Yeah, this is actually happening

Well ladies and gentlemen, before I left Toronto just a few days ago, just about everybody I spoke to told me that I should write a blog while I’m here, in the South Korean city of Daegu. Generally, I’m not very good at things like this. I’ve never been a good diary keeper. But since learning a little self-discipline when it comes to writing can’t really be a bad thing, I figured I’d give this a try. So, welcome to my blog. This is the beginning of the story of my time as a runaway from North America and academia.
The facts: I’m working and living in the city of Daegu, which is about the same size, population-wise, as Toronto, which makes it small by Asian standards. It’s about 2 hours on the high speed train from Seoul, the capital. I work as an editor for an ESL company that runs a number of schools, though editor in this context actually includes writing and designing and potentially voice recording. I decided to come to SK for a number of reasons, the most prominent of which is that I needed to take some time away from academia before I sign up for the long-term commitment stylings of ye olde PhD. When I finished my master’s this past August, I knew it was time for me to give this whole fulltime job, actual income thing a try before I wrote it off completely. So here I am.
The flight(s) from TO to Daegu is super long and involved stopovers in Vancouver and then Seoul. I had non-annoying seatmates the whole way which was a big relief and I took Tylenol sinus to reduce the epic painfulness in my ears that I always experience when I fly. I also chewed gum the whole way to help with this. That’s almost 20 straight hours of gum chewing, which, incidentally, makes your mouth feel like you just had your wisdom teeth out and a bee stung your tongue. But my ears weren’t as bad as they have been on other trips so I was happy about that. When I was waiting for my connecting flight in Seoul’s Incheon airport, a young woman came up to me and explained that she comes to the airport to chat it up with foreigners to practice her English. So I talked to her for a while, which was a good way to while away some of the time. Then I ate at Lotteria, which is a Korean fastfood chain. I had a bulgogi burger, which was good and entertainingly fusion-y.
I was picked up by one of the fabulous folks that the company pays to make foreigners not wander off cliffs and he drove me to my apartment, where some of his counterparts were waiting to carry my sinfully heavy baggage up the stairs to my third floor (no elevator) apartment. And what a nice apartment it is! It’s a spacious bachelor. The kitchen is, as these kinds of kitchens go, very nice though the lack of oven is sort of annoying. I have a toaster oven, a stove and a microwave, but no oven means no cakes or huge slabs of salmon. I’ve also got a washing machine (yay! laundry mats blow!). Marty will be impressed that I will have to start hang-drying my clothes since neither I nor anyone else has a dryer. The bathroom is the typical kind over here, which is to say that the entire bathroom is a shower in the sense that literally everything in the room gets soaked when you have shower because there isn’t any kind of separation between toilet, sink and shower. The shower head is the handheld kind and it is attached to my sink faucet.
My place is walking distance from work, which is sweet. I do have to cross a crazily wide intersection with very confusing lights, however. Korea seems to be made up of huge, six to eight lane major streets and tiny, barely single lane residential streets. Clearly, middle ground is for suckas.
I arrived Monday night and worked Tuesday morning and this is my first night coming straight home from work. I’ve taken a couple of trips downtown to do some looking around / eating and I’ve also done some very necessary grocery shopping. All of these activities have been accomplished with delightful coworkers, including my awesome friend from university, Melinda, who has been working here for a while and has been incredibly helpful with my settling in. Tomorrow and Saturday nights there will be going out on the town to be done; I shall have my introduction to Daegu night life. I’m looking forward to the weekend; I’ve gotten used to working here, now I need some time to get used to living here.
So there you have it. My first few days in Daegu. Nothing too exciting, but whatever, you guys made me write this. I’m sure there will be more entertaining tales to tell in the future. For now, I’m off to laze the rest of the evening away.
Bam,
AAA

p.s. I suppose I ought to give you all an idea of what this blog will be like. Aside from the sort of personal ramblings found in this entry, I’m sure I’ll also spend time rambling about the sorts of topics I find interesting, which is mostly stuff like popular culture (particularly kdramas and kpop since I am, after all, all up in Korea), language (I’m going to try to learn as much Korean as possible and I’m sure I’ll have observations about the English language in Korea), ethnicity and culture and all the craziness related to these two amorphous concepts, and food, since food is awesome. And before any of you ask, yes you get stared at a lot if you are black person in Korea. But I am a person who gets stared at a lot anywhere (because I do things like dance down the street mostly) so it hasn’t really felt that weird. People have been nice and helpful to me, and generally understanding of the fact that my Korean vocab is rather small. I’m not by nature a humble person, but acting humble when traveling is definitely the secret to my success in terms getting great treatment from people and not having them read you as an entitled western douchebag. So yeah, my biggest travel tip: work on having a really nice smile and a good, polite but friendly laugh. Seriously. These are really the things best able to make cross-lingual communication less awkward and strained. Wow, this is a long postscript. Ah well. I’m a long winded gal. You guys should know that by now.