Unrelated image of me on a Korean mountain
So yesterday I wrote about how my life of misery in England triggered something inside me to finally leap out of my comfort zone. I set off to South Korea alone, 21 years old with no experience or skills under my belt.
You see, in South Korea - and indeed many Asian countries - one can get a job as a teacher without being a teacher or knowing how to teach. At the time I wasn't aware of the stigma behind this and just thought about how I can get myself out of poverty so I was happy enough in that regard.
But my first week in Korea was a hell of a roller coaster for my brain.
Arrival
Incheon airport is beautiful and comforting and I felt more or less ok knowing I was going to meet somebody holding a sign, which I always wanted to do for some reason. But rather than take me home, they took me to the school. It was about 8pm so this really surprised me.
Turns out it's not a school so much as a private academy where kids come for extra study after school from 7 to 16 years of age. It was very clean and everybody was busy, and the boss who picked me up introduced me to their other foreign teacher: Logan from Alabama.
He didn't have the hilarious accent, though he was more than friendly in the two minutes he had free to speak with me. Soon after I was taken back to my little apartment on the 4th floor of a building hidden within a fish market called (and it took me forever to remember this) Bakdal Shijang. I'm really excited because after recalling the name, I could find it on Google maps who actually took the time to do street view in the market:
If you look beyond that yellow circular sign about 10 metres, turn right and there's a little hidden building you can go up to my apartment. Awesome.
Behind the photographer you can go to the end of the street, across the road and there's the Anyang river that connects to the Han river. That's a whole post in itself of stories.
Home
So yeah I was hidden away in this scary foreign market in a room with no internet and I got the wrong plug adaptor for my computer. All I had was a little TV full of mostly Korean stuff but there was one channel showing some shitty detective show or something NCIS which I watched almost exclusively.
For three days (time period before starting work) I was too terrified to leave by myself. I just sat in my room getting increasingly hungrier; still no internet, no phone, no heating, nothing. I had a thin pink sheet on my bed I'd wrap myself up in and shiver myself to sleep. I think there was heating but I couldn't figure it out.
On the third day I started looking out my window to see what I would face if I went out there and noticed a store with French words on it: 'Tous Les Jours' - Ahhh a bakery-type shop! I mapped it out the best I could in my head to get straight there, get some kind of bread and come back like some kind of skittish vole, and it turns out it was quite nice.
Friends
Samir
From here I would start work and I actually had a second foreign colleague, Samir - a very unusual, friendly polyglot who seemed to have some kind of confusion with his identity but he was a point of comfort for some time. He hated the job and the job hated him. The fact that he spoke fluent Korean (alongside at least 18 or so other languages I confirmed over the year) was seemingly of concern to the Korean staff.
Logan
Typical Yank
Logan was in his 30's somewhere, and he was my rock. He was wise, friendly, relatable, welcoming. He would simply come knocking on my door (He lived 2 floors below) and ask me if I wanted to join him gluing wood models in his room, things like that. He'd teach me all kindsa stuff and tell me stories and kickstart my social life through other friends of his.
Harriet
A friend of Logan's, the two of them first invited me to lunch on the first weekend; a Korean spicy but tasty meal that was the first non-bread thing I'd had all week. The spice was intense for a British tongue and within 20 minutes I casually rushed back to my apartment before the meal was open to... expel the contents. Worth it.
This is how I came across 
My first encounter with
To the side of them was this strange, slightly dangerous looking drunk.
Towards the end of the night this huge, beefed up military bloke from the US marched up to us asking if we had seen his coat since he left it here. He was being quite accusatory. The drunk - a comparatively tiny but tall figure - stood up and looking him in the face and said something along the lines of 'You should show more respect if you want your coat'.
The guy was fuming and a fight was seemingly bubbling, but we all rushed our departure to avoid such a thing. The drunk had already beaten us to the elevator at the end of the hall, and upon seeing us, he yelled something, threw a bottle of coke at us and gave us the finger before the doors closed.
It turned out that he wasn't just a caricature drunk, but a musical, lyrical and intelligent guy who just happened to be drunk. I would keep coming across him by chance until we ended up kind of friends, and I fail to remember how, but proper friends even to this day.
Actual Home
By now I had felt much more established, safe, stable. I had finally built a life from the ground up, and it felt like home. The work was tough; 10 hours a day, a single 30 minute break, 6 days off a year.... I didn't care. I never wanted to leave!
Test Day
But alas, I did, and it didn't end well.