I have officially completed one full month teaching in Korea and there is so much to tell. Korea is an awesome place and I'm experiencing, observing, and tasting new things daily.
So first things first: my apartment. My apartment is small, which I was expecting, but after one month here it is feeling quite large. I haven't seen many other apartments, but the ones I have seen are smaller than mine, and people who see mine think it's big. It is technically a "studio" although the rooms (kitchen, bathroom, patio, and main room) are somewhat separate. I have a teeny little kitchen, with two burners, a sink, a medium size fridge (bigger than a dorm fridge, but smaller than a normal fridge), and absolutely zero counter space to prepare anything. My shower consists of the entire bathroom. When I shower, the whole bathroom showers. It was a little weird at first, but now it seems completely normal. When I want to shower, I have to change the water setting on the wall. It's like a little thermostat, but it controls all of the water in the apartment, which includes the shower, washing machine, and floors. Floors? Yes, floors. My feet stay nice and toasty thanks to hot water pipes under the flooring. This is actually how my entire apartment is heated. In the main room I have a twin bed, small table, dresser, TV, and shoe rack, which you must have because you remove your shoes when indoors. My patio is really just a separate area that can close off from the mainroom if I want to. This is where I hang my clothes to dry after washing, because I can open the windows even if it is cold outside. The patio is actually large enough for some storage, another small wardrobe, and my clothes rack (most people keep this in their mainroom because we don't have closets, but I am lucky that I can put it away somewhat). My apartment is located directly above a restaurant, which I can always smell throughout the hallways, but luckily, I never smell inside my apartment.
The neighborhood I live in is small, compared to others nearby, and especially Seoul. For such a small "neighborhood" it really has everything. There are convenient stores on every corner, little boutiques, restaurants of all kinds, a movie theatre, grocery stores, bars, you name it. I can walk downstairs from my apartment, walk two blocks and be standing on the corner of the main street. Looking down the street it is hard to believe it is a small little community. There are neon signs, flashing, spinning, and blinking, music blaring from every store, and people hustling and bustling up and down the street until late into the night.
My school is actually in a larger town, about 15 minutes away by bus. There are several foreign teachers who work here and live in my neighborhood. Most of us work in hagwans, which is the name for private language schools. My hagwan is a little different than others, as I am the only foreign teacher. There are three other Korean teachers who teach English. Their focus is grammar and writing, whereas my focus is speaking and listening. This is where things get interesting.. The other teachers at my school are pretty far from fluent. They generally don't understand me, and I rarely understand them. How they teach English, especially any kind of pronunciation, is beyond me. Most hagwans have several native English teachers, and a few Korean teachers, so my experience has been quite interesting. I wasn't really given any kind of orientation; I was just thrown to the wolves. This would have been less of a disaster if I had been given the curriculum anytime earlier than an hour before classes started. The first few days were pretty miserable, but by the end of the week, things were looking up. Now that I've got my bearings, things are great, although the kids are complete hellions. Some of them want your approval so bad, it's sad. But some of them act like they ate a bowl of sugar for bed the night before, then another for breakfast. For the most part, the kids are really great, but it seems to be a common problem among foreign teachers (in hagwans anyway) that the kids are unruly and hard to discipline. It is kind of funny though when they pretend they don't know what I'm saying just so they don't have to work/sit down/shut up. When I call them out on it, they can't keep a straight face, and it's quite cute. I would try bribing them with candy if I didn't think it would send them into a diabetic coma.
I'll leave you with this for now, with more to come on food, fashion, and cultural oddities that I find interesting.
Annyeonghee gyeseyo!
