Archive for September, 2006

Terribijon Terripy

Rainy Saturday all holed up in my little residence here at Gohan Elementary School. With the TV on. I’ve never been much of a TV watcher, but ever since they hooked up my cable I keep finding my thumb drifting toward that remote. The provision of cable and a TV on which to watch it is stipulated in my contract. This surprised me at first – I would certainly have preferred they provide internet, which I’m still waiting to get hooked up on my own 100 won coin – but I now realize that, at least in my case, cable TV has actually been very soothing. TV kills the silence of living alone, something that is quite new to me. Sure I’ve spent plenty of time by my lonesome, having traveled to many a far-flung spot all my by self. Here now I’m finding out how different moving alone is from staying alone. The part that kills me is not loneliness. The only time I’ve felt lonely, in fact, was my first night here and most of the following day. It was a very intense loneliness brought on by the abrupt transition from the high-drive socializing of a bunch of fast friend peers all lumped together with 10 free evenings at EPIK orientation to a silent night in an empty house in a strange little mountain town. Fortunately, having uprooted myself to strange places before, I was able to identify the reasons for how I felt and knew it would go away. What didn’t go away was the silence. The silence really kills me, it piles up on top of itself, traps and suffocates my brain. Background noise is like a pacemaker for my thoughts, occupying the part of my brain that bounces off the walls if not restrained. TV does occupy more of my brain than I would often like, but at least for now the sound of human voices, even ones I can’t hardly understand, is truly wonderful, if a little bit terribly guiltily so.
Cable TV here has a number of highlights I would like to share with you. Moving up through the numerous channels, you first pass a whole lot of local news channels. While I can sort of guess the news topics from visual cues and the few and far between words I understand, the newsworthiness is often entirely lost to me. They seem to interview a disproportionate number of old ladies who look very disapproving of whatever it is they are talking about, to show a large number of panning shots of quotidian life, particularly of ubiquitous apartment buildings and farm houses, and to sprinkle in a surprising amount of undercover-cam footage with blurred-out faces of people pretty much sitting around chatting very unexcitedly and, I must say, entirely unsisnisterly about something that I can only take on faith to be appropriately nefarious.
Next, there’s lots of talkshowish programs, with plenty of cute font, brightly colored captions bouncing around the screen, highlighting the more amusing statements they’re saying. After that there are pretty much 24/7 at least a few soap operas set in ancient times East Asia, some Korean, some Chinese with subtitles. Among these, the only thing making any of the programs unique to my untrained eye is the wide range of production quality; some of the Chinese ones I’m pretty sure borrowed their costumes from a high school drama class.
Further into the channels come educational programs of teachers lecturing about a wide variety of topics. These are very exciting. Every couple of minutes they even go so far as to change from the predominant shot of chalkboard and hand with piece of chalk writing on chalkboard to show the teacher’s face for at least a few seconds. I have one of these programs on right now. We are learning high school algebra. The teacher has clean fingernails and holds that chalk very well. Unfortunately he uses roman letters for variables, which I find a little disappointing.
After that there are a number of sports channels, showing local and international sporting events.
Following that there are some channels that show a lot of American movies, couple-year-old primetime network series, and a few wonderfully horrible old-school shows (such as the A-team; I don’t know how people took themselves seriously back then!), presenting a surprisingly satisfying selection of programming in English.
Finally come the best channels of all. Second best is the 24/7 Go channel, channel 73. My personal favorites, though, are channels 77 and 78, the live video game channels. Here one can’t help but become engrossed in the epic battle between slightly rotund, sweaty Korean teen-aged boys trying to destroy each other’s avatars or demondroid armies or whatever through the medium of networked personal computers, complete with corporate sponsorship and attractive commentators.
Aside from the above programming, I find the advertisements rather fascinating as well. About half of all advertisements, pitching most any product, are all the same: a cute, mid-to-late-twenties Korean girl against a clean, stylish background, speaking in a sing-songy half-whisper, with some fancy-font words floating by and almost always a very quick little jingle at the very end. Seriously, those are all the same, whether it’s green tea, home lones, or toilets. Also, there are a few great ads on of just the sort made fun of in Lost In Translation, particularly good is one showing Pierce Brosnan in a suit. It just zooms around him for a while, and at the very end, he says, simply and slowly, “The Suit.”
Gladly I don’t need to wear “The Suit” myself at work. I do, however, have to wear a collared shirt and non-jeans. I actually haven’t been explicitly told not to wear jeans, but I plan to wait until I’ve thoroughly ingratiated myself before asking. I have been explicitly told not to wear flip-flops, yet at the same time it is required at the elementary schools to take your shoes off at the door and change into slippers. I bought my own pair of slippers to take with me after spending all Wednesday with half my foot hanging off of the biggest extra pair they had. I’m glad no students noticed this, as I’m sure they would not have let me hear the end of it. This I am sure of because of all the other things they don’t let me hear the end of. Of foremost interest are the presence of hair on my face, the relative lack of it on my head, and the size and shape of my nose. Whether despite or because of such exotic features, the majority of my younger female students have been assuring me that I am “very handsome,” even a few male students and teachers have echoed that. In fact, last Saturday, when I was meeting people at some schools before starting work, several teachers happily said to me “good imajee [image]!” My co-teacher in charge of helping me out, Mr. Heo, explained that they were pleased that they got the most tall, anglo-saxon looking of the new teachers coming to the county. Clearly my English is thus the most authentic, right? Anyway, the girls’ middle school is probably the best place to teach; perhaps it’s just the novelty, but they were glued to my every word. And while for now I just let the rockstarstatus amuse me, I very quickly grew tired of the one girl who decided to stalk me through the hallways all day long. At one point she saw me talking to some other girls at the other end of the hallway, I suppose found this unacceptable, and literally sprinted over and tried her best to edge the other girls away. I think I need to practice the Korean for “Thank you, I’m very flattered. Please do be so kind as to relay your positive impressions of me to any sisters or cousins you might have who are about ten years older than you are.”
At the boys’ schools, don’t get this kind of attention, which can certainly be a relief. Still, the boys seem to like me too, and I have had absolutely no discipline problems at all, something other teachers are already complaining about on our EPIK 2006 email list. I am keeping in mind that the lack of misbehavior might, like the girls’ attentions, fade as quickly as my novelty. They do still use the “love stick” in schools here!
I teach at two elementary schools, the boys’ middle school, the boys’ high school, the girls’ middle school, the girls’ high school, and once it’s completed, at the “Jeongseon English Experience Center,” a brand-new facility for role-playing English practice, about 30km away. That is 7 schools, depending on how you count – since the boys’ high school and middle school are connected, as are the girls’ schools. In total I have 24.5 class hours. My contract limits me to 18 class-hours, so this means (should mean – I’ll be looking very carefully at my paycheck!) 6.5 hours’ overtime each week. They call these “special classes,” and never asked me if I wanted to do them. According to my contract they should have. I suppose I could complain, but at W20,000/hr (about US$21/hr) overtime, the added income is enough for me to try and put up with it. What I’m worried about is how much work it will prove to be, outside of class, to prepare material for 10 different grades, as well as the English Experience Center. But, as with everything, time will tell.
For now, I’m more worried about being able to teach effectively and cheerfully, with a loud enough voice, come Monday. Since about Thursday, I’ve had a sore throat, very unpleasant nasal congestion, and fatigue. Seriously I’m pretty sure it’s SARS, but I’m telling myself it’s a bad cold, brought on by the stress of getting adjusted during my first week. I was thinking of leaving town this weekend, possibly even going to Seoul to buy some things I want, particularly an electronic Korean-English dictionary and some Korean grammar books, but instead I’m just resting, writing this freaking novel (hey, you’re still reading it, aren’t you?), and watching TV.

Epilogue: On the way to the internet cafe, USB flashdrive with this post in my pocket, I was harangued by some middle school girls. They were very concerned that I am unshaven, and truly shocked that I should be wearing flip-flops with no socks! They must have been very concerned for my naked feet because they proceeded to follow me down the street and giggle rabidly. Don’t worry ladies, my toes can handle it!

Home Sweet Gohan

English Program in Korea, or EPIK, has essentially two roles, so far as I can tell. The first is to be a recruiting company. They advertise around the world, giving an impression of a standardized, nationally run program. They then process applicants and pay airfare to Korea. Upon arrival, EPIK takes on its second role, which is the brief training of the new teachers. It is at this mandatory, ten day orientation that it becomes very clear that EPIK is not at all a nationally run program. To be fair, when signing the contract it is made quite explicit that said contract is between the teacher (in my case, me) and the Office of Education to which said teacher is going (in my case, Gangwon-do). But the true extent of the decentralization of the program is made quite clear when you’re at orientation for a whole week before you can meet with your provincial coordinator and actually have a chance at finding out more about where you’re going than just which province it’s in. Only later to discover that all this coordinator knew was which county you’re going to and that he was blatantly wrong about which town in that county. The experience I speak of is of course my own, and the culmination of it happened Friday as I was riding in the car of my co-teacher, who had come to meet me at the Gangwon-do Education Center, and was driving me to my new home. He was telling me details of a town with a name that was most decidedly not the Jeongseon I was expecting. I remember like it was yesterday (or, at least like it was 5 days ago) that the Gangwon-do coordinator told me I was going to, specifically, Jeongseon town, not just a broad assignment to Jeognseon county. But loandbehold there I was, riding along with some town named Gohan looming large enough in the conversation that I had no choice but to reckon that thereto I must be going. And hereto I have come, to find out that while Gohan loomed large in that conversation, it does everything else pretty small indeed.
But before I tell you what little more I can about where I am, I want to say a few more things about how I got here. I’ll spare you too many details about the flight over and such, except to mention the part where the weight of my shoes, which I had strapped to the outside of my backpack, pulled open the zipper and caused everything to fall out, including, most unfortunately, my external hard drive and my laptop. The external hard drive appears to be broken, as does the hard drive inside my laptop (although the rest of the latop is OK). I made a back up of the internal drive onto the external drive that very morning, but, when all my data was in one proverbial basket and that basket very unproverbially came open, I now find myself thoroughly fuct. I have low hopes of finding anyone who can fix a Mac around here. Somehow, having uprooted myself to the other side of the world, losing all that data feels like just another thing I’ve had to give up to come here, and so does not bum me out as much as I think it would have back home. What does bum me out is not having a fully functional computer of my own.
Technological tragedies aside, I arrived at Incheon International an hour early, found the EPIK counter. They bought all the already arrived teachers dinner and then we loaded our stuff onto a truck and ourselves onto a bus – or a “limojin” as they seem to be called around here – the last of four buses to collect teachers from the airport over the previous two days. A very nice three hour nap later and I arrived at about 12:30 pm at the Korea National University of Education.FYI:KNUE&EPIK(OMG). , outside of the city of Cheongju. We all registered, got a guidebook, a map of the Cheongju area, a map of our province, a textbooky thing to go with the many lectures to come, and our very own stainless steel EPIK mug. I lugged my gear to my dorm room on the third floor, waking up my roommate, Patrick from Newcastle, took a shower, passed out.
The following ten days were a mixed bag indeed. We were tightly scheduled between classes and three cafeteria meals, which evenings thankfully freeish. Freeish because we were required to sign out and back in should we be leaving campus, with a curfew of 11:00 pm. Luckily the curfew was not strictly enforced! Most of our lectures turned out, in my opinion, to be fairly well-intentioned but useless. Our lecturers were some EPIK staff, some local Korean teachers, and some veteran EPIK teachers. I liked the lectures that were very on-topic and that gave a lot of good, practical advice and ideas to use in the classroom. Unfortunately, many of the rest of the lectures became dominated by the same people asking the same questions over and over and over again.Another exciting lecture. All of these questions were legitimate things to be worried about, like visa issues, tax issues, housing, transportation, etc., but it was obvious to me very early in the program which of these questions I could get an answer to at that point and which I could not. The former I quickly resolved, and the latter I just gave up on, knowing I’d find out when I got wherever I was going.
Because of so much wasted time I think the EPIK office is wasting a lot of money on having so long of an orientation, all the material given to us, the food, the housing and the field trips must cost them a lot of money. On the practical side, I’d love to have all the good lectures over five days, and have them give to money saved to each teacher as a nice bonus. On the personal side, orientation went by damned fast. It hasn’t been long since I graduated and I sure haven’t forgotten how to turn my brain off during bad lectures. Outside of the lectures, I actually had a good time. It’s easy to make fast friends with people who have a similar background and who are all similarly in a strange country embarking on a very similar sort of adventure. A day and a half in Seoul and plenty of nights out and I’d say orientation was well made the best of. I was getting very anxious to move on to the next step, but now that I have so much to do to get my life here in order, on top of the responsibilities of a real job, I’m missing this past care-free week and a half.
Now here I am, feeling rather alone, in this tiny town of Gohan, Jeongseon county, Gangwon province, Republic of Korea. Just that I’m in this town at all was one surprise, but there’ve been others. For one, due to a current housing shortage, they’ve put in me in an official residence at one of the elementary schools I will be working at. My commute on Fridays will be unbeatable! I tried my best to expect the very minimum housing promised in the contract, and so I was extremely happy to see my new place. I’ve got two rooms, a small kitchen, a bathroom. Brand new appliances: TV (big).Bedroom. , microwave, a minifridge and a full-sized refrigerator (?!).Kitchen.
Kitchen. , and a washing machine (the buttons on which I spent about 15 minutes deciphering and labeling in English with sticky notes this morning).Washing machine (and improvised clothes line). .
An enormous new dresser,
Dresser (and improvised clothes line #2). and a brand-new queen sized bed (I guess they expect me to find a girlfriend).Big for a bachelor. No cookware as yet, and while no was cookware ever promised, it sounds like they’re going to be buying me some soon.
My good fortune in housing is due to another good fortune; the local housing shortage is due to the large number of construction workers who are building a ski resort right outside of town. The local economy used to be entirely coal-mining, I have been told. Around ten to twenty years ago all the mines closed, and everyone left. My co-teacher explained that this is why they have a two elementary schools, two middle schools, and two high schools with very small numbers of students and in such a small town. A while back, in an attempt to revive the local economy, the government gave a special exemption and allowed for the construction of the only casino in Korea in which Korean nationals are allowed to gamble. This casino is called Kangwon Land and it’s only a few miles up in the mountains from Gohan. I have yet to check it out, but from what I’ve read it’s quite big, and they have branched out to include a large resort and a golf course. Kangwon Land is currently branching further to include a ski resort, slated to open this December. From the the girls’ high school and middle school, which I visited yesterday and which is higher up on a hill, it’s possible to see some of the ski runs and ski lifts.Brand new ski slopes, as seen from Gohan Girls' Middle/High School). Needless to say, what with the turn-off up to the resort literally across the street from the elementary school that is my new home, I think this should be a pretty good winter! .Turn-off for Kangwon Land. But, this isn’t even the end of the good surprises. Local teachers are allowed to use some of the facilities at the Kangwon Land staff housing complex, just a few minutes walk from my home. I’ve been granted access to the gym and the swimming pool, and plan to check them out soon. I have, however, not been granted access to their internet room, apparently the previous English teacher, one Mr. Parker, abused that privilege and has set a poor precedent for all gringos.
While the director at the Kangwon Land employee housing might not trust me, everyone else has been really nice to me so far. Just on my way to this internet cafe I stopped for some noodles. I got to talking to a guy working there, in his small English and my teensyweensy Korean. He was wearing a Burton snowboards shirt, so I asked if he snowbaorded. Turns out he’s a snowboard instructor and now I have a snowboarding buddy. I think he said he could get me a discount on a season pass to the new resort. On top of that, after lunch, they refused to let me pay! Next, I was a little confused trying to find this internet cafe again – I had a card with some minutes left I wanted to use up. I asked someone, and they forced me into their car and drove me here. Finally, just now the guy next to me noticed I was almost out of time as he was finishing up playing some Starcraft, and he gave me his card with 28 minutes left on it. I’m getting worried that there’s some awful conspiracy to be nice to me!