Goodbye Wangsan Middle School

Bittersweet goodbyes. Wangsan Middle School is my smallest school with 20 students. I only go to the school once a week to teach classes and I don’t always see my students every week. There was a two month hiatus after my coteacher was in an accident and a substitute teacher took his place.  I had learned to recognize most of my students names but unfortunately with the absence of not going I forgot almost all…

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Do you wanna build a snowman?! Damn you Frozen.

For those of you who haven’t seen Disney’s new animated movie, Frozen, you are lucky. Personally while the story was cute there was way too much singing for me. Unfortunately, if you are an English teacher in Korea this movie and its songs are pretty popular. My co-teacher wanted to do a lesson on the song, “Let it go,” lucky for us most of the students didn’t show up to school because of snow on…

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A Bug? A Snake?! The Mysterious Sting Ends at the Hospital

2013/07/26 by Nina 16 Comments Wednesday night at about 9 pm I went for a walk. As I was heading down the concrete path by the school something stung the side of my left foot. Immediately, I used my cell phone to check my foot and noticed a little blood, I looked for the culprit and found nothing. As soon as I put my left foot down again, I realized I could no longer stand…

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Korean Banking 101

Living as an Expat there are a lot of Banks that are recommended to go with when you live in Korea. KEB and Citibank seem to be the two that most people recommend. With that being said if you live in a city your options are pretty limitless, however, living in a rural part of the country your options are normally limited to one. My only option is Nonghyup bank as that is what my…

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3 Schools and Nina Teacher

I’m currently teaching at 3 different schools. When I first arrived in Okgye (옥계)  I was told that I would be teaching at the middle school 3 days a week and the elementary school 2 days a week. That sounded like a good schedule to me.  I’m in the door at 8:30 A.M. and I’m out the door at 4:30 P.M. To me, this was heaven. No weekends, no overtime, no fixing problems, I was…

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Off to Gangneung

Today I met up with a few other English teachers who are placed in Gangneung.  I am about 25 minutes away by bus. So this morning I set out early to leave and I asked to make sure I got on the right bus even though I knew it was the right bus. I like to double check these things. A middle-aged man befriended me and talked to me a bit on the bus and…

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