Orientation Part 1

I am actually already in Busan, finishing my first whole day here. There is a lot to say about, well, everything, but I haven’t even begun to start processing these last two days, though I can tell you that they were good. So instead I will leave talking about Busan, my new school, co-teachers, and classes until it all actually starts and I have a more solid idea of what I am doing.

I can, however, talk about orientation.

It was…weird? A very generally positive experience, yes, but still odd. Someone described EPIK orientation as being like a bubble, and that is exactly how it felt. A strange transitional period, not connected to your past and only tentatively connected to your future. When I was researching about EPIK, I had trouble finding any detailed accounts of orientation anywhere. I mean, a blog would mention one aspect of it and another blog would talk about something else, but I couldn’t seem to get a complete picture anywhere. It was frustrating, but now I can understand why. There is no point into getting into the meat and potatoes of what you do in EPIK orientation, not because it wasn’t useful or important, but because it was so insular to that period of time.

First, the actual, physical place felt disconnected from everything. Joenju University is where the orientation took place, and it was on the outskirts of a pretty sizable city, which you would not be able to guess just from the campus. It felt like the middle of nowhere. Everything was also shrouded in humid fog that stopped you from see too far into the distance except for the rare moments when the sun broke through.

These were the views from my dorm room, which I think accurately shows what it looked like there. Oh! Also this photo.

It is dark and kind of hard to make out anything, but basically in the background you see the dorm and in the front there is a road lined with trees.  The photo dulls the color a lot, but the light made the leaves a very bright green color, which was very pretty and added to the feeling of unrealness, to break out some great English. But we were mostly functioning entirely with in this one stretch of road. There was the lecture building, the dorm, the cafeteria, and a street that people huddled around, drinking a little, letting off some steam, or desperately searching for wifi. The whole place felt like a set, or like something from the Truman Show.

Adding to the feeling was the lack of wifi, being around English speakers and fellow foreigners 24/7, and the town being very empty because the students were out for summer break. Eventually even the odd bubble of orientation opened up, but that was definitely what the first few days felt like. I will go more into the later half next time.

Such as, next time, I think I will talk about breaking out of the bubble a little, and the fun and different kind of weird that that brought with it. Thanks for reading!

PS. I’m sure there are mistakes in here, spelling and grammar wise, but I am too tired to edit really well right now. But I feel like I should apologize in advance for it, because, I don’t know, it is somewhat ironic that I would have spelling and grammar errors while being an English teacher.