My Korea Over the past two and a half years I have detailed a lot of my feelings about Korea on this blog. I am, by nature, an overly sentimental person and so looking back on my posts from when I first arrived in Korea they read as such. Overly sentimental. But the truth…
Starting Year Three I'm back in Korea, back at my desk in the grade three teachers office at my school on top of the hill I have to climb every morning. Back to daily alerts from the government that is air quality is so bad you shouldn't go outside, and back to my tiny…
September Update: Mom Comes to Korea! Brace yourselves ladies and gentlemen this is going to be a long one. September was eventful to say the least. In the beginning of the month at school I was enjoying the accidental success of a particular lesson for my grade one classes that I expected to flop…
May Update: Warm Weather and Good Vibes May has been a good one. I finally feel like I'm really past that weird funk I was in at the beginning of the school year and the strangeness of starting again has worn off. I'm still as busy as ever but exhausted after a long…
When The Shine Wears Off This is year two for me living and working in Daejeon, Korea. So that means that, for two-thirds of my students this is their second year with me. It means that the novelty of me has worn off for most of my kids. That manifests itself in good and…
April was a pretty low-key month. At the end of March I found that I'd accidentally written something closer to a short novel than a blog post about everything that happened but this month I'm here with almost nothing. In fact I don't even remember much in particular that I did, a sure sign that…
When you're living in a country that's so homogeneous it's people took note when the foreign population jumped from 1% to 3% it's easy to feel like you're fighting a losing battle in terms of "fitting in" with the country and culture around you. In a bizarre turn of events, one of the hardest things…
Continue reading ➞ Ways to Get Connected While Living Abroad
I arrived back in Korea to start my second year here on February 27th. We had our first day of the new school year on March 2nd, and it's now been about 7 weeks back at school. And those seven weeks have, unfortunately, seen some of loneliest most anxious moments while living in Korea. I…
I have been in Korea for a year. Today is the last day of school and I'm writing this from my desk as the office is descending into utter chaos while the grade three students storm in and out with questions for their home room teachers about if they're having a snack party later, what…
As I try to look back on this past year in Korea and come to some sort of conclusion about things I've learned or ways I've changed, I can't seem to come up with any clear answer. I've learned a lot and certainly changed in a lot of ways, but Korea is not a complete…
Hours and Miles 