My face skin fucking hates South Korea. Or South Korea hates it, maybe, I'm not sure. Either way, my skin has looked TERRIBLE since I got here, and I'm waiting patiently for it to sort itself out. Now, my skin has never been fantastic - but I'd much prefer to have 23-year-old acne instead of the 15-year-old shit, you know? Hulllllll.
"Hullllllll." It's a stupid sound/expression that Korean students use to express distaste/dissatisfaction/whatever, and I use it way too much. Way more than my students.
For the most part, Korean people are exceedingly awesome in a number of ways. Super nice and super helpful (the majority of them). AND super-super willing to get all emotionally involved in songs and sing and dance at any time. Singing especially for ballads. And dudes are the first ones to dance in bars/clubs. And they're terrible dancers, for the most part.
Clubbing in SK is way better than clubbing in the states. Because Korean boys are shy as shit. And so they won't come up and start trying to dance/grind with/on you unless you legit hold eye-contact with them for at least 5 seconds, and then it may take some more inviting beyond that. It's really nice to be able to dance without feeling pressured or preyed upon. My week of clubbing with Kodee was awesome because of this - and literally every time we realized the ratio of foreign-guys had gotten too high, we would either move to the other side of the room or leave the club entirely.
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| Oh yes. 6:30am faces. |
This being said - once you give a Korean guy an "in" - chances are he's going to act ridiculously possessive. There's no casual 'I'll just dance a few songs with this cute dude and then go back to my friends' - getting away from them can be really difficult. But not really, like, "scary" difficult - just annoyingly difficult.
ALSO - Seoul really really is a city that never sleeps, especially on the weekend. There's no 2am time-limit on alcohol here, so clubs (and coffee shops and norebangs near clubs) stay open ALL NIGHT. And they don't get dead at 2-3am, either - we left one last Sunday morning at 5:30am and it was still packed like sardines in there. Which is all pretty great, because the subways stop around 1am and don't start up again till 5am. Needless to say, I fucked up my sleep schedule something awful during vacation. AND, when you're done clubbing in the morning, there are lots of restaurants open (Koreans don't really eat anything different for breakfast, so you can get anything at 6am). Our last night out we ended up at a place where we found a plate of "sausage and french fries" which was actually pretty delicious.
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| Just what the menu said it would be. |
Anyway. The timeline of my stay thus far has been:
Week 1: Training (2ish-10ish), immigration office visit, shopping for necessities
Week 2: Normal Schedule (2pm-10pm), found a crossfit gym, got my Alien Registration Card
Week 3: Summer Camp (10am-10pm), got a bank account and a cell phone!
Week 4: SUMMER VACATION - lost my cell phone, got a new one through insurance, went out dancing almost every night
Week 5: Summer Camp (10am-10pm)
Next week: Summer Camp (10am-10pm) - last week of this 12-hour shit, thank god.
WORK
So far so good. I like teaching so far, but I'm still figuring it all out... some of the classes have so much busy work to do because of the textbooks we use that I don't have to think about much. But the older/higher-level classes I'm starting to need ideas for. I don't have a good arsenal of language/word games to play with kids yet, and so a few of my classes are boring, which I hate. But I also really want to have a little more focus - I'm planning on asking the director this week what is the main goal for each level - what he's looking for from the English teacher. He inadvertently gave me a phonics-class focus/lesson the other day, and that was really helpful and I think knowing what he wants (other than "teaching the book") will be helpful for the other classes, too. In retrospect, it seems like maybe this is something they should have told me at the beginning. Oh well, I'll figure it out and make sure to add it to my "incoming teacher" notes. It's a growing school, and they're still in the midst of setting up admin processes like this.
The kids really are great. And I definitely have my favorites and less-favorites. Out of the 65+ students I have, really only 3 leave a bad taste in my mouth. Most of them I really really love. One of them is my favorite, for no real reason other than he makes me smile/laugh. The best thing I've done so far is make a bunch of the higher level kids write stories in a format that was taught to me in undergrad:
My favorite class (actually I have two, I think) is tornado-face class, for obvious reasons. I love those guys - they're super fun without being violent/ridiculous (and I mean physically/literally in class - many of my classes jump and fight with each other in a normal kid-like way - but this class doesn't). It also helps that they're my 2nd highest-level class, I suppose, so we can have good conversations pretty easily.
**Also, like, the Korean admin boy at my school is UNBELIEVABLY ADORABLE. Like, like, hullllllll. I just want to coo at him a lot. He's freakishly tall, and only 22, but soooo cute. And his English is pretty terrible, which is wonderfully ironic. ("You don't want lice? I bring you lice.") ALSO ALSO, the best thing about him is that his name is "Juan". No, for real. Technically it's "Oo-won", but yeah. Juan. Juan the Copy Bitch. Because that's his job. He mostly sits in the copy-machine closet and makes copies of things. Occasionally he gets to herd children around or take attendance (the middle-school girls have also noticed how adorable he is), or is subjected to random office-bitch requests from the teachers (apparently he fetched fried chicken for a teacher to bring home after work yesterday). I reeeeeally want to make him a name tag that just says "Juan" and under neath that "Copy Bitch" but I don't think he'd get it... So I settle for trying to make tiny conversations with him ("I go through the dry erase markers very fast, I think I use them more than the other teachers." "Haha! You're markah-gul!") or bringing him left-over ice cream from my class so he'll smile at me and I get to see his dimples. Gah, dimples! He's a nice perk of working at the school. **
**Also, like, the Korean admin boy at my school is UNBELIEVABLY ADORABLE. Like, like, hullllllll. I just want to coo at him a lot. He's freakishly tall, and only 22, but soooo cute. And his English is pretty terrible, which is wonderfully ironic. ("You don't want lice? I bring you lice.") ALSO ALSO, the best thing about him is that his name is "Juan". No, for real. Technically it's "Oo-won", but yeah. Juan. Juan the Copy Bitch. Because that's his job. He mostly sits in the copy-machine closet and makes copies of things. Occasionally he gets to herd children around or take attendance (the middle-school girls have also noticed how adorable he is), or is subjected to random office-bitch requests from the teachers (apparently he fetched fried chicken for a teacher to bring home after work yesterday). I reeeeeally want to make him a name tag that just says "Juan" and under neath that "Copy Bitch" but I don't think he'd get it... So I settle for trying to make tiny conversations with him ("I go through the dry erase markers very fast, I think I use them more than the other teachers." "Haha! You're markah-gul!") or bringing him left-over ice cream from my class so he'll smile at me and I get to see his dimples. Gah, dimples! He's a nice perk of working at the school. **
MOVING ON - I had my first outside-of-school spotting earlier tonight, where a pair of twin girls from my highest class were apparently at the same movie as me (EPIC, in 4D, whaaaat?!?). It was kind of nice/fun - they seemed really excited to see me even though we just said hello.
FREE TIME?
There was that week-long vacation I had, wherein all the clubbing happened. The first two weeks I was occupied with getting my alien card/cell phone and finding a crossfit box. Now that it's "Summer Camp" and I work 12 hour days, I don't really have much free time outside of the weekends. And so that mostly consists shopping for different things I'm realizing I need/want, hanging out in coffee shops, and going to movies. Towards the end of my vacation week I bought a bike (yay bike!), and it makes me super happy. And it gives me a bit more mobility/freedom. The subways here are cr-amazing, but I still like being able to pick my own route from point A to point B. Tomorrow I'm planning on riding to my crossfit box to see how long a trip like that takes (it takes me about 20 minutes on the subway). I'm super excited for summer camp to be over so I can get back to crossfit - I haven't been able to go at all in the last two weeks because I can't even fathom trying to get there for the 7am class, and all the other classes are while I'm at work. :(
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| Also, my bike is super adorable. And it has pretty red tires! Yay! |
The food here is really good. Too good. I eat so much fried chicken here, it's ridiculous. And delicious. The three tenants of Korean cuisine that I've discovered are: 1) MAKE IT SWEET. If it was salty in America, chances are they've found a way to make it sweet here. 2) CHICKEN CHICKEN CHICKEN. Like really, it's everywhere, and it's all amazing. 3) SINGLE-SERVE ICE CREAM. Super important when it's going to stay consistently above 85 degrees for two months. It's like an ice-cream truck ran rampant through the country - there are ice cream boxes outside of most stores, and they all have single-serving ice-cream cones and popsicles and milkshakes and little freezy otter-pop-esque things, and all of them are delicious. So, Koreans are super good at making delicious fried and/or sweet things. You know what they're not so good at? Coffee. Like, really really bad really overpriced espresso. I only drink dopios (because I still don't like the taste of coffee for the most part, although it is slowly growing on me), and so it's REALLY OBVIOUS that the vast majority of coffee-workers (I'm not even going to call them baristas) have no idea what good coffee is supposed to taste like. I have found once place that does, and so I visit them on a pretty regular basis (i.e. all the baristas know me and wave hello).
I'm enjoying being a faux-asian looking foreigner here. I like it because I'm enough of a novelty in my neighborhood that even if I only go in a place once, they will definitely remember me the next time I'm there, and so there's a nice amount of recognition. And it's nice being faux-asian looking because I don't get as much blatant staring as I know some people get.
My Korean still sucks. Part of the down-side of being an English teacher here, especially during summer camp, is that I spend 12 hours of my day in an English-speaking environment. I am going to start taking weekend Korean classes in September, and hopefully that will help. Also that vacation week I was hanging out a lot with Kodee (from Washington), so that was also a whole lot of English. I guess all I'm saying is that apart from very short interactions with people I'm buying things from, I don't interact with Korean-speakers all that much. I know that will change though, I just haven't really had time to make friends yet.
...... okay. I'm going to stop writing now. Because it's almost 3am and I want to try and maintain a pre-3am sleeping schedule from now on. GOOD NIGHT YALL.
