Living And Travelling In South Korea With A Kid - Our Story On "An Epic Education" Podcast!
We're super excited our backstory is live on An Epic Education podcast! Emma was interviewed by Jason for his podcast series on living overseas with kids, and you can listen at Living, Biking and Teaching in Korea. Below are the notes from the interview if you want to know a little bit about our story and life in South Korea with a kid.
Introduction
Our family consists of my husband Jarrod, myself (Emma) our son Sebastian who is 13 yo.We decided to move from Australia in 2008 for a change of scene, when Sebastian was 4 years old. We’ve lived in South Korea since then (teaching English in universities) and have travelled to other Asian countries between university semesters. We travel a lot in South Korea and have done a cycle touring trip from Seoul to Busan (the length of the country) and also cycle toured around Jeju Island in Korea.
We go travelling for a few weeks twice a year. Usually in Summer we do a bicycle tour in Korea and in winter we travel overseas. We have travelled to Malaysia, Jakarta, Bali, Taiwan and the Philippines, as well as gone on several trips back to Australia.
TRAVELLING WITH A CHILD IN SOUTH KOREA
I never thought I needed to travel until after we moved overseas, and then I realized how much I had needed it! I didn’t realize I was so bored with living in Australia. So I think I realized we needed to travel after living a couple of years in Korea. We had only planned to stay for a couple of years but it has ended up being for 9 years! Our life has changed in terms of our minds feeling much broader about different ways of doing things. E.g.- For Seb’s schooling, at first we were worried what we would do with Seb when he reached school age, as there were no English speaking school in our budget.
By that time his Korean was OK as he’d learnt Korean at a bilingual kindergarten. So he ended up going to a public elementary school in Grade 1 and we just thought we would see how it goes. But he ended up loving it and having a great time. So we realized there’s many different ways to do things, we don’t have to do things like everyone else, you can analyse the situation and see for yourself what will work. Just because he’s an Australian, western kid, doesn’t mean he needs to attend an English speaking school. And it’s been great, Seb has become bilingual. After grade 4 we decided Korean public school was getting too much into memorization style learning so we started homeschooling and he goes to many extra curricular classes and an open-learning study group and has been doing well.
Rituals & Routines
For our family it’s important to us to keep a routine, even when travelling. So we never skip meals, and try to eat well. Our bedtime routine is the same wherever we are. We read a novel as a family after dinner– at the moment we are reading The Lord of the Rings, and also do Falun Gong meditation practice together, which keeps the stress down when we are travelling (and working at home) to keep feeling centred.
Sebastian also does this and enjoys it. While we are away, we usually have a fairly hectic schedule unfortunately, so we don’t make Sebastian do schoolbooks. Instead he writes a daily journal about what he has done. This has really increased his confidence in writing. Now he wants to write a book about some of his adventures exploring the nearby forest with his friend on his blog.
INCOME & MONEY
Even though we travel a lot, our income is fairly small. So we have to budget carefully. We don’t have a car, and public transport is cheap here. When we went to Australia this year, instead of hiring a car we took our folding bicycles for our transportation! We also look at everything we are spending and make sure it’s essential to our quality of life – right down to the cost of cooking ingredients. Everyday we put in a spreadsheet our spending, and have a budget for set categories like gifts, clothes, education, etc.
We put aside money for travelling every month, so when we have our vacation we just use that money for travel expenses and accommodation, so it doesn’t affect our budget or put us into any debt. We don’t use a normal credit card, the only credit card we use is paid off in full every month so we have no debt accruing interest.
Our Travel Essentials
Our travel essentials are our smartphones and iPad with bluetooth keyboard. We’ve decided not to take our laptop on normal trips as it’s too heavy and we are so busy usually we don’t get to do much work on the computer anyway.When we go on trips to make a film, as in the Jeju: A Bicycle Adventure, we were cycletouring at the time, so we took only minimal gear like a few changes of clothes and some camping gear, and very light filming equipment: goPro, RODE lapel mic to plug into an iphone, the light mafrotto tripod, canon 5d II.
Insight & Education
Our approach to education for our son Sebastian is a combination of homeschooling and unschooling- basically we set some basic tasks – reading, maths, writing, science, etc. to keep things moving. He also goes to a jujitsu class everyday and is in a choir group. Then Seb works on projects that he’s interested in at the time like making videos and video editing them, writing a book, computer programming, etc.
Resources
For Seb's education we use Brainpop as a good resource for learning using videos and activities. It’s fun and has heaps of different topics. The history and geography book we are using is by Pandia Press called History Odyssey Middle Ages. It’s interesting because it has a lot of different fiction and non fiction books in the course and different map and writing activities that we’ve found very good. We also use wordpress as a learning tool for Seb to learn computer programming, so we set up his own website.For our budgeting we use the Mr Money Mustache blog for ideas on managing our money.I don’t follow many blogs, but I use facebook’s groups to connect with a lot of different homeschoolers, also the worldschoolers group and other groups.
Our Top 3 Destinations
Riding Jeju Island. was special and exotic with beautiful mountains and coastline. It feels adventurous but it’s on a good scale for cycling with kids. It’s amazing and exotic but safe as well. Its got beaches, mountains, waterfalls, jungle, plentiful cheap accommodation and a great climate.
Exploring the jungle in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia. We took a jungle trek a few years ago to see the Rafflesia flower it was so fun and a great learning experience for Seb. As well as trekking through some serious jungle and swimming in a crystal clear stream deep in the forest we got to visit an indigenous village and got to try using a blowgun with some of the local men. Oh and of course the food in Malaysia is the best.
Malapascua Island in the Philippines. It’s so small you can walk around it in a day, it has no cars and only a handful of motorbikes. Most people get around on foot or by bike. Snorkeling is gorgeous. We had a small whitesand beach all to ourselves, the shade of palm trees and a little coral lagoon filled with fish, starfish, anemones, incredible colours.
If you need more information on living in South Korea with kids you can book a one-on-one video call with us here!
