Dive right into the deep end

 I guess there's no better way to do this thing than to go for it 1,000,000%, and that's definitely what we are doing.  Upon our arrival to Seoul, we were ushered in a taxi for an hour to a korean-buffet-style restaurant by some random shuttle service driven by a gentleman who handed us a phone to talk with our recruiter and then said nothing else for the whole ride.  We then got to meet the staff from the entire school, and yes, it was awkward, as we had both been on a plane for over 15 hours and were pretty much the most raggedy versions of ourselves that we could possibly be.  I can gratefully say though that the people at our school are SO nice, and have really been fantastic to us so far.

They informed us at this scruffy dinner of ours (scruffy on our part) that we would be teaching the next day, so we sleepily piled our stuff in a suitcase and were driven to our hotel, which is basically a tiny box in which are two concrete-hard beds, a side table and a wall mount tv, and a bathroom that is basically a walled hose-down area.  It has air conditioning, though, so we love it. haha.  But seriously.

Our first day at LCI was pretty much a blur of instruction and overwhelming amounts of information followed by a lot of observation, which has actually been really helpful.  We will both teach kindergarten in the the morning and the older classes in the afternoon.  Our kids are flipping adorable! They were really wired these past couple of days because they are almost on vacation, but they are very hard working and pretty dang conversational for their age.  We have quite a support group of teachers and Korean teaching supervisors that share game ideas and experience.  All of them are American except for the couple we are replacing, who are from Toronto.  One of them picked us up from our hotel 2 days in a row, one took us to get our metro cards filled, and the couple is showing us around the neighborhood tonight before they leave so we have our bearings once we move in.  The girl, Heather, is also leaving me her Korean straightener so I don't have to buy one! Everyone has been awesome.

The second day, today, was a little more chaotic because there were parties for the last day of classes, a shortage of lesson plan material as kids finished their books, as well as a "newbie" class of young kids with very little English skills and a Korean teacher on vacation.  These resulted in one of the he supervisors asking us to take the young ones on with no plan, and man, to quote my friend Bryan, they were tiny Hitlers. Ok, not all of them, but at least two of them are absolute terrors, and they didn't speak enough English to discipline, and I'm pretty sure they were talking about us in Korean the whole time.  But thankfully, they will not be our classes, they are leaving after today as they were only here for summer school.  The rest of the kids are darlings, and are already excited to meet us.  The feeling is totally mutual.  :)

So, for now, we are just hanging on for dear life as we try to make sense of the world we were thrown into and stay afloat!!! More to come soon!  For now, here's some photos:

Above, the sweet plush taxi we took from the airport, and our tired selves at the airport.

Above: LUGGAGE!!! Below, the view from our hotel.  Not too pretty, the buildings are really crammed against one another here.  I have no idea how people even begin to park in Seoul.  It's a nightmare.

This is the mural that is (yep, that's right) above our bed.  WEIRD much?  We thought it was hilarious.

And here is the hotness, soon to be known by his new alias, The Keeper of the Won...

Two more shots of the room to get an idea of the size. (Hint: small!)

The open bathroom, pretty western style, but with no curtain, so water goes everywhere.

We'll finish things off with a photo of some cool dandelion sculptures we saw on the street: