How I came to Korea and later blogspot

It's been a while since I've participated in blogging. I once had a blog over on livejournal, but all of my buddies stopped updating their blogs, and I lost interest as well. I've decided though, that after several years in this strange land, that I have quite a few stories to tell. Many of these stories have been posted over on eslcafe, but though the site is occasionally useful for bits of information and job postings, it has its definite shortcomings.
So, I'll start this off with a rather mundane entry on how I came to Korea. Later posts will follow which include my tales of adventure.

The year was 2005. I had just graduated with a bachelor's degree in Science. No major. My university didn't trifle with such trivial things. I studied mostly ecology and evolutionary biology, but I also took a few film and film studies courses. I had been flat broke throughout most of my time in college, so I moved back in with my mom and got a fantastic job in customer support for a crappy cell/mobile/hand phone service provider. After several months, I tired of working with morons, talking to morons, making terrible money and living in my mom's house. Not all of the people I worked with were morons, but most were, and the rest were just really depressing.

So, I decided to find a real job. I had a college degree, and there were some postings at the department of ecology, the department of fish and wildlife and the state parks department. I had experience interning for a national park, but the application process is insane, you have to apply federally, and there were thousands of other applicants. I had no replies after a couple of weeks, until finally I got a reply from the state parks department. During this time, a long time friend of mine who was in a similar situation had applied for a teaching job in South Korea. He had become fascinated with the place after watching a bunch of Korean romantic comedies and decided to teach English over here after seeing "Please Teach Me English".

While I was waiting for my criminal check to come back so I could send it to the parks department, I went on a road trip with this friend. While on the road, he was called about five or six times every day by a recruiter who wanted him to send him some documents so he could fly over. I was pretty surprised that people were actually coming after him instead of the other way around. So, I asked him about the situation in Korea and pondered the idea throughout the rest of the trip.

When I came back home, I had received my CRC and then checked the job posting for the parks department again. They were offering $2200 per month, required an interview, a physical, a fitness test, a psychological test, a waiting period of up to three months for placement, no housing, a requirement for a personal vehicle and the park was located in the middle of nowhere. I then checked out some ESL job descriptions and decided to take the latter. My only teaching experience was tutoring a fourth grader in math when I was in high school, but I had plenty of public speaking experience. I hadn't been to any countries outside of the US except for Canada, and Canada is not exactly an exotic land.

So, I contacted a recruiter, got a passport and hopped on a plane with $1,000 in my pocket to start my year as a teacher in Wonderland in Seoul.(I'd mention the specific location, but I'd like to keep myself somewhat anonymous)