Archive for August, 2006

some background

There come’s a time in every Skor-skor’s life, as it was once said, to, well, find something to do with himself. That time in this Adam Skor-skor’s life was brought on by my somewhat questionable choice to graduate from college. With no immediate desire for further schooling, no desire at all to have the kind of job that I could get in the US with just a bachelor’s degree, and the good sense to not squander my paltry capital on being a bum, the best option was one that, I must admit, does come quite naturally to me: running off to a far-away land.
But not just any far-away land. My criteria, while not too demanding, narrowed my choices down to two countries. Specifically, I wanted to capitalize off of my good fortune to have been raised a native English speaker (thanks mom! thanks dad!), and I wanted to make enough money for it to be worth my while. Now, with just a bachelor’s degree, and with no (or, in my case, very little) special training in education, it is possible to get a job pretty much anywhere in the non-Englishosphere with the exception of Western Europe. Unfortunately, in the name of making enough money to count when converted back into real money, only two countries remain viable options: Japan and South Korea. “So why not Japan?,” as I have been asked by plenty of people. To be honest, the primary reason I first considered Korea instead of Japan was because of several travelers I’ve met who explained to me how one can save up significantly more money in Korea. While the absolute pay is less than in Japan, the cost of living in Korea is fairly low, and the cost of living in Japan is quite high, making for a greater amount of savable income in Korea.
I first thought of teaching, as most westerners do, at a private language academy. As I did research towards that goal, I learned that at these private academies the pay can be quite good, but the hours can be very demanding and there are often many great uncertainties. Stories of terrible working and housing conditions, and very frequent accounts of not getting paid on time made me increasingly cautious about it. Many people find great jobs and I still think that with a lot of care and some good luck I could have too had I not found out about English Program in Korea (EPIK), through which the Korean Ministry of Education places native English teachers in public schools across Korea. On the downside, the pay is somewhat less good than I could, as a UCLA graduate, have found in the private schools. On the upside, the job is very secure, I’m sure to always get paid on time, and things like housing should be much less sketchy. Additionaly, according to my rough calculations comparing the kind of hours I’ve heard people work at private schools with the hours guaranteed to us through EPIK, my pay per hour should actually be somewhat more.
And so, here I am at the Korea National University of Education, an hour or two south of Seoul, attending our mandatory 10 day orientation period. Here I am to be getting acquainted with Korean culture and attending some useful lectures to help prepare me for the classroom. We’re housed in a dorm, fed like clockwork, and have to carefully fill out excursion forms if we want to leave campus – it’s the insurance policy, they say..'Pork music.' So far some of the lectures have been good and some rediculously useless, which I suppose is par for the course. This afternoon, after a field trip and a special folk music concert (which, despite the MC’s description of it as “pork music”, was actually awesome) we had a very poor introduction to phonetics from one of the directors who, with his imprefect accent, insisted that we follow the goals of The Seventh National Curriculum and make sure all our students achieve the pronunciation perfection he lacks. All in all there’s a general air of everything being superficially hyper-organized, but fundamentally ad-hoc at the same time. I’ve been told that I should get used it, that it’s just sort of the Korean M.O.
I get shipped off to my province, Gangwon-do, a week from today. I still, however, have yet to find out what town! Neither has anyone else going to Gangwon, so for now no choice but to go with the flow. In the meantime, after a morning lecture tomorrow,.Representin' UCLA class of 2006. I’m escaping this campus to run around Seoul with some other EPIK teachers, two of which happen to be follow members of the UCLA class of 2006. There’s also a UCLA ’05 grad here too. None of which had I previously met in LA, of course. I have decided that this is not really coincidental and indeed just a product of the high exposure to all things Korean that is UCLA. For now, I’ve an hour and ten minutes to hopefully get some time on a stationary bike in the dorm’s gym (gotta work off all the kalbi!), shower, and head off to noraebang! (Do NOT call it karaoke, you’ll get your ass beat ’round here, they don’t like the Japanese for some reason…)

32 Kg.

I thought this blog needed at least one post since I’ve linked lots of people to it already.

And so, with T-minus 12 hours to lift-off, I will break down my packing dilemna as an equation:
snowboard + snowboarding gear + backpacking gear + street clothes + hella warm clothes + work clothes + gadgetry + books + toiletries <= 32 kg I've got like 3 kg left and I haven't packed the last three of those categories... looks like there will be some careful consideration of just what exactly I don't need. Like toothpaste; I hear kim-chee is like natural flouride.