Jinyeong-ri Our new home

Jinyeong-ri, Jinyeong-eup, Gimhae City, South Korea. This is our new home. The population is around 26,000 and we have been told by our boss is quickly growing. That's why the school we will be teaching at was opened here. Glen, our director, says the small town is becoming "trendy." We saw evidence of this as we walked through the old city and then the new city today. Jinyeong-ri became well known because it is the last Korean President's home town. Just north of the main highway running through the city fast development has occurred. Just within the last handful of years hundreds of new buildings: apartments, offices, stores, and high-rise towers have been constructed. Many buildings around our apartment are still under construction and we are pretty sure there will be continued development for years to come. In fact, Glen also told us that the tall high-rise apartments that occupy the entire northern part of the town will be copied, and an identical area will be built just north of that. In short, it's insane.


See images of our town at my FLICKR site.


It would be interesting to contrast the level of density of the high-rise blocks to a typical American suburb. After doing some rough measuring and calculations, I've determined the area that the high-rises occupy is about .15mi x .25mi. This is about 33 acres. Within this area there are about 30 high rise apartments that are about 20 floors tall each. It's difficult to say how many units are on each floor, but I think it's safe to say it's more than a couple. The lifestyle in Korea is very different from that of America. This is for sure.

You and I Hagwon

Hagwon = Private English school. This is our Hagwon, just like our apartment, it's brand new. It occupies the 4th floor of the building near our apartment. The upper left image is the lobby and reception desk; the lower left image is the C-R Room (Comprehension / Review room - computer based testing). The upper right image is a little seating area just off the lobby, to the left of the entrance. The other three are images of some of the classrooms. There are a total 4 classrooms.

Views from the flight in

These images were taken from my phone during our 1 hour flight from Seoul to Gimhae. The Korean landscape is beautiful. Our regional director guy said 70% of Korea is mountain. I believe it... I don't know what cities we flew over or what I took photos of, but from what I can tell these photos are fairly representative of many Korean cities.

I want.... that

Garnish or meal? We weren't sure...

Our first meal in Korea was an experience. We were both starving after traveling for nearly 24 hours and only having airline food in our stomachs. We walked down the street about a half block from our apartment and decided to try the first restaurant that we thought looked promising. We figured we could mosey in, take a peak at the menu and get an idea of what they serve. Well, as we entered the restaurant this elderly Korean lady eagerly waved us to come in and gestured us towards an open table, so we decided to go for it. We opened the menu and were greeted with all Korean text and few pictures... The lady came over with some tea and we asked for an English menu. She didn't speak any English, nor had an English menu. She grabbed the menu and started asking everyone in the restaurant if they could help us, or so we gathered that's what was going on. Turned out nobody spoke English. But then, one gentleman came over and opened the menu with us, he tried to explain it to us but everything we heard was Korean. We then resorted to pointing to 1 of the three tiny images we saw at the bottom of the menu. He nodded his head a few times and then went to deliver the message to the lady. So far we had little idea of what we were doing but agreed that the restaurant was being very helpful for us. A minute later three tiny dishes were delivered to our table. We weren't sure if it was what we ordered or if it was a garnish. After looking around at other tables and seeing many other people having identical dishes we decided that our main dish was yet to come. And so it did. The lady came out with two large bowls of pasta and an even larger bowl of a black sauce with shrimp, octapus pieces, onions and other things in it. She poured a bunch over Amanda's noodles and then mine and proceeded mix it in to our noodles for us. She spent a good couple minute ensuring we had a good mixture of noodle and black sauce stuff. She also brought out a fork and spoon for us so we didn't have to use the chopsticks. She showed us that we could stick the fork in and spin it around in order to eat. All this was a very nice gesture of assistance. We were really impressed, even though we still had no idea what exactly it was we were about to eat. The highlight of our meal was when after a couple minutes of eating, the lady came back to our table with a pare of scissors and went right into Amanda's bowl and started cutting her food with the scissors. Either she just assumed we never ate pasta noodles before, or our form was so atrocious she felt the need to jump in with scissors. We said no no, that's ok! And she smiled and left. All in all the food was good and filling, we couldn't finish all of it because we got quite full, and we didn't do much with the small plates of garnishes. After going to the counter to pay we attempted to say "Thanks for the delicious meal from our Korea book, but after a couple attempts resorted to just pointing to the Korean text in the book for the lady to see. That worked pretty good and we were on our way.

Our NEW apartment

We got fairly lucky and have landed ourselves a brand new apartment to live in for the next year. So new, in fact, that we are the first residents. The building is only a few stories high, and has about 4 apartments on each floor. We're at the end of the hall on the second floor. The ground level is a retail space but doesn't have any store or restaurant in it yet. Because almost every other building on our block has a restaurant on the ground floor, I think that's what will most likely be in ours.

Our front door has an electronic code access lock device. You hit a button and then numbers appear in a random order on a display for us to enter the code. It's pretty high-tech. We also have a phone in our bedroom that's hooked up to the door bell, so whenever someone comes to the door we can see who it is via a camera.

When you enter our apartment you first go through a small entry space intended for guests to remove their shoes. From there you go through a glass door, and then can either hang a left to enter our bedroom or go right into our kitchen and dining space. Off of the kitchen to the right is a laundry room and our bathroom. The bathroom is maybe 4'x4', with just a pedestal sink and toilet. The shower is the bathroom. There is a shower head connected to the sink faucet, so when showering you set your water temp and pressure on the sink and then turn a valve to redirect the water to the shower head that hangs on the wall next to the sink. We have to be careful when showering so that everything in the bathroom doesn't get saturated, like the toilet paper or q-tips... It will take some getting used to, but I think we'll become more efficient bathers as a result.

Last day in the U.S.A.!

The night before Amanda and I depart for Korea, we are finishing our packing and final preparations. Amanda's parents, Becky and Jim, are cooking a delicious smelling meal of duck and squash... mmmmm.... We have weighed our luggage and came just up to 50lbs per bag, right at the limit. For the next 12 months we will each be living off of two suitcases, a carry on bag and a backpack! We'll head down to Chicago around 8:00pm tonight to get on our Asiana Airlines flight taking off at 1:00am Sunday. It's a 14 hour flight from Chicago to Seoul, and then another 1 hour flight from Seoul to Gimhae. We have little idea of what to expect upon our arrival and hope the nerves stay down during the flight. We'll let you know how it goes when we get there!