But that wasn't the real test.
The real test came once I arrived at my homestay. I knew very quickly that it would not be a smooth transition. A lot of the food that they ate, I just couldn't! I couldn't eat spicy food (yet). I also didn't eat fish, one of my host dad's favorite dishes.
As the weeks passed, I had to intereact with people who differed drastically from me on the way they thought and acted. And for a while, I felt like they were in the wrong. After all, I was here to show them how the Americans did this or that, right? But then I came to an important realization: my job was as a teacher, but also as a cultural ambassador. So while I showed them what it was like to live in the United States, I also began to accept that not everything about the way I grew up is either the best or only way to do things.
A good example of this is when I started to take taekwondo lessons. I had been doing martial arts for ten years, so some things are just engrained into my muscles; so when the Master in Korea told me to change how I did things, I was resistant, and neglectful, often forgetting to do them. This could be anything from the the way I was standing, or how I held my arms or the way I tied my belt. But after doing lessons for a while with this new Master, I realized, that I was starting to do things in the same way as everyone else around me. I don't know when it started, but all the sudden I realized the Master was correcting someone else on that one thing I had always got wrong, instead of me!
Another example of being challenged to change my thinking was when speaking to Koreans in English. I would, at first, get annoyed by certain phrases that everyone seemed to use.
