About

Who’s that girl?

Hi there! My name is Alexina and I’m a bilingual 20-something graphic and web designer from Montreal, Canada - oh, wait, scratch that - I’m a bilingual 20-something Canadian girl teaching English in South Korea!

Wait, wait, wait, let’s backtrack here. I’m a graphic and web designer? Teaching English in South Korea? What gives?

Well, here's the thing... and hopefully it'll be comprehensible because it's pretty much a random mumbo-jumbo in my head.

All right. Let's go back to November 2010, when an online friend of mine recommended the Korean drama (commonly referred to as kdrama) Minami Shineyo (You're Beautiful) to me saying it's pretty much made of awesome and omg he's (Taekyung) like a lulzy version of Gossip Girl's Chuck Bass (I was a diehard GG fan at that point). "Okay," said I, "let's see this Chuck Bass 2.0". Well. I liked it. Enough to buy the series later on. Oh, I facepalm a lot nowadays because it's definitely not the best kdrama ever made (now I'd say that honour possibly goes to City Hunter, although next summer I might say something else), and I can't freaking believe no one saw it coming that Go Minam is a girl, but I digress. It was cute, it was properly lulzy and sad, and I liked it. And it made me discover the world of Korean pop (kpop) through FT Island's Lee Hongki (who played Jeremy) and CN Blue's Jung Yonghwa (who played Shinwoo). I'm not much into those two groups anymore but I still greatly respect them as talented musicians and composers.

Anyhow. At some point I found out that Korea is very big on hiring foreigners to teach English in their schools, and that gave me pause. Hey... maybe I could...? Except then I found out that they only hire native English speakers or "people who attended English institutions from junior high on". Well crap. Seeing as Quebec has a pesky law (Bill 101, if you're curious) that forbids children of French Canadian parents (or rather, more specifically, even if one parent attended a French institution, the kid has to attend French school) from attending English institutions until college, I thought This is the end of that. But! My mother, a translator, is very wise: she wanted her kids to be good English speakers whether the government liked it or not, so to bypass the law she sent me and my sisters to a French immersion school for anglophones and allophones, where we learned English... between classes.

Fast-forward to 2011: I wondered if that would be enough for the EPIK (English Program in Korea) program.

I began applying in April that year. Pleading my case to Korvia, I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. Unfortunately, they never replied to my inquiry. I thought, Well crap, I guess it wasn't meant to be. But! Later that month I discovered Footprints, a Canadian-based recruiting company. Since they're Canadian, I wondered if they might be more understanding of my situation... Lucky me, they replied within a few days, saying Yup, start gathering your reference letter! So I did.

Fast-forward to the end of the year: I'm working at a major newspaper conglomerate and learning that they're moving out of the city to already established hubs and that hey, there might not even be enough room for everyone there. I'd actually just applied to EPIK and felt tremendously bemused about this whole affair back home... I really, truly, absolutely did not want to follow the company. I don't have a driver's license, and public transit would be pure murder. Plus, I was beginning to grow weary of working there. I always felt tired because my body couldn't get used to my irregular schedule, and I didn't enjoy the repetitive tasks. There's a famous saying in the design world: get out of the box! Well, my job was very confining, in a few words.

So I decided to... not follow them out there. I was very aware that the gig in Korean wasn't even confirmed, but I decided to cut my losses, collect unemployment insurance, and see if I could get the Korea thing. Obviously a very risky decision, but I honestly didn't want to drag myself deeper into something like depression-land just for job security. I'm young, I want to discover the world, and I can definitely learn from teaching and living alone out there. So there I was, wringing my hands and crossing my fingers really hard.

Come December (just before my last working day at the paper), I learned that I'd been dropped from the EPIK program (no idea why), but that I could apply directly with the Office of Education in Ulsan, but that I'd need to hurry my butt. There were some hitches with badly notarised documents (tsk tsk tsk not my fault) but in the end I finally sent them mid-December at long last. This is around the time that I remembered that I still needed to pass my bloody TEFL test, so off I went studying for the final -- stressful is an understatement. I hadn't had a test in more than a year! haha

Just after Christmas I got the results from the test back: PASS! But, still no news from Korea. More waiting, more waiting. Very sobering time. And then... news! The answer was YES! Woohoo!

So that's my story, everyone. A more nerve-wracking year, I have not had.

My name is Alexina, and I'm a bilingual 20-something graphic and web designer (and English teacher) from Montreal, Canada, currently working and living in Ulsan, South Korea. Pleased to meet you!

Why the name coucoukorea?

It came to me quite suddenly while I was brainstorming potential blog names... way back in late 2010 actually when I'd just hopped onto the kpop bandwagon. I couldn't tell you what the other name contenders were, but needless to say, obviously they just didn't stick out enough in my mind like coucoukorea instantly did.

In fact, I say "coucou" very often. For those who don't know, the word is basically like a cute way of saying "hi" in French.

I didn't want this blog to just be another Hey, look, I'm in Korea omg! Seeing as I'm bilingual (French/English) I wanted this blog to be my playground, in whichever language I wanted. You might say I wanted it to be a true reflection of who I am. Sure, I'm teaching English in South Korea -- but it's nice to switch it up sometimes. I'm extremely lucky that I did grow up in Montreal where everyone more or less understands you in either language -- but I was aware that I might start feeling homesick in Korea if I wasn't able to express myself in French every once in a while. It's part of who I am.

So... coucou Korea! kekeke