Teachers Share their Experiences While Living Abroad!

I've been living in Korea for about nine months now, and I've absolutely loved it thus far. This being said, I must admit that I was a little nervous about celebrating my birthday while teaching English in Korea, so far away from all of my friends and family. My birthday happens to fall on St. Patrick’s Day, and being from Boston, I’m a little spoiled when it comes to birthday festivities. I wasn’t so sure that Korea could live up to my expectations. I was wrong.

Last weekend I celebrated my 25^th birthday.  This was the second birthday that I have celebrated since moving to Korea to teach English.  Every year I try to think of something creative to do for my birthday.  Last year, 2 of my good friends flew to Jeju for the weekend.  Because this was my 25^th birthday, I decided that I needed to do something out of my element for it.  Since I have never been the biggest fan of heights and I knew that I didn’t want to go bungee jumping and I couldn’t find a skydiving place where  teach English in Gwangju, paragliding was seemed like the perfect idea. 

The biggest challenge that I faced (besides the actual jump) was setting up the event.  With a lot of help from one of our desk staff members, I was able to find a paragliding school with 15 minutes of my house.  For some reason, I was not able to just call in a reservation in order to reserve the date and was subsequently forced to use a Daum account to register online.  Another issue that we faced was with the logistics of bringing such a large group.  Figuring out transportation for 13 people was quite a challenge as none of us posses an international drivers license.  Long story short, it really helps to have good Korean friends who can help you navigate confusing websites and procedural issues.