New country, new internet community

Well, I've been here in Seoul, South Korea for two weeks now, and I have quickly come to realize that I don't want to go to all the trouble of sending everyone every cool picture I take or update that I write, so I have jumped on to yet another internet bandwagon. I was thinking about Myspace, but it just looked too trendy, and I finished with that "make internet friends" stuff when I turned 13. Also, another reason for blogging is that I can never really gauge which friends actually do want to hear from me, and which I just start to annoy with my updates. So the ball is now in your court. Read, or don't read, at your leisure.
Here's the first update. Don't worry, the rest won't be this long.
-Mike
P.S. Sorry about the cheesy intro.

Anyong haseyo! That's "Hello" in Korean, which was the only word I knew when I came here for the first time two years ago as an exchange student. Now I'm back as an English teacher, and although the food, customs, and language aren't so foreign anymore, I still have so far to go before I can really have conversations in Korean. I arrived a week and a half ago, and am starting to get settled in my neighborhood here. I live on the 5th floor of an apartment building in the northeastern part of Seoul with a Canadian and another American who also teach at my school. It's a fully furnished apartment, we each have our own bedroom, and the school pays the rent, so I'm pretty happy with it.

The school I teach at is an after-school english-language school, so I teach from 3-9pm every day. I teach kids ranging in age from 7 to 15 years old, and although my first day of teaching them was a little rough (since I had just flown into Korea the night before), I am starting to get the hang of it. Luckily, the kids know a decent level of English, and the Korean teachers all speak English excellently, so I don't have many communication problems at school.

Outside of school, however, is a different story. Yet although I know very little Korean, I'm already starting to get to know some of the people in our neighborhood, like the woman who runs a little restaurant right on the corner by our apartments. I have gone to eat there a few times after work, and although my Korean skills are minimal, I have made friends with her and her son, who is my age and was there the first night that I ate there. The whole time we were talking in Korean I kept thinking to myself, "I can't believe I'm still understanding what they're saying and am able to reply!" Her son even gave me his phone number and asked me to call him sometime, although I don't know how much we'll be able to talk about before I run out of words I know.

I've also been able to meet up with some of the friends I had made last time I was here. One of them, James Kim, is the chaplain at a Korean army base in the western part of Seoul. On my first Sunday here, James invited me to come to the service on the base, so I went, and not only was I the only foreigner in the service, but they said that I might have been the first foreigner ever to visit that particular base! I didn't really understand any of the sermon besides the passage he was preaching from that someone pointed out for me in an English Bible, but "amen" is "amen" in Korean, so I could chime in with everyone else at the pauses in the prayers. Afterwards the church put on a big sort of field day for about 150 or so of the soldiers, and I joined in, too. We did obstacle courses, three legged races, that game where you tie a balloon on your leg and try to pop everyone else's before they pop yours, and played soccer. It was fun and everyone was really nice, but it seemed kind of surreal- I kept thinking to myself, "This is my 3rd day in Korea and I'm on a Korean army base playing elementary-school-birthday-party games with a bunch of Korean soldiers."

Last weekend I met up with my friend Ben from college who is now teaching English in a small town in Korea on a Fullbright Scholarship. Ben and I went to these mountains called Seoraksan in the northeastern part of South Korea. People go to those mountains for the hiking and the fall foliage, but when we got there we saw to our disappointment that most of the trees were still pretty green. And although we did do a good amount of hiking, we were constantly surrounded by other people, because Seoraksan is the most popular hiking destination in Korea, and Koreans evidently are avid hikers. It was pretty amusing to see alot of them in full hiking gear, with special shoes, pants, shirts, vests, scarfs, hats, and backpacks for hiking, and many with one or even two professional walking sticks. Although they had all the gear, alot of them didn't hike very high up the mountains, and there were paths everywhere, so the going wasn't very rough. But despite the crowds and the mostly green leaves, it was a good time and there was some great scenery. And yes, I am doing the "peace" sign in that picture- pretty sweet, huh?