During the summer of 2008 my ex-spouse and I were working as archaeologists for a small company that was becoming unstable. We needed a solid plan B, and when an acquaintance lauded the financial benefits of teaching English overseas, we decided that this would be a good opportunity for us as a family in an uncertain economic time.
Within this blog, in addition to discussing the wonderful world of food, I would like to recount our two year adventure in South Korea. It has been a year since our return and I have distanced myself a little from some of the drama that we endured and hopefully in that time period have gained some perspective. I hope to communicate the initial culture shock, transition and adaptation over the course of two years living in three different apartments in three different cities (one was more of a village) on two ends of South Korea.
In 2008 my ex-partner and I were at a crossroads in our relationship and careers, and we were co-parenting our children. Our decision to list the house, pack our belongings into a storage unit, sell the car and fly to South Korea to teach English with our daughter and son in tow was fueled by several factors: partly by the tanking economy with a very uncertain future in Cultural Resource Management archaeology, a field that relied upon continuous land development projects; our venerable dog’s illness and subsequent euthanasia; and a desire to give our kids an opportunity for experiential learning to challenge and engage them.
It was a life-altering, incredible, and mind-bending experience and we have returned to Canada with many mixed emotions. My son, 3 years old when we arrived in Korea, is now at the time of writing, 6 years old. He spent two birthdays (his 4th and 5th), Christmases and summers in S. Korea and his first school experiences were within the Korean curriculum - he learned Korean and began to study Chinese and taekwando in addition to his other curricular subjects. He regards S. Korea as his home and misses his friends and teachers.
It was a life-altering, incredible, and mind-bending experience and we have returned to Canada with many mixed emotions. My son, 3 years old when we arrived in Korea, is now at the time of writing, 6 years old. He spent two birthdays (his 4th and 5th), Christmases and summers in S. Korea and his first school experiences were within the Korean curriculum - he learned Korean and began to study Chinese and taekwando in addition to his other curricular subjects. He regards S. Korea as his home and misses his friends and teachers.
Our daughter was 11 when we arrived at Incheon International Airport and her first year in Bucheon was pretty wonderful, even idyllic as she was a grade 6 student in the classroom next to my English classroom at an elementary school in Bucheon. Her classmates (my students) had fairly high proficiency in English. She studied math, music, art, Korean, science and P.E., just like her classmates – the only subject she was spared was Korean Ethics due to the language barrier.
We all learned to read and write Hangul soon after arriving – the wrinkle was in acquiring the language as we did not have scheduled lessons and the urban environment tended to encourage English language competence – meaning people really wanted us to help them with their English rather than the other way around! We naively thought that we would be in a predominately Korean language environment, ripe for an instructive immersion experience.
We all learned to read and write Hangul soon after arriving – the wrinkle was in acquiring the language as we did not have scheduled lessons and the urban environment tended to encourage English language competence – meaning people really wanted us to help them with their English rather than the other way around! We naively thought that we would be in a predominately Korean language environment, ripe for an instructive immersion experience.
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