On the Upswing

During orientation we were showed a graph that displayed the typical cycle of "happiness" a person will go through during a year long immersion experience. At the time that I saw this graph, I was in my honeymoon stage of my year in Korea. I was loving everything from the sour cafeteria kimchi to practicing my few Korean phrases at coffee shops with my American friends. I had just landed in Korea and everything was wonderful.

I went through another honeymoon stage when I moved to Cheonan. My school was adorable and my homestay was great. I believed that I was living a charmed Korean life. The chart showed a slow decline from the honeymoon stage to the freak out stage, which was supposed to hit about October. This chart was exactly my experience. Around the beginning of the month, my rose colored glasses cleared up and I was seeing Korea for what it really is. Everything started to bother me from rude questions from strangers to getting sick from too much rice. I was becoming bored with teaching directly from a textbook and I was desperately looking for more to do during my free time. I started to realize that my clothes were going to become stretched out from being hung dry all year, that I was going to have to wake up everyday (including weekends) for an early morning family breakfast and that my host family would always treat me like I am 12 half of the time instead of 24, my Korean age. My host father and I got into our first big disagreement over me not wanting to confession in Korean. I didn't want to be at school because I found it frustrating to co-teach with someone I do not share many philosophies of education with and I didn't want to be at home because I didn't want to talk about how I have a unholy soul. My freak out stage put me into a funk.

The next step on the chart is recovery. I have finally reached this stage and with careful planning I have created solutions to each of my "issues." My host father and I sat down and discussed my spiritual health and I was sure to not let anything get lost in translation. We came to a consensus on my well being and everything at home is much more comfortable.

I spoke with my co-teacher about having more responsibilities at school to help my boredom and I am currently tutoring a group of students for a speech competition and another for a writing contest. The ability to work creatively with these students is really rewarding and helping to balance out the textbook boredom.

I have started volunteering at a North Korean refugee camp, The Heavenly Dream School, with some other ETAs. I am sure that this experience will be a highlight of my year and I am looking forward to sharing stories about the middle school class that I am teaching at the camp. The travel time to and from The Heavenly Dream School is a great time to catch up with other ETAs and speak in English.

For my mental and physical health I have started taking yoga classes at a local yoga center. The class is a small group of middle aged Korean women and myself. This was my first week, but they have done a great job of welcoming me into their group. We have great konglish conversations about breathing, their children, and of course, the swine flu. Today after class we had a tea party in the studio. We put our mats in a circle, drank green tea and ate cookies. It was really cute that they do that together. They also invited me out to dinner with the "ladies" next week for a traditional Korean meal. That pretty much means, there will be lots of food and lots of soju.

Overall, I am happy to be heading out of the recovery stage and into the plateau of happiness in Korea. I am almost a third of a way through my year. I have had a great experience so far, but I still have so far to go. There are lots of fun things coming up and I want to enjoy each of them to their full capacity :)

Less than two months until my family arrives in Korea!! Griswolds take Asia!