Friday, September 18, 2009

On the Road Again!

Due to the postponement of our original departure date, our trip has been hanging in limbo for quite some time now. First we were going to stick with Aclipse and leave for Korea in November and go to Ireland in the interlude. Then our window of opportunity for Ireland was becoming more and more narrow due to scheduling conflicts on our side (due to the uncertainty of our departure date in November) and on the Ireland side (due to our hosts having other commitments). In the end, we decided to switch recruiting agencies because Aclipse seemed to be a dead end for us. That meant Ireland was no longer an option as our projected departure date is now mid-October. To give you an idea of the time frame, we signed up in April and were supposed to leave in August, and then the date was pushed back to "some time in November." Not cool. 
However, my father works with a guy whose son decided to teach in Korea, and he signed up with a different agency in the beginning of August, and he was IN Korea by the end of the month. Needless to say, we switched to his agency, one called HoyaEnglish. You can check them out at http://www.hoyaenglish.com/. Fortunately, all of our paperwork was already in Korea, so we just had our old agency forward it to the new one, and voila! we are ahead of the game. 
Just a couple of days ago we heard back from our recruiter, and she has found two schools about 10 minutes from each other that would like to have Angie and me as teachers. Both schools are located in Daegu, (also Taegu) the fourth largest city in South Korea. See the map to get an idea of where we're going (it's Taegu on this map). For info on the city, check out this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daegu. Apparently, since the schools provide housing (rent free!) for their teachers, we will each have our own house to live in, but either one of them is large enough for us to live together if we choose. We are scheduled to have phone interviews on Monday evening, but the interviews are supposedly very informal and more of a way for them to check to make sure we have the proper American pronunciation of English words. I'll be sure to post when I have more information.