I had to take a few days just to clear out my head of all the advice everyone had given me and try to remember what my dream was in the first place. I decided to visit the career center website at Chico State.
A table then popped up on my screen comparing a teaching job in Korea with one in an American high school. It was time for a different path in life.
After seven months of waiting, I finally got a job with a Korean recruiter in Seoul before any native English teacher can be hired from the US or Canada, they first need to go through a recruiting agency that places them in a job in Korea β most of the recruiting agencies are located in Korea. My new job was at an English academy in Southern South Korea. All I needed now was to get a South Korean visa.
I got my visa in the mail a few weeks later and departed for Korea in March of As I was clearing customs in Seoul, I ran into another American who was also coming to Korea to be a teacher. I recognized him from the San Francisco airport, he was probably the only person in Korea with a mullet. I fought hard to avoid living in Seoul. I had seen too many documentaries about the guys in Tokyo whose job it is to cram bodies into the subway before the doors closed.
I settled on a medium-sized town called Mokpo. Mokpo is a port city located in the southwest corner of the Korean peninsula. Mokpo tends to be a few degrees cooler in summer and a few degrees warmer in winter compared to Seoul. It was also one of the few cities in Korea whose name I can pronounce.
