Introduction

I am currently sitting in my parents' house in Columbia, SC. I am on the final leg of an epic road trip that has stretched 4000 miles from Miami to New York with many stops in between. My girlfriend, Catherine, has a detailed account to that opening chapter of our story. I highly suggest that you head over to her blog and catch up with what we've been doing as she tells it better than I possibly could.

In exactly 10 days I will be on a flight to Korea.....it still doesn't seem real. Catherine and I have spent the last 6 months researching, studying, preparing, and agonizing over every last detail to get us to this point. The culmination of all that effort is around the corner and I still struggle to comprehend what we're about to do.

It all started because my former college roommate, Andrew, told me of his plan to go to Taiwan for a year to teach English. This seemed like a great plan for him and I encouraged him to go do it. Life got in the way however and he wasn't able to do it. Instead I hung on to the idea for myself. After conducting some preliminary research I found that for a first time teacher with no experience Korea is the place to go. The pay is decent, the benefits good, and the jobs plentiful.

Here I am, 6 months later, with a visa in my passport and plane tickets in hand for 6:15am July 6th on US Airways to Charlotte, 9:40am to San Francisco, and finally 2:10pm on Singapore Airlines to Seoul, South Korea. We will arrive at 6:35pm July 7th after roughly 20 hours in the air. Really not that bad if you think about it but still daunting for someone who has never left the country and only crossed the Mighty Mississippi once.

We will have one day to adjust to our new life in korea before work begins and we are expected to fulfill our end of the bargain. Within that first week I will undergo a medical exam so as to be accepted onto the Korean National Health Plan, sit at the Immigration office to receive my Alien Registration Card (how weird to think of myself as an alien.....) and setup my Korean bank account. I will be doing this with little to know understanding of the native language and with a completely different upbringing than everyone around me. I expect to sympathize far more with the plight of those who arrived on the shores of America a century ago, and those who are still arriving.

I plan to blog once a week from Korea to keep everyone up to date on how my adventure is going. My next post will either be right before or right after we have flown to Korea....if I was a betting man I'd say one before and one after actually. I expect the culture shock to necessitate an extra post.