entry the first

Welcome! Welcome to Postman's blog. This is that tricky, incipient entry, where I give you a pretentious preamble and a long-winded introduction and bring you up to date on some personal context. After this is finished the other entries will necessarily improve, not to mention have more imaginative titles.

I, Andy, a 22-year-old, six-foot-tall, brown-haired, blue-eyed punster and journalism major late of Cheyenne, Wyoming, am currently sitting in my pajamas in my studio apartment in the Shinhyeon district of Gohyeon, on the island of Geoje off the southern coast of South Korea at 1:38 p.m. on a sunny but slightly chilly day.

Let me explain. I am in Korea because, unable to find a journalism-related job in the States within six months of my graduation from North Dakota State University in December 2007, I broadened my search and found an opportunity to teach English under contract in South Korea for one year. I jumped at it and have been happily pursuing it since June 27, 2008.

I am working for a hagwon (the Korean word for private academy) called Reading Town, actually an international franchise of decent size, with branches in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, the Philippines, China, and Korea. I am enjoying the heck out of my time here; seeing sights, learning the Korean language, trying various Korean delicacies, and discovering how to teach. (More about all this later.) I am in a studio apartment because that's where my boss, the director of my academy, who goes by the Anglo alias "Jacob," put me up. I'm very happy with it (always wanted to try living in a studio apartment), even though the bathroom can get a bit moldy in the damp island weather and I haven't got an oven. I am in my pajamas because I was out drinking rather late last night. And besides, this is Sunday, darn it. Don't worry, I'm going to get up, sweep the linoleum floor, put on my coat and hat and take a nice walk in the cool breeze and then come back and pick up where I left off in The Bloody Crown of Conan.

As if that wasn't constructive enough, I'm starting this blog. I'm doing it for several reasons: I love to write, first thing, and I think writing here might be a little more constructive than all the stuff I've been doing on Facebook or Helium. Second, I'd love to run my thoughts and travel diaries past the blogging community and see what happens. Third, this is a notch in my belt. One of the reasons I had such trouble finding a journalism job back home, I suspect, was my lack of experience and tangible work. Maybe now I can point prospective employers in this direction and show them that I haven't been idle during my time overseas (not that I have been anyway; I've been writing articles, travelogues and essays and submitting them to travel magazines) and that I can write tolerably well.

That's the purpose of this blog: a journal-cum-travel diary, where I'll keep track of my wanderings around the world (of which this Korean sojourn is the first). I'll offer my opinions on sights, sounds, smells and tastes, describe them as vividly and accurately as possible, and present information and facts and food for thought in an expository (but not necessarily objective) way. This is a blog, after all. I attempted first to keep a video blog on YouTube of my time in Korea, but it fell through. I updated every month or two, and eventually so much information stacked up that YouTube's prohibitive ten-minute video length rule became truly so. (Plus I was lazy.)

All kidding and self-deprecation aside, I do intend to be diligent in keeping this blog. I'm going to keep a stringent record of my travels. (There should be many; more about that later, too.) Aside from chronicling, I'll also use this blog to write about any other details of my life that are of note; sometimes the darnedest things happen to me. I'll tell you about how my flight training is going, say. I was twelve flight-hours into it before I left for Korea. I'll tell you if I get my novel published; I'm only six chapters into it by now, but going strong. Seeing as how all the other twenty times I've ever started a book I've gotten a mere 40 pages in and then torn the whole thing up in a fit of exasperated, insecure pique, I'd consider this current effort a noteworthy one. I'll tell you when I start writing my comic book, too: covering the same material as the novel, it is simply the same story in a different medium. I'll tell you what cocktails I've been sampling. I'm something of an amateur mixologist and am running a cocktail bar out of my apartment here for fellow expatriates.

In short, this blog will be concerned with what I hope most of my life will be: traveling, flying, and writing, with a little booze thrown in.

There, that's a suitable preamble.