I’ve been back in Korea for almost 5 days now.  I’ve moved into my apartment, meet my boss and coworker, and had a hour session with my new kindy class.  So it’s been a busy week!

 Dealing with my apartment was a bit of a challenge.  I thought that the school had already arranged an apartment for me, so I wasn’t too excited when they told me that we would have to go apartment hunting, and that the school was only providing us with $400/month for rent.  Lauren (one of my co-workers), Steve (an administrative person from the school), and I ended up finding a few apartments that were in our price range.  So I am now living in a tiny little studio about 6 subway stops away from my school.  At first I was freaking out about having to live there for a whole year, but when my furniture arrived and I had arranged and unpacked it started to feel a bit like home.  My favortie thing about the apartment is that there is a really cool little traditional Korean Market only a few blocks away.  So I can just wander down the street and buy fruit, veggies, homemade tofu, kitchen stuff, and pretty much anything I would want from little stalls on the side of the road.  I love not having to shop in those Wal-Mart type stores!

My school seems pretty good, but I was not prepared for how many hours we would be working in the day.  I am with my kindy kids from 9:30am until 2:30 pm with albsolutely no breaks!!  (Well, 30 mins for lunch, but that doesn’t really count.) Than I’ll be teaching elementary school kids for 4 hours after that on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays (again with no breaks)!  I knew there had to be a catch, for the school to be paying me so much.  I’m trying to look on the bright side, but that is a lot of teaching and no prep time or down time between classes.

I am teaching a 6 year old (Korean age, so really 5 year old) kindy class.  The kids and their moms came to school today for an hour to meet me and have a little meeting with the principal.  1 of the little boys took one look at me and then started bawling for about 45 minutes.  (I’m the first westerner most of them have seen, so I must be pretty scary!)  But luckily by the end of class he had joined in to sing songs and was giving me high hi’s.  I have a few kids that are super smart.  One girl spoke in full sentences, knew how to write in English, count, knew all of her colors and numbers etc!  I will also have an assistant teacher in my classroom with me all day, but she doesn’t really speak English so that will be interesting.

Well, that’s pretty much it for now.  I’ll let you know how I’m settling into new life later on. 

Well, as most of you know I spent about a month in the States visiting family and friends gefore heading out again.  It was great to catch up with everyone and just unwind!  I spent 2 weeks in MN and a week in Ft Myers, FL.  (Boy was it nice to have a break from the cold weather.  After living in SE Asia, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to coop with a MN winter again!)

I’m back in Seoul, Korea now.  I’ll be working at SOT (School of Tomorrow) in Gangnam.  I just arrived last night, so I haven’t seen the school or any of my co-workers yet.  My flights were pretty uneventful, except for the fact that a zipper on a little compartment of my backpack opened.  I can just imagine my dirty laundry laying on the runway in Tokyo or something. 

The school was nice enough to send a car to pick me up at the airport (ushually they just tell you to take the airport bus into the city).  And they are putting me up in a great hotel room, so I’m living a life of luxury at the moment!  My hotel room has so many great ammenities, like the biggest flat screen tv I’ve ever seen. (It is seriously at least 5 feet long!)  Also, there is a computer with free Internet, a jacuzzi bath tub, and a fridge!

I found some gimbap and aloe juice for breakfast and now I’m just chilling out until someone from the school calls me or comes to get me.

It was really easy getting from Flores, Guatemala to San Pedro, Belize.  I took a mini bus with other travelers because it actually worked out to be cheaper than taking the LD bus (which is a nicer bus company in Guatemala).  The border crossing was super fast and easy.  I found it very bizarre that the officials were actually speaking Englsih, but then I remembered its the offical language in Belize.  (If you listen to locals speaking to eachother you would never guess they are speaking english.  They sort of mix together some Creole, Spanish, and English and then they cut out all of the small words.  So there sentences end up being more like “Mon, beer, beach, go”  But without any pauses between the words.  So basically I couldn’t understand much of what was being said.)

The minibus dropped me off right at the ferries, and there happened to be a ferry (more like a big speedboat) heading out to San Pedro within a few minutes of my arrival.  So I didn’t have to wait around at all.  The boat ride out to the island was very nice and scenic.  When I arrived in San Pedro I walk to my guesthouse Pedro’s Inn, which is really the only budget option on the whole island.  It was $12 a night for my own room and a shared bathroom.  Pedro’s  was very simple but clean and only a 3 minute walk form the beach, so it worked out perfectly for me.  The main drawback was that it is basically on the runway of the airport.  Planes literally land about 30-40 feet behind the buliding, but since it is a small island there weren’t too many planes coming or going.

My typical day in Belize was pretty much wake up, go grab a coffee, go talk to all of the travel agents arranging snorkeling/boat trips for the day, relax on the beach at Ramone’s resort, sit in a hammock, read, swim, snorkel, eat, and eat some great seafood (usuhally lobster or shrimp). 

The travel agents were one of the most annoying things about San Pedro.  They put up signs advertising different trips they’re offering for the day, but half of the time they aren’t really available.  I had my heart set on doing a trip which was a day of sailing combined with snorkeling in Hol Chan and Shark Ray Alley, and a stop at Caye Caulker for lunch.  It took 3 days of running around to al of the travel agencies to finally find the right day and time to do the trip. 

The sailing/snorkeling trip was definetly the highlight of my time in Belize!  There were only 5 passengers including me on the catamaran and 2 crew members.  The crew was great! They were always coming around other us rum punch and taking care of us.  Our first stop of the day was Hol Chan Marine Park.  As soon as we got out of the boat we saw an morae eel swimming around in a big pile rocks.  I’ve seen a morae before, but usuhally they are very lazy and hardly move at all, this one was swimming all around.  It was really neat to see.  We also saw a few Spotted Eagle Rays (the teacher from “Finding Nemo”).  The Spotted Eagle Rays were my favorite animal of the day.  They have completely different movements from other rays. These ones look like they are flying through the water and flapping their “wings”.  The reefs in Belize have a diverse fish population too, which I think is really interesting to see.

Our next stop was Caye Caulker for lunch.  This is a smaller island where more backpackers and budget travellers like to stay.  It had a really chilled out/laid back vibe to it, but the beach was not very nice.  Most of the people were sunbathing on a cement walkway, so I think I made the right by going to San Pedro.  I had a yummy lobster kebab that some guy was grilling on the beach, for lunch.  Then after swimming for a bit and checking out the island it was back to the boat for some more snorkelling.

Our last stop of the day was Shark Ray Alley.  This is basically the “must see” snorkel spot in Belize, obviously known for having tons of sharks and rays.  When we first started snorkeling we sort of sporadically saw a few sharks off in the distance and a few different rays just chilling on the bottom of the ocean.  Then we came to a spot where there were 5 big nurse sharks at least 8-10 feet long eating the head of a baby shark.  That was pretty scary and disgusting!  But the freakiest part was when we got back to the boat, one of our crew members had chopped up a fish that he had caught and started to throw pieces of it all around us.  The sharks and rays started swarming around us and that was when I decided that I needed to get out of the water.  I thought it was really cool watching them from a distance and just a few at a time, but not being surrounded by them!

All in all, I enjoyed Belize and San Pedro but it was definetly not my favorite place of the trip.  The beach was not like I had imagined it to be.  It was quite narrow and there was tons of sea grass in the water and it was really shallow, so it wasn’t really nice swimming from shore.  Plus there has been so much development, that most of the beach is really built up and you sort of have to sneak into a hotels beach space in order to have a space to relax.  Also, it is an expensive place!  You can find deals at restraunts off the beaten track, but even buying snacks or things from the grocery store was incredibly expensive.  ( A box of cereal was about $10 US, a little package of cookies was about $6 US, and even an individual bottle of icetea was about $4 US at the grocery store!!)  The people in Belize were friendly, but San Pedro is more of a place for retired Americans and that was about 70% of the people I met there, so I didn’t really fit in to well. 

My trip around Central America is over.  It was a really fun time.  There were so many things to see and do there, that I’m glad I adjusted my schedule to explore more of it.  I’ve been in Minnesota now for 1 week, and tomorrow I head to Florida with my parents.  Then on Feburary 24th, I’ll be going back to Seoul to teach English.