At the Starting Line

Well, it's another adventure and another blog for your favorite engineer-in-waiting. You might remember the last time we met which was last summer, when the deft-blogger Duncan joined me for a romp around our great country from Ohio to California. Since then, my camel loving friend has moved to Morocco for a 2 year stint with the Peace Corps where he is lurking in the shadows trying to talk to women about midwifery. No, but seriously, he is getting well-adapted, stunning everyone with his Berber language skills and resisting the temptation of Islam. In fact, he has had an infinite amount of marriage requests, unfortunately they are all from 16 year old girls, kind of inappropriate for his Quaker upbringing.

As for me, I have been on the front lines in protecting Nevada's mighty fine public lands. As a year-long Americorps volunteer I have been building trails, killing invasive species and cutting down ladder fuels and hazard trees. Upon retelling my experiences, everyone wants to know, "So what have you learned from this experience?" Usually I could say something about how maybe I can lead up to 40 people in a safety meeting, or maybe about how I can cut down 5 trees at once and buck them up with one hand, or perhaps you might be impressed that I can now build a 4 foot wide horse trail on a 45 degree slope in the snow, you might be disgusted by the fact that my comrades and I routinely went 8 days without showering while sweating it out in the Mojave Desert spraying herbicide and wandering 50 miles in a week looking for a particularly invasive tree that is sucking all the water out of Lake Mead. Whatever the individual experience and growth from it may be, the most pertinent and long-lasting effect of the year would have to be that I have learned to be able to eat anything* and be pretty happy about it. (* granted that it is actually food and was obtained at a grocery store, food bank or equally respected vendor) Now those that have fed me lately know that I would prefer the vegan option (or In-n-Out), but throughout this past year, I routinely had to eat very poorly cooked food, dirt/dust covered food, cooked-by-unwashed-hands food, food eaten way too frequently, and food that is supposed to be cold but is warm due to lack of refrigeration. As you can tell, this year was an reintroduction back into germ-infested nature and a rapid rehabilitation for my formerly giardia-infested digestive tract.

Now, for the next adventure, you may have heard that I willbe moving to the Republic of South Korea to teach English to young Starcraft champions. This is, in fact, 100% true. You may also want to know if along with English I will be teaching other great American traditions, such as carnivourism, alcoholism and pharmaceuticalism. No, I will not. Now, you may notice that I have no qualifications for teaching english, nor can I speak more than 10 words of Korean, however, all that is needed to obtain such a teaching position is a Bachelor's degree in any subject and the ability to stick it out for what has been almost a 5-month application process. My working visa was finally obtained on August 27th and my plane ticket booked the same day (paid for by the school), so considering I am flying out September 2, it is pretty last minute.

My home for the next year will be the fourth largest city in South Korea, Daegu. It is known to be the hottest part of the country and the birthplace of Samsung. It also has the best professional soccer team in the K-League, FC Daegu. I will be working at the English Village IBC Town, which is kind of a progressive private school, teaching English and some other subjects. I'll be teaching English Conversation for Elementary school-age kids and working weekdays from 2PM - 10PM. School is intense for young Koreans, they attend public schools in the mornings and then many go to private schools called "Hagwans" for more studying and then they get home late at night and prepare to do the whole thing all over again. Oh, that's not even mentioning that they still get whacked on the hands by teachers for bad behavior.

I will be flying out tonight, leaving at about 6PM out of Seattle and will fly to Los Angeles, then to Incheon, Korea, then to Busan, Korea where I will then take a train up to Daegu. It is a two-day trip as I will be getting into Daegu sometime on Thursday. So, if I can survive the trip, I should have a lot more to share with you, so stay tuned!