Home sweet Ori...

A tour of our apartment in pictures!  I shall try to update more fully after work today.

Our Westernized bathroom!  Note the floral toilet...

This is our living area.  It's quite spacious and came furnished with
a tv, some seating, drying racks, and a bookshelf.
See our hanging laundry there?

Here is our kitchenette!  The "cabinets" on the left are
actually our refrigerator and freezer.  We have a microwave, a
washer/dryer combo, and a two-burner stove.

It's difficult to capture the hilarity that is our loft.  We have a little
bet up there, with some bars to hang our clothes... a couple of shelves...
and a three-foot ceiling.

Our lovely little hallway.  Lots of storage space
here, with a nice step that reminds us to kick off
our shoes!  We have sensor card access.  No keys!

First impressions.

After a long but more or less uneventful flight, we finally arrived in Seoul.  We had a driver pick us up and take us to our temporary hotel accommodations, and they are so nice!  We are staying at Hotel S.R. in Seohyeon-dong, just about 20 minutes from our school.  Though it's a small room, we have a big bed, fridge, computer, jacuzzi tub and wet room (shower that just ), heated EVERYTHING (floors, bed, toilet...) with lots of free toiletries and an extremely friendly staff.  Needless to say, we are glad to get a chance to relax.

The director of the school, Andy, came by the hotel to meet us and go over our schedule.  He was very charismatic-- I think we're lucky to have such a nice director to work with!  He gave us our teaching manuals and showed us a little bit of the town around where our hotel is.

Tomorrow we will go to the school to meet and greet with the students, teachers, and parents.  Andy told us that the parents will likely be coming tomorrow just to look at us... so we are going to try hard to be presentable!  We will have 3 days of training-- just shadowing the head teachers and getting to know the kids.  Apparently I have a really great kindy class of 7-year-olds, whereas Ben got placed with the rowdy boys!  That should be interesting.  :)

We still need to go to the hospital to get our 80,000 Won physical, then we'll need to apply for our Alien Registration Card so we can open our bank account.

It's turning out to be a busy life already here in South Korea, but we are so happy to be here!

-Rebekah

A grand adventure.

Hello, blog-o-verse!
Tomorrow morning, Ben and I will finally be leaving for Seoul, South Korea.  We fly out of Memphis, Tennessee, at 6:00am to Chicago O'Hare.  Our flight out of Chicago leaves at 12:00pm and flies straight to Incheon Airport in Seoul.  It's a 14 hour flight (ick!), and we'll be in Seoul the following day around 4:00pm KST (2:00am CST on Jan. 24th).

This was a last minute development, which I am discovering is normal for ESL teachers in Korea.  We found out last Monday night that we were going to be leaving in a week.  Hasn't anyone ever heard of booking flights in advance?  Sheesh.

Ben and I are very excited about the journey, however.  I miss traveling, and I'm ready to get there and get acclimated.  We're nervous about teaching-- who wouldn't be?  Nevertheless, we are anxious to get started.

We'll miss all of you in the States!  Hopefully we will have our internet up and running soon after we arrive so we can post a status update.

Please feel free to add us to Skype!
Me:  makeupbybeks
Us:  beksandben

Cheers!  Next time we post, we'll be in Korea!!

Unforeseen delays.

A lot has happened over the past week.
I quit my job at the spa.
We broke our lease and moved out of our apartment in Conway to relocate to Jonesboro while we waited for our flight.
We got a flight booked for last Saturday and didn't show because we didn't get our visas in.

Oh, and the school postponed our arrival date until February 20th.

Needless to say, this is very frustrating.  We've been busting all week and weekend to get things done, we've spent a lot of money to expedite the process so we could leave quickly... and the school tells us they want to push back our date of arrival.

So we get to wait unemployed for two months.  Who knew you'd have us for so long, America?