The real introduction

O.K. so here we go time to actually introduce myself and this blog properly. As you can tell by the title I am indeed an English man in Suwon, Suwon you say, where the bloody hells that? Well I'll tell you its in South Korea (thats the good guys for anyone not sure) in the Gyeonggi province about an hour away from Seoul. I'm a Leicester boy so I'd compare it location wise to Leicester and the distance to the capital is almost the same although north bound as opposed to south.

Why are you all the way in bloody Korea is probably your next question? Sometimes I ask myself the same question! The truth is I've dated a Korean girl for the last 6 years, although dating became I'm married to from last October. I first came to Korea about 4 years ago, at that time just for vacationing and catching up with my girlfriend. Almost a year and a half ago I decided to settle here for a longer period just to really get to know the people and culture. I used to teach back in England but decided upon a change of scenario as English teenage school kids are a bit of a nightmare to say the least.

My agenda with this blog will be to highlight the culture of Korea, it's differences, similarities, perks and quirks. There will be the occassional moan but its all light hearted so shouldn't be taken seriously (I don't want to get burned by any korean netizens and chased out the country ala 2pm's JaeBeom (check the link for more details 2pm controversy but to quickly summarise he called Korea ago about a 100 years ago when he  was a teenager)

I will also try to give some survival tips and some guides to food and what not, but plunging yourself in at the deep end is always the best way to settle into a new environment, the immersion method I think its called.

First I would say it helps to learn a little bit of the local language before you come here. Personally I bought teach yourself korean, as shown on the right. It's a little dry and the audio files on the cd are laughably slow to the Korean natives but for someone who's never tried the language it could be useful. There is a mixture of Romanised and Hangul text for familiarising yourself with Hangul. The best method from what I've read though is just to try and get used to Hangul as sometimes when we pronounce the words in our own style it sounds somewhat strange to the locals!

I've also heard good things about Making out in Korean for more

colloquial expressions, although personally I didn't need to ask any K girls if they 'come here often' or 'fancy a coffee back at my place' so didn't see the need!

There are also many free websites that I would recommend, I'll add them later as currently I can only remember Sogang Universities site Sogang.ac.kr so I'll post them up later.

I'll post up a more general overview of Korea itself at a later time for now I will steal yet another blog off my old myspace account to fill today's gap.