Preparing to Leave

In case any of you haven't heard, I will be heading to the wonderful country of South Korea around the 22nd of February. Specifically I will be going to the city of Ulsan, which is in the South East part of the country. It is right on the coast on the Sea of Japan. The city it self is a major industrial city with a population of 1.1 million. It is home to the largest automotive plant and the largest shipyard in the world. Despite its size it is still only the 7th largest city in the country.

I will be teaching at a private language school there. A private language school is basically an after school school parents send their kids too to learn how to speak English better. The kids do learn English in their normal schooling, but the private schools allow them to learn the language better and provides better opportunities for their future employment. As such I will mainly be working afternoon evenings over there 5 days a week 35-40 hours a week. I will be making 2.5 million Korean Won a month, so I will literally be a millionaire after the first month. Before you start hitting me up for money though be aware that the Korean Won does not transfer into the US dollar at a very high rate. (I hope you'll forgive me for hoping the US dollar will continue to devalue against the Korean Won, at least during the next year).

Most (if not all) of you are probably wondering why I am doing this. Well, there are several reasons. First of all it is quite hard to find a good paying in the current economy and this job will pay well, even once I transfer the Won into the US dollar. Secondly, I am still sort of young (going on to more than a quarter of a century), I have nothing holding me down, and it is a chance to experience a different country and culture while being payed well. Many of you are probably saying these are very similar to the reasons I gave for becoming a truck driver, and you'd be right. I did that to see the country and make some money and have some good experiences. Replace “country” with “another country” and the reasons are the same. Perhaps I'm just not any good at settling down, or finding a career, or finding a steady job. Or, maybe I'm just a wild and crazy youth, going out to experience the world. It's really hard to tell.

Apart from the “why” the second most common question I receive is “Do you know any Korean?”. The answer to this is “No.” I got Rosetta Stone from a friend and I couple of phrase books/dictionaries and am very slowly going through them. It is very slow going, especially since Korean is so different from English. They don't even use a similar alphabet. It's like they are trying to make it hard for me. The most troubling part is that I have to trust these books and software to translate accurately for me. It reminds me of a Monty Python sketch where things are mis-translated and wackiness and harm is done. Hopefully I won't be accidentally saying anything vulgar in Korean, but it's impossible to know for sure.

Since this has been going on longer than I thought I'll try to wrap it up. I'm going to South Korea in a week or so, I will be there for a year. I will attempt to maintain this blog, probably updating every week or two to keep all you wonderful people updated on my comings and goings. While there I will of course miss all of you, although hopefully you will keep in touch. Don't bother calling me since I will be cancelling my phone service. My e-mail is either trevor54@gmail.com or trevor54@hotmail.com my Skype username is trevor.dykeman. You can try contacting me on Facebook, but that is probably the slowest way to keep in touch.