first week in daegu

Well, I've been in South Korea now for more than a week. I'm sort of settling into a routine: waking up early and running in the morning, eating lunch, going to work around 3, leaving work at 10 and going to a gym that I joined this week. My neighborhood is in the southeast corner of the city, a pretty affluent area, I'm told. I'm down the street from man-made Suseong Lake, which is next to a rocket ship-themed amusement park. In the other direction is the center of Beommul-dong, where I teach. I live on the street that links the lake with the school, and it has a bunch of stores and restaurants, a food market specializing in fish and eels and a host of karaoke bars, concentrated outside my windows.

My apartment is a good-size studio. I have a television which shows the NBA finals, Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, Oprah, some interesting and incomprehensible Korean game shows, the occasional soccer match and the Spice Channel, blurred out. There are three channels showing other people play video games and four devoted to American, Japanese and Korean baseball. There's no shower, just a nozzle attached to a flexible hose that drains into the floor of the bathroom. I have air conditioning and heating. A washing machine. A full size fridge. No oven with which to bake my own cookies. Sniff sniff, hint hint.

The school is nice. It's official name is Swaton Language School For Kids (I'm always tempted to grab the sign and paint "Who Can't Read Good"), and has these official-looking wall clocks with the insignia, which is aqua blue and yellow. All the classrooms are named after Ivy League universities or elite boarding schools. I teach in the Exeter room and have my own computer, white board and files. The owner is great--he really cares about the teachers, which is actually not the case at all of these schools. You hear about a lot of dissatisfied teachers who break their contracts because their schools are so bad. James is his name, and he gave me his bike, which he never used. I think part of it is that he wants to keep "the guy from Yale" happy. That's how I'm known to some of my co-workers.