The story so far

If I stood in the street just outside my apartment and pitched a tennis ball in an easterly direction, it would fly past a cosy little café called A Twosome Place and strike the brown brickwork of Doosong Middle School.
Doosong is so close, in fact, that I could draw a lungful of air from my apartment and expel it within the grounds of the school at which I teach three days a week.

The principal has since asked me to stop throwing tennis balls at the school.

On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays I rise at 07.30, and I leave my second floor apartment at about 08.20. I hustle past A Twosome Place and reach my school by 08.21, red faced and wheezing from trying to hold my breath for over a minute.

By 16.30 I am done for the day. I power down my laptop (which has been provided to me by my school), lock up my desk, and leave the English language behind. I’m off the clock, and free to mix up “less” and “fewer” as much as I’d like.
I’m back in my apartment by 16.35, and I immediately put the kettle on, turn on the television (which has been provided to me by my school), and hang up my jacket. I can do all of these things from the threshold of my front door, because such is tininess of my quarters. But what my apartment lacks in magnitude, it makes up for in economy. In the minuscule amount of floor space I have there is a table, two chairs, a television, a coffee table, a kitchenette, a washing machine, a microwave, another table, a wardrobe, and a bed.

It seems that, for English teachers at least, the apartments in Busan are small. But I appear to have much fewer floor space than most because a large part of my apartment is taken up by my enormous bathroom.
Unlike most English teachers in Busan, I am able to lie prostrate in my bathroom. Generally speaking, the bathrooms in this city contain only a toilet and a basin from which a shower head is plumbed in and hung up overhead, forcing the inhabitant to shower in the same spot where they might brush their teeth. Not my bathroom though. My bathroom is a veritable spa.
It is also, curiously enough, made almost entirely of frosted glass. This means that, should I have any visitors over, they would be able to see my silhouette every time I excused myself to go and lie down next to the loo.

Pictured: Me having guests over.

But I digress.
On Mondays and Fridays I rise an hour earlier to catch a bus to my secondary place of work – Daedong Middle School. This is a private all boys school and it is located atop the peak of a hill. This is quite normal for Busan. It is a city so hilly that if you are not walking uphill you are surely standing still (In fact, the “san” in “Busan” means “mountain.” I can only deduce that the “Bu” must mean “a lot of”). At Daedong Middle School my working day starts at 08.10 and ends at 16.10, meaning that I usually get home at 16.35 every day of the week.

The evenings are mine to exploit. On Mondays I attend Korean classes with a handful of  English teachers. My Korean language abilities are still awful, but luckily I can get by for the time being. Not being able to speak Korean simply means that most locals avoid me, and the cashiers at the supermarket won’t give me plastic bags for my shopping no matter how much I gesture at them. On Tuesdays through to Fridays I go to a small yet well-equipped gym that’s a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment.

I live very close to the southern tip of Busan, in an area called Saha-gu. This place is so far flung that it takes me a minimum of one hour by subway every time I want to go into some of the more metropolitan parts of the city. I don’t mind, though. My neighbourhood is quiet, but just commercial enough to supply me with all the modern conveniences that I need. There are some quaint coffee shops around, and I buy my groceries from a medium-sized shopping mall about three blocks away, which is not a far distance to walk when you’ve got no shopping bags. I’ve got a convenience store around the corner, and the subway station is a five-minute walk from my apartment. I’m thankful that there aren’t too many flashing lights and jazzy food joints that encourage me to spend money. Also, if I peer through the tree branches outside one of my wide bedroom windows, I can see the harbour, where a small ship seems so be permanently anchored.

Upon closer inspection I see that it is named the Opera Cruise. Maybe it’s related to the actor.

On the weekends I get out of my bathroom-cum-apartment as much as possible. I occasionally go on hikes, or to the cinema, or see a sports match, or try new restaurants with friends. I’ve fallen in with a group of good people that I met when I first arrived in Korea. They’ve given me consent to talk about them in embarrassing detail, but I’ll get to that in a later blog. For now, I’m just laying down the basics. I’ve found a happy life here, and there’s still so much more going on that I haven’t discovered yet. I intend to write regularly and, over time, develop a comprehensive picture of what life for me is like in South Korea. But for now, Dear Reader, please consider this to be The Beginning.

From left to right: Bianca, Diane, A Strange Man, Magpie, Kimmy, Sarah, and Brittany. I had to crop Marissa out because she was blinking.

There’s a bit of Marissa. On the right.