Welcome to Seosan City in Chungcheongnam-do, Korea

It is not a very popular city for foreign visitors. In fact, lonely planet doesn’t even mention it.

My husband and I have been living here since the 1^st of January 2015. We came here, like many other foreigners, to teach English. We left our home country on the 31^st of December, spending our New Years in the air somewhere between Abu Dhabi and Korea. We left sunny South Africa, only to step onto the icy Korean soil.

Honestly we have never experienced this magnitude of “freeze”, ever…

Bearing in mind that we come from a warm country, where our winter temperatures are normally around 14 degrees and summer reaches 35+. After the initial freeze we got on a bus to Seosan-si. Our first experience with Korean buses was, something of a nightmare. In all fairness I have to say that not all the bus drivers are the same. We have had some really pleasant bus trips since then, but back to beginning. I remember thinking. Oh my word, we didn’t die on the flight over here but we are going to die on this bus. The reason being that the driver kept falling asleep behind the wheel. Swerving a little left, then a little right before waking himself with a jerk of the head. The second reason is that he drove through the tolls gates so fast that the speed limit indicators where shaking as we went past. This lasted for two and a half hours. Finally we made it to Seosan…alive. When we got to the bus terminal there where no one waiting for us. We’re in a foreign country where everyone speaks Korean and they do not understand English. Luckily a young girl offered to phone our new boss to pick us up from the terminal. And this is where our adventure began…