The stages of dawning

Well... the teachers' orientation is over and now I'm at my new place in central Seoul (which I mean in the literal sense -- I'm in the geographical center of the city). After settling in and sitting down to the quiet of an apartment by myself, it finally dawned on me that I'm finally here and this is the real stuff.

Strangely enough, it isn't the first time that it's dawned on me. Nor is it the second time. Or the third. It seems that like grieving, there are always stages. Unlike the stages of grieving, I don't know how to characterize the stages of "dawning," exactly.

The first time that it dawned on me that this is the real thing came when I picked up my E-2 visa from the South Korean consulate in downtown Vancouver. Holding the passport with a newly-minted visa in my hand was my first realization that I was really leaving. I was so used to seeing nothing but US Homeland Security stamps in my passport (from the back-and-forth between Vancouver and California or Washington state) that a big honking visa seemed quite odd.

The second dawning came right before I left. I was all packed and was doing one last checkover to make sure I didn't leave anything behind. I was satisfied. I turned around, and my dog was sitting there in the doorway. I went down to pet him and give him a little hug. He's normally not a nice dog (quite a snooty dog, actually) but at that moment, he looked up at me with the saddest eyes I've ever seen from him. He's 15 years old, so that's saying a lot. I broke down right there and then, and just hugged him and had a nice cry/bawl for a few minutes. He normally doesn't let people hug him at all, but he actually let me hug him for the first time in his life; he just let me hug him and cry for a while. I actually still cry a bit thinking about it (like right now as I type this). That was the second time that it dawned on me that I was leaving a lot behind, and probably remains the strongest among my "stages of dawning." It's currently one of the two things (that's NOT from a movie) that can make me cry every time -- the other thing is memories of the Anaheim Ducks' Stanley Cup championship win.

The third time probably came during my stay at a hotel in nearby Incheon, where Seoul's airport is located. Just walking about and seeing everything written in Korean was quite a jolting shift, and the day trip to central Seoul was a further shock. Just seeing that made me realize that I'm in a new world now.

And yesterday was probably the fourth dawning. After seeing people I got to know during orientation get shipped off one by one to their respective schools and apartments, it finally dawned on me that we're all leaving the safe English-speaking confines of the orientation venue and heading out into the non-English speaking world. It was quite a scary feeling but not unprecedented; I guess the orientation reduced some of the scariness but it's impossible for it to remove ALL the scariness.

And now here I am, using a combo of a security-enabled network and my old VPN connection from my alma mater (which is still working) to access the internet, which will be installed later. I'm not sure whether this stage of dawning has ended yet... I guess we'll see. And I'm sure there might be another stage of dawning during my first day of actual teaching.

Tomorrow is my first day at work, although it'll mostly be prep work. If I have time, I'll write an entry about the school and the living quarters.