My First Week

Sunday: After meeting two other teachers from my SA agency at Incheon Airport, we make our way to the English Village north of Seoul, arriving just as the sun sets. My apartment is tiny but very neat and space-conscious, and there's a thoughtful present of noodles and loo roll on my bed. It's equipped with internet (hooray for high-speed first-world internet!), TV, heater, LOTS of storage, and a little kitchen + accessories. I also have my own bathroom. We're taken out for dinner at a local restaurant and already I can see I'm going to like the people here, Korean and otherwise :) Jet lag allows me to sleep till midnight, but gently prods me awake after that, and I spend the early hours of Monday morning watching K-pop (local music) on TV.

The photo is of my residence. I'm the window on the left at the top.

Monday: First day on the job! The two other new teachers (Ross from Zim and Caitlin from SA) and I are taken down to the teachers' room for the Monday meeting, and then it's straight out to the entrance of English Village (EV from now on), where, underneath an enormous Stonehenge, we rollcall our students with our shadow teachers. Mine is Park, a Korean guy who looks about 20 but is actually 32. My class doesn't understand a word I say and packs out laughing every time I say a name, so Park takes over. We drop them off at their "hotels" to unpack, and collect them 20 minutes later for an "opening ceremony" where two teachers (Korean and American) give a great show, enthusiastically taking the piss out of the 350+ students (nicknames are popular to avoid having to learn any names!) and listing the unbreakable rules (Speak English! Listen To Teachers! Don't Sleep In Class!). I sit in a sea of black-haired students who stare shamelessly at me and the other non-Korean teachers. Finally it's time for classes, and the rest of the day passes in a blur.

Tuesday: I lose half my class as they run screaming around a corner after a young guy in army fatigues. Park tells me with his usual affable smile that there is an actor shooting scenes from a popular Korean soap in the main street of the Village and goes striding after the lost girls and boys... Apparently the streets of EV are often closed down for the sole use of directors, and the local pub's walls are lined with autographs. My fellow teachers seem less excited. Probably because it's hard to explain to the teacher you're delivering a class to that you haven't a clue where the other fifteen children are.

Later, we're taken out for shabu-shabu at a local restaurant - the owner drives to EV to fetch us! This is a Japanese meal and is pretty special.


How to eat shabu-shabu:

1. Pull up a cushion and sit at the low table, where a potjie pot full of soup and vegetables is bubbling away above the built in gas flame. Fill up your bowl with the ladle - the professional way to do this is to slop it everywhere, including on yourself, and then admire the reddish stains. I'm happy to say I was immediately successful at this.
2. Ask the hostess for the meat - brought to you in about 20 rolled up very thin slices. Plunge a piece into the soup when you're ready and swish it about, waiting for it to cook. Shabu-shabu apparently means "swish swish". I can't comment on this part - vegetarians skip to the next step:
3. Pull up an enormous bowl of fresh white noodles and tip into the potjie pot. When cooked, spend half an hour attempting to transfer to your bowl using the ladle and your friends' chopsticks. Once in your bowl, attempt to eat with chopsticks. Drop slippery noodles around the table to great amusement of Koreanised teachers. Admit defeat when the hostess comes hurrying anxiously across with a fork. (The two other newbies laughed at me, but I notice they didn't attempt the noodles themselves...)
4. The hostess will remove the last bits of soup from the pot (these are put aside for take away) and then packs in a mix of uncooked rice and vegetables and a bit of leftover soup, pressing it down hard around the pot. Leave to cook over the flame for a couple of minutes, then scrape off the pot so that the black crunchy bits are mixed up, and pat it down again to cook some more. When it's to your taste, enjoy - this is the easiest part of the meal to actually eat and is surprisingly delicious.
5. Unfold your legs from underneath the table and attempt to stand up - it's alright to take a few wobbly attempts at this - after all, it has been an hour and a half of sitting on the floor...

Wednesday: I have been assigned to the science section of the school, which means Invention, Science and Exploration classes, I think - and Robotics! Which is awesome, cause I always wanted a robot. Teachers are encouraged to try out projects before teaching them :) I get confused when being introduced to the class, as there is a short question-and-answer time every new class you take (although you are the Home Room teacher for one class for their whole week here, you also teach other classes through the day). During the Q&A I keep asking the students their ages, and every single one is 15. I understand that all babies start life as 1 year old on the day they're born, so all Koreans are a year older than we are. I now discover that at Chinese New Year, everyone turns a year older, which means that it doesn't matter which month you are born in, you are the same age from New Year to New Year. A child born the night before New Year will turn 2 the following day. So despite being 4 months from my 28th birthday, I am actually already 29 in Korea. I have started giving this age to students that ask: they ask so that they can mentally place you in the classroom's hierarchy - age is everything in Korea. The older I am, the more respect I get from the kids! Also, apparently I have "small face, teacher!", which I'm told is a good thing here :)

Thursday: Ross, Caitlin and I were taken to the local hospital for our medical exams. Everyone at EV has to do this once they arrive, and it's pretty comprehensive and in-depth. Basically, if you've smoked a joint in the last month, or are taking anything stronger than paracetamol without a prescription, you will fail, and you will be escorted from the country immediately... pretty terrifying! The hospital is amazing, absolutely spotless with huge potted palms and ferns lining the corridor and tiny, neat little nurses in bonnets. Nobody speaks much English, which meant that when standing on the height/weight machine, I was not prepared for a plastic thing to wallop me on the head while checking my height, and the nurse thought I was a real idiot when I couldn't complete the hearing test first time... Then, just to make sure you're really weirded out, you are given a cup and told to go get a urine sample. The bathroom is right down at the other end of the corridor, which means that you walk back to the exam room with an open cup of wee, past all the incoming patients in the foyer, who are already craning their necks to see you because you're foreign and interesting. Awesome. Blood test, eye test, blood pressure, medical history.... They delve deep. Or at least they attempt to, but without any Korean on my part and no English on their part, I'm not really sure how much history they got from my mime.

Friday: Hooray! Friday at last! I'm exhausted - and most of the teachers have been doing this for a straight ten days thanks to an anomaly in the Korean school term & exams... Morning class is Invention, in which the kids make "rainbow juice" from a mix of coloured juices and soda water. Afterwards, in Home Room, everyone writes postcards to their favourite teacher to round off. I get a satisfying little bundle :) The afternoon is filled with meetings and introductions, but we're given little bundles of rice cakes ("deok") by a teacher who's just been married - beautifully wrapped and boxed, they're not like the dry Western rice cakes, but thick, gooey rolls of (I assume) mashed rice, with bits and pieces mixed in - chocolate chips, black beans, and I'm not sure what the pink one is.... Deok is a very auspicious food, served on lots of important occasions.

On Friday night three of us head for Ilsan to do some shopping - this is the nearest big town to EV, about 20 minutes on the shuttle and then 5 minutes taxi to an enormous shopping street/mall. It seems like the entire town is lit up - Earth Day needn't bother with the rest of the world, just getting Korea to switch off for the day would stop global warming all on its own! The buildings are covered in electrical signs for the shops and offices inside, all flashing and doing their own little things. Think Times Square on steroids...