Busan, Korea - 1997
Back to Busan! The dirty, chaotic, crazy maddening port city was quite nice to arrive back to. I had alot new stories. Even better was my friend Chris (from the Grand Canyon and Portland Oregon) was hired by my exact same school. Oddly enough, he'd met a girl fairly quickly upon arrival, and he is still married to her to this day and living in Portland Oregon (writing this in March 2003). Congrats to Chris and Lisa.
About of half of the teachers that I'd know four months ago were still there. I also met alot of new teachers, and quickly made friends. There was an extra room at my old apartment, so they glad let me stay there. With some help from some other friends, I was able to arrange some private teaching opportunities. I was actually able to set up only about 15 hours of work a week and made more than my friends who had signed a contract to teach 30 hours at my old school. Fortunately, they let me stay there. Although, technically I wasn't allowed to stay there as I didn't work at the same school. So occassionally I'd see old students and I always had to lie to them and tell them I was just visiting.
My plan in Busan this time was to make enough money to be able to fly to Eastern Europe to take a course to learn how to teach English. These programs are 1-month programs and they have a series of different acronmys like TESOL (teaching english to speakers of other languages) certificates. My plan was to study and try to work iin Eastern Europe. So I took the pre-enrollment tests and found a good program in Budapest. The program I wanted was only available in the summertime, so it was fairly imperative I be there at that time.
Oddly enough, once I'd been accepted to a program I met a really cool Korean girl who'd studied for two years in Australia. Her and I really hit it off well and she had fluent English. We saw each other nearly everyday, but at this point in my life, all I wanted to ever do was just travel and see places and go places. So I'd gone ahead and decided to follow my plan and go to Budapest.
Some people ask me if I have seen this girl since I have now come back and forth to Korea many times (I've speaking years later now). The answer is 'no'. I have completely lost contact with her and made no effort to try to find her, nor do I have any plans to try to find her. Why? Ahmm.. don't know why. Just thought I'd answer that because often Koreans ask me if I had a Korean girlfriend before and then they ask me what happened to her, etc. Well, nothing happened. That has now been years ago, and no intention to follow it up.
Anyhow, being back in Busan was great. I was able to make the money I needed to pay off debts and pay upfront for the class and airfare for Budapest. That summer, shortly after my 27th birthday, I flew to Budapest.
You can email me at:
Wintermoon2@yahoo.com