[6 months Review ] August & September

I wrote a review for my 1st 6mos in Korea... its a long post so I broke it up into parts.

August
August was a hectic month. It was filled with many ups and downs I’m surprised I have made it this far. The 10 day EPIK orientation went by in a blur and my birthday celebration wasn’t what I expected. If some told me 5 years ago that I’d be celebrating my 25th birthday in S. Korea I wouldn’t have believed them. At the orientation one of the coordinators started and inside joke with a phrase from one of the “travel Korea’” campaigns. “Korea is dynamic” basically this means when “crazy”, “odd”, “confusing”, or “last minute things” happen to you in Korea it’s because” Korea is dynamic”.
September
School was in full swing and I was going through my culture shock. There were many moments where I day dreamed about packing my bags and running away in the middle of the night. You’d be surprised to know how many people have done that in the past. One day after a hard day of classes I fell into a deep sleep around 5pm. About 30 minutes later the sound of yelling and drums violently woke me up. I honestly thought it was the coming of the apocalypse. Completely disoriented I run around my apartment look out into the hallway then, run over the window. I’m scared and half expecting to see the four horsemen outside my window. Actually it was much worse it was about 10 Korean men marching in the streets with flags and drums. Even with the visual my heart is still beating like crazy and echoing in my ears. The sounds of drums and yelling fade until they make it around the block again. This continued every Friday until October. During this period “Korea is dynamic” became my mantra, though it didn’t help much. Being stared at and whispered about wasn’t as hard to deal with compared to the insanity of my middle school classes. At orientation I was relieved to find that I was assigned to an elementary school. Once I met my co-teacher I was informed that in addition to elementary school classes and would also be teaching at a middle school. Which I think was ridiculous. All the people that know that have two schools are placed at schools of the same level. For example two elementary schools, two middle schools, or two high schools. The co-teachers at the middle school did little to help me when it came to lesson planning. It caused me a lot of stress and headaches. Toward the end of the month Korean food started to make me sick. I wasn’t sure why and the doctors had not answers for me… so of course they assumed it must be stress or some mental defect.