New Moon, New You

Whether you’re prepping Lunar New Year festivities of good fortune, family, and food, or getting the seven-layer bean dip ready for Super Bowl LIII, I hope 2019 is treating you well so far and giving you what you need. The beginning of February marks the end of my first social media-free month this year and it’s been everything I needed. After laying out my game plan for you earlier in January, I thought I’d check in and share some of my first impressions…

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Happy 2019

At about four o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Day 2003, I ripped my shorts slinking through a cutout in the barbed-wire fence at the base of the lush Koolau mountain range in Oahu. My family and I had set out in the dark to hike the now infamous Ha’ikū Stairs…

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Left Foot Farm

Going from 80 percent mountains to 0 percent is just as hard as I thought it would be. If I don’t hike something soon, my bones are going to turn to dust. It’s been three months since I left Korea and though I love the scenery of home (I recently took my dad’s camera -don’t […]

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1st Day of Teaching

  Irish Breakfast & The best part of waking up, indeed. I don’t know if it was the coffee or my fear of being one of the bad teachers in Waiting for Superman, and the fact that I had just watched Detachment on the airplane ride over to Korea, but I had some serious shakes […]

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Koreacare

The U.S. could learn a thing or two from Korea’s healthcare system… 23 of us instructors walked into a medical center to take our health exams and each of us were finished within forty minutes or less. Rather than waiting well past our appointment time before finally being called back by a nurse practitioner to […]

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Post Visa

Who knew clicking a simple “submit” button on an online application to work abroad would launch me onto an emotional rollercoaster ride of endless identity verifications, academic authentications, and immigration legalities, all the while working under Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.  My initial recruiter didn’t speak English, my fingerprints were too fine […]

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Incheon Night Life

Incheon Night Life After sweating it out on the first day of the official end of the rainy season in Nongdaemun, Hansu and Dahee took David and me to experience Korea at night. We met Dahee a few minutes before she got out of work at Lotte World. She had told me she was a […]

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Nongdaemun Market

Day 7: Nongdemun Market David met up with us to shop around the infamously huge Nondaemun market. That’s 2 days in a row that I got to speak English! Ginseng. I didn’t get my hopes up for cheap shopping while in Korea. My mom had told me, with inflation, the Korean won had basically the […]

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Osan AFB

Day 5: Osan AFB I’m in OSAN! Osan has its own airport and is one of the bigger bases I’ve been on (Gunsan AFB, Ellsworth AFB, Grant Forks AFB, Scott AFB, Hickam AFB, Hawaii Marine Corps Base, Army Schofield, Pearl Harbor, Fort Campbell, Quantico Marine Corps Base, Fort Meade). I’m a little homesick but even the military […]

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Beer House

Day 4: 멕주 집(maekju jeeb) Our day started off promisingly slow. I love day-long excursions but the last three days made me appreciate my floorbed a little more and I was looking forward to catching up on all this blogging. Giving my brain a break from 5 days of constant translating sounded nice too. I […]

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Gyeongbok Palace & Dongdaemun Market

Day 1: Gyeongbok Palace & Dongdaemun Market Posing with the Palace Guards. Switching of the guards ceremony. I can’t help but think of that part of the The Wizard of Oz The King’s throne. Snake (1989) & Dragons (1988) 1960’s Korea Children’s museum The Harems’ Quarters at the Secret Garden. Shamanistic prayer rocks and wooden sculpture to fend off […]

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