my korea year

rice farming, gimpo city, south korea, 2009, originally uploaded by regi metcalf.

in case you didn't know, i spent the year, from may 2009-may 2010, in south korea. i lived in what we would call a suburb of seoul, called gimpo city. ostensibly, i was hired to english-as-a-second-language at a public high school (the qualifications are minimal: a native speaker of english and a bachelors degree). i also went to scratch the travel itch i've always had. i'd say had partial success on both scores: my lack of training as an esl teacher was quite apparent from the beginning, but i got better as time went on (there are few things more painful than being a bad teacher). if i were dedicated to teaching, i'm sure i would have become quite good at it (they did offer to hire me back). but, ultimately, i found teaching english, particularly at a very rudimentary level, extremely boring. and if you don't love what you're teaching, you should definitely move on.

as for the travel itch, i managed to get around to some interesting parts of korea: hiking the small mountains, the countryside, seoul, busan, the mudfest, the dmz. of course, i didn't do or see everything: no temple stays, no jeju island, no young korean girlfriend. and what i feel i missed out on most was jumping off from korea to other parts of southeast asia (vietnam, cambodia, thailand) and the south pacific (bali, indonesia).

most important to me these days, however, is that korea is the place i started to seriously educate myself about photography. it's where i started trying to do more than take snapshots and to actually make photographs.