Back in the ROK

Took a three-month hiatus from blogging while Matt and I visited Idaho. We had big plans to see and do many things, but between family obligations and so many activities in my home area, we didn’t get around to as much as we had hoped. If you’re interested in our adventures, you can read his blog: http://lametayel.tumblr.com/ 

After almost a year of searching through terribly paying jobs, obviously crazy bosses, and impossible employment standards (no Americans here, no Brits there, no males anywhere), we had a couple of promising job offers in the dreaded hagwon (private afterschool academies) setting in South Korea. We were lured into a school owned by a Canadian who has owned an academy in S.K. for quite some time now. Three weeks after accepting the job, we are now in Chungcheongnam-do, a rural province south of Seoul.

View from old town towards our apartment complex.

We arrived a week ago Saturday night. Our bosses, a married couple, picked us up at the airport and drove us the one and half hours (or would have been if they hadn’t got lost) to our new home. They quickly showed our exhausted selves around the apartment before promising to collect us the next afternoon.

Our apartment is a spacious three-bedroom, two bathroom epitome of South Korean culture. Accessing the building is quite difficult. First, you have to go through a blind intersection, in which cars park in the middle (in order grab a bite at the convenient store). Then you have to choose which parking lot or garage you want to park in and carefully back into a spot, or if you are Korean, just park any old place and block four spaces. If you are of normal weight, you’ll have to crawl through the trunk of your car to get out of the vehicle.

Now you can squeeze between or crawl over parked cars to get to the doors of the apartment building, using a key card to enter. If it is windy, you have to physically wrench the automatic sliding door open and closed again. You wait for the single elevator that services the 18-story building and protect your nose from the kimchi smell until the 11^th floor. Another keycard (we have three key cards together for this place) will let you into the apartment.

There are four closets on either side as you enter the apartment, however none have tension rods in them to hang up coats. After the closets, you have a handy switch to switch off your gas or all of the lights in the apartment (except for the lights in the living room), then you have four switches to control various lights in the bathroom and entry.

There is a bathroom to the right, which has an actual tub with a shower, but no shower curtain rod. If you go straight instead of going into the bathroom, you will end up in a bedroom (empty save a fold-up cot and a tennis racket) and a glassed-in balcony that runs the length of the apartment.

If you turn left from the entry, you will be in the kitchen/living room area. We have a couch and a 32-inch TV. Black and cream tiled gives a feature wall. The kitchen has a full sized refrigerator, a cupboard for a kimchi fridge, a four burner hob, a gas oven, a vegetable washer, a cloth sterilizer, and a dishwasher. Next to the kitchen is a room that houses the washer and a water spout for cleaning.

If you go through the living room, there are two more bedrooms (one has its own separate balcony). One is the master suite, consisting of a complicated lighting system. Our ensuite closet and bathroom is equally annoying with a strange motion sensored light that seems to only detect ghosts. Our master bath has a heated toilet seat with so many buttons for various streams of water, that is it quite terrifying.

At least Koreans but a tarp between the ground and their soybeans.

So what besides the kimchi fridge screams Korea? There are two intercoms to open the downstairs door and the apartment door which are conveniently located right next to each other and three steps from the apartment door. The washer is off the kitchen, but the drying rack is in the master bedroom. There are several sterilizers, but everybody dries their food on the street. Not to mention the tiles, wall paper, as well as wall outlets, are crooked, and the paint is chipping but the light fixtures have crazy amount of detail that can only be seen when the light is just right in the early afternoon. Oh, and there is a big plastic cover in the middle of the living room’s wood floor that has “AIR CON” in big letters. It’s Korea in a nutshell.

On Sunday, we were taken to the school to get a crash course on the classes we were to teach the following day. By crash course, I mean: “here is your schedule, here are the previous teachers’ notes, I think your books are here, you’ll teach from 3:20 to 10 tomorrow, make sure they have more fun than learning.” After this half hour “orientation,” they whisked us off to Lotte Mart to get our groceries. I hate shopping with people, even though they were trying to be helpful, you could tell that the guy was not having the most fun following us around. By the time we got back, jet lag had hit us and we were lucky to get the groceries put away.

No time during the week to do anything but work and sleep. We’re teaching between eight and nine, forty-five minute classes a day. More on school in a future blog post, after I’ve been there for a bit. However, I can tell you that it is clear no one has any clue what is going on at that school, considering the teachers weren’t even correct in noting the pages covered, let alone the books used. We’re quite excited for this new adventure.