No. 1

I moved to South Korea on 26th August, 2007.

My life before that in Kansas City wasn’t a bad one by any means – I had a wonderful family and group of friends to spend time with; a career that had its ups and downs but was largely fulfilling; plenty of good books to read; a cat – but after nearly a quarter century in the same community I’d begun to feel like a lot of my possibilities at home had been exhausted. I felt stuck: stuck in a routine; stuck in one place; stuck in my own skin. I experienced shades of “Groundhog Day” every morning.

So I decided to shake things up.

In a pretty big way.

The week before Thanksgiving 2006 had been a particularly hard one at work. I was at the office late (a not uncommon occurrence at the time) finishing up a few emails when I decided to take a quick look at any job openings in my area. It wasn’t that I hated my job; I was just so restless; so bored with myself. I loaded up craigslist and the first listing I clicked on was a “Teach in Korea” link. It was just a generic add for an English institution outside of Seoul – the kind of add that clutters these types of sites – but it set me on a scavenger hunt for information (not on company time, of course) that would eventually lead me to accept a teaching position at an elementary school in Yeosu, South Korea. I’d been involved in education for a couple of years already and it had long been a desire of mine to see Asia.

This opportunity seemed like a perfect fit.

When my plane touched down at Incheon International Airport after twenty-six sleepless hours of travel I was running on pure adrenaline. Through some time spent playing guitar in a rock band before college I’d been fortunate enough to travel around much of the United States but this was only my second time overseas; the first being a brief two weeks in the United Kingdom and Italy over the 2003/04 Christmas holiday. Nothing in my life’s experience had prepared me for this journey and, now on my second year, I can safely say nothing outside of time spent in Korea would have.

It is a weird and wonderful place.

This blog will consist primarily of impressions of and reflections upon my time spent living, working, and travelling through South Korea, although I should forewarn you that given the nature both of this medium and the author a certain number of self-indulgent detours into fiction seem regrettably inevitable. I’ll try to keep those at a minimum. For the most part I will stick to recounting many of the everyday experiences that never cease to fascinate and bemuse me: walking through open-air fish markets; hiking with Buddhist monks; eating and drinking with Koreans; and all the countless opportunities for comedy that avail themselves to you when you’re a stranger in a strange land, to list but a few.

Above all this blog will be a way for me to preserve the memory of what has become one of the most unique and remarkable seasons of my life. It is my hope that you would find some of these entries of interest.

I suppose that about does it by way of a preface.

Thanks for checking out my little love letter to the Land of Morning Calm.