On my own

I'm now in my placement city where I'll be teaching for the next year. I'm not staying with my homestay family yet, because they're still visiting America, but I'm staying with a really nice family for a few days. I'm not sure when I'm moving in with my permanent homestay family or when I'm starting to teach... sometime early next week but the language barrier prevented me from learning exactly when.

So yesterday was our last day together during orientation. It's been nice having a group of 60 Americans to talk to, some more than others. To meet our school principals, we went into the auditorium where they were having a workshop about "how to treat an ETA." We lined up around the front of the auditorium, and when our name was called we would raise our hand, and bow to our principal. We were told to make a full 90 degree bow. This was a formal occasion and no one wanted to make a bad first impression, so the pressure was on. But it turned out not to be too serious. The principals were eager to meet us, and one even jumped out of his seat, ran over to his new ETA (Jackie), and popped some silly string and shouted how excited he was. One ETA made the bow, but then fell on the stage as she was backing up. During the wait, both the ETA's and the principal's were thinking "Who am I going to get?"

I got a nice principal who was there with another English teacher. Luckily they could speak some English, so the 3 and a half hour car ride wasn't too awkward or too silent. It was tough to stay awake the whole time, and I almost fell alseep several times. But we finally made it to Gyeryong, and I met my surrogate host family.

Gyeryong isn't as small as I thought it would be. So that's comforting. I took a bike ride around today, and tomorrow I'll go to Daejon with my family to see a movie. We might see Stealth. I might prefer a Korean movie even if I can't understand it.