Linguist Ashley and the Mr. arrive in Korea!

The first week of January, the Mr. and I landed in Korea. He was going to begin training to teach English for Chungdahm (a chain of private schools, or hagwons, in Korea). We stayed in a business-y part of Seoul known as Gangnam. We were at Coatel Chereville Residence.

The first weekend we didn't have anything to do except hang out with the Mr.'s best friend from childhood, Natron, and his Chinese girlfriend, YK. On the sidewalk in Gangnam there are machines that take your picture and email it to you. Fun! Here we are. You can tell from this picture how finicky I am about how I look. :P  The Mr. is in the middle.

So we hung with the gang all weekend, but on Monday the Mr. had to start his training. That left me in a hotel room alone from 8am-6pm every day, while he learned the Chungdahm way of teaching EFL. I can entertain myself pretty well. In addition to things I had to do to ensure I have a job in March, like mail documents and request documents and such, and besides sort of housekeeping things like buying myself gloves, I gave myself a list of things to do every day: exercise, study Korean, and freeread.

To exercise, every day I found an online no-equipment-necessary workout and did it while I watched CNN International in the hotel room. Most of these workouts put a lot of emphasis on push-ups, so my chest was sore by the second day. I switched from strength exercises to cardio in the room (a minute of jumping jacks, then a minute of burpees, stuff like that) to a yoga video. I like to do a different workout every day. I get bored very very easily.

To study Korean I am taking an eclectic, mixed approach. I have multiple books and CDs that I use. For this first week, I listened to one half-hour lesson from Pimsleur Korean. My alma mater had Lessons 1-30 and the Pimsleur Reading series, so I copied them to my laptop and saved a ton of money. I love getting stuff for free. I'm not a shopper. So I made sure I did some Pimsleur every day in the hotel while the Mr. was gone at training.

I just finished a PhD in Linguistics, so I'm happy to have some free time to read novels and short stories and such. One of the suitcases I brought to Korea is just full of books to read. If you are like me, you have an entire bookshelf--or bookcase--of books you bought to read. One of the first ones I tackled after my dissertation was accepted was this one:

I bought it on eBay in like 2006. It took me 6 years to get around to reading it, but I enjoyed it. It has medieval folktales ("The Rabbi Who Was Turned Into a Werewolf"), high literature that I didn't understand ("The Messiah of the House of Ephraim"), and pulp fiction ("The Golem"). I like reading classics from outside the accepted canon. I once had an ancestor who was Jewish, and it was also cool to read about one aspect of my heritage, although the way the authors in this collection discussed converts to Christianity informed me that my ancestor was, to them, worse than dead. I would definitely recommend this book to fans of fantasy who want to expand beyond the Tolkien-esque. So I was able to get most of the way through this book during the Mr.'s training period.

So, that's basically what my days were like my first week in Korea. The Mr. then passed training and we were bussed to our new home: Dongtan.