fridge that didn't work, we moved that out on the balcony and only kept the good one. We also placed our toaster oven on top of it. One of the spare bedrooms we made it into a guest room. We stacked the two single mattresses so we'll have more room. We can separate the mattress when we need to. We really dislike the colour of the couches and leather is a terrible material in this type of weather! We ended covering it with some blankets to make it softer and more comfortable. We cleared out the long tv stand and discovered so many guide books for Gwangju, Korea and even Seoul. All things left behind by our predecessors. All of this is only a portion of the changes we made. I can't wait to do the video blog of our new place. We're also looking forward to inviting new friends and coworkers over. We're really proud of it now and this apartment is very nice!

We didn't get any of the classes we had previously. I got whole new sets of students and course books. On the first day, we also had to hand out books to the students. They are super heavy! I managed to wrangle some poor unsuspecting students to help me. Unfortunately some of my books were messed up for two of my classes and it caused a bit of a confusion. With the new books, Neil and I had to get to work pretty early to make sure we find all of our books and then figure out how we want to prep our lessons. Some were easier than others. But 2 hours to prep for 7 classes is not enough time. Especially when some didn't have a guide on how we should teach it. It's a bit of a bummer. Good thing some of the older teachers were able to help us and give us some insights. We felt pretty bad having to ask about every little thing, but we didn't know :( So for Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, we have one set of schedule. For Tuesdays and Thursdays, it's another set. So some students see us once a week, some three times and some even five times a week. We don't teach on Saturdays but for those that we teach on T/T, they also have classes on Saturday taught by Korean teachers. It would have been fine if all we did was school/work but we had to get our bank account set up as well and go to our Korean classes.

Neil and I signed up for Beginner Korean classes with the GIC (Gwangju International Center) and our classes are Wednesdays and Fridays from 10am-12pm. Theres only one other person in our class. An American named Nick. He's super friendly and nice and he also lives and works in the Sangmu area. We would probably end up meeting each other one of these nights. He's been here about two months longer than us and is so helpful to us. The Korean classes itself are really good. We really like our instructor, she's very energetic and happy all the time. Even if I'm tired, it perks me up with her abundant energy. The first week was basic Hangeul so it was a breeze. I started learning this stuff two years ago so it was more of a review for me. But it's good to confirm what I know.

On Wednesday we get into work and Mr. Lee gives us our Alien Registration Card. He proceeds to let us know that his friend has a deal on phones today. We can get a phone for free if we sign up for a two year contract today. But first we need to open a bank account. It'll cost us $35 per month with 500mb of data, lots of text and 100 minutes or something. A basic smartphone plan. It's an LTE phone so it's not 3G. But Internet here is pretty fast already so it's not bad. Although the phone only has 8gb, there is a microsd slot to increase your memory capacity. I doubt I'll use it for anything other than messaging, map, emails and quick info search. All my games are on my ipad.

We opened up our bank account with KEB because we heard the transfer and service is really expat friendly. We didn't have our passport so we had to go back the next day to get our debit cards. It's funny for every service you want, you have to sign a form. To open a chequing account - one form. To get a debit card - one form. To use Internet banking - one form. To transfer money - one form. We still have to do the last two items.

Yeah...it's been a really busy week. We cancelled our plans for Seoul and decided to stay in Gwangju to relax instead.