Beginning life at ICC Daejeon – O world and Hanwa Eagles baseball game

After 5 hours sleep at a kind friends house after the weekend in DeokJeok do I had to go to the school to catch a taxi to Daejeon along with the contents of my apartment. I was not a happy camper and slept like a baby the whole way there. It took about 2 hours to get there in the taxi and when I managed to get into my dorm room all I could do was fall asleep for a few hours until I had to start a few days training before we started to teach the kids.

Now I’m conveniently  located in the middle of South Korea, I live near a KTX station (rapid train) that brings me to Seoul in an hour for about €15 one way or an hour and a half to Busan (beach city at the bottom of South Korea). My school ICC Daejeon is a sister school of Osan GLC, and I was incedibly lucky to get this job. I don’t think private academies (hagwons) often offer you another job! The school itself is busy, it has hundreds of students (which I wasn’t used to in Osan!) so I am kept busy from Monday to Thursday. Friday is a preparation day for the next week so it’s a nice relaxed day, if I had to teach 5 days like that I would probably go insane!

My co workers are dotted all over the world: USA, South Africa, New Zealand, Scotland and myself from Ireland. We are a good mix. We all live in a dorm next to the school itself, which has its good and bad points. It’s so easy to get home at night. My room is 30 seconds walk from my home room. But if I’ve had a crappy day at work I have to stay in the same building.

The school is laid out much the same way as Osan GLC, it has experience rooms or active zones as we call them down here. The kids get to experience different rooms and learn different topics such as cooking, zoology, speech, math, and geography.

After a hard week learning about how the school worked we all decided to go to the local theme park O world. As we didn’t know the busses, we had to take a taxi here but it reminded me a little of Tramore except about a bazillion times better with a flower area as well as a zoo.

O World.

Tony the Tiger!

Happy with his block of ice on a hot day!

My favourite animals in the zoo! So cute!

With the great weather that was in it around the beginning of June we decided to go to a baseball game. Baseball is a very popular sport in Korea. The Hanwa eagles are Daejeon’s team. We decided to check out a home game. It was all very fun, we bought chimek (chicken and mekju (beer)) into the stadium and ate it while watching the game. Each team had mascots all dressed up dancing for the fans during the breaks.

Having fun is exhausting!

Hanwa stadium.

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