Nic Trips

 One of the many awesome things that orientation gave us the opportunity to try was taekwondo! They had some black belts come in 2 days of the week to give us a lesson on the basics. We all go to wear the uniform and try punches and kicks on the practice gloves. At the end, they gave us a board on which we wrote a goal which we wanted to achieve in the next year. Then we got to punch and break the board! I wrote, "I want to learn Korean language and culture," on mine and I broke it on the first shot!

 There were at least 4 lectures each day that we had to attend. They covered all sorts of topics revolving around teaching in Korea, and some about living in Korea, too. Some lectures were involved little to no movement or thought as we just sat in our chairs and listened or silently scribbled down some notes. Other lecturers chose to get us participating in the kinds of activities we would soon be encouraging our own students to do. These were by far the most fun classes. Other classes had activities for us as teachers, to still get us up, moving and active the way and teacher might do to keep their students interested and paying attention.  Finally, other lectures had us doing group projects or presentations to practice some of the situations we might encounter in our classroom in the months to come.  Regardless, orientation was an overall BLAST and felt like several months of building friendships rather than one short week o...

As part of the EPIK program, all teachers are required to attend the 8 day orientation in Daejeon on a local university campus. Here we will have some classes and lectures on culture, history, language and teaching in Korea to help prepare us for the upcoming year. The first day was scattered with everyone arriving at various times. (I didn't get to the campus until after dinner.) So the opening ceremony and first day of classes was held the following morning. (Tuesday, August 19th) It was a long ceremony, full of all sorts of speakers and welcome videos to explain how orientation would work to prepare us for the upcoming year living and working in Korea. They also had the national champion University taekwondo team do a presentation for us. (as pictured below) This is the video they showed us during the opening ceremony for introduce the staff and all they did to prepare for our arrival:

This is the giant plane that took me across the Pacific Ocean from San Fransisco, California to Seoul, South Korea. Total travel time from Syracuse, NY to Daejeon (where the orientation is) was 35.5 hours. Train from Syracuse to Chicago = 14 hours Car from Chicago to West Lafayette = 2 hours Car from West Lafayette to Indianapolis = 1 hour Plane from Indianapolis to San Francisco = 4.5 hours Plane from San Francisco to Seoul = 12 hours Bus from Incheon Airport to Daejeon = 2 hours

(The "farewell" cake my brother got me for my Going-Away party.) Hello everyone, and welcome to my travel blog! I have created this site under the pressure of several suggestions and insistence from many people that wish to keep up with my travels over the next year as I am living and working abroad in South Korea. I've also decided that it would be beneficial to my own purposes to document all of my travels past, present, and future in one place. I will do my best to keep up on posting about my exciting new endeavors in addition to making some pages about my previous ones, but I suspect I will be very busy getting acquainted and settled in to this new place over the next month, so I won't make any promises on regularity.

In the summer of 2014, I spent 5 weeks living in San Jose, Costa Rica to complete a TESOL training course. TESOL stands for Teaching English as a Second Language, and it was the certification I needed to be able to be an elementary school English teacher in South Korea. I found the program through an organization called Greenheart Travel. The offer 3 different TESOL training courses: one only online, one in Chicago, and one in Costa Rica! The course in Costa Rica offered the most hands on training and hours, plus it was in another country! So that was my obvious choice, and off I went! Although Greenheart travel connected me to signing up for the course, the class itself is through INTESOL and was hosted at the Idiomas Mundiales English School. There was a lot to learn in just 4 weeks of class, so our week days were long and full of work to do. In addition to taking classes about teaching, we also had to sit in and observe many lessons. In the final 2 weeks, we also had to te...

The summer of 2013 brought me on another amazing journey to Europe. This time I traveled with the Chamber Singers group from Alfred University to be performing in several cities across Italy! We started in Rome and had 3 small concerts in various places through out the city. One of which we did for mass at...the Vatican! We were in Italy for a total of 10 days, and we spent 4 of them in Rome. We had guided tours planned for us everyday to see the more famous parts of the city. But, since we had members of all ages in our singing group, the tour tended to move a little slow for my tastes. I would often split off from the group to  explore things on my own "to-see" list and meet up with them again at the next destination. It meant  lot of power walking to catch up, so I got lots of exercise in. After Rome we stopped at the beautiful city of Assisi for a day. We had no concert planned here, but after a fantastic guided tour, we stood together in the plaza and sang a song t...