Seoul Therapy

Seoul is a fascinating city. Each part, each suburb, is devoted to a particular need. Myeongdong has designer clothes, Chungmuro is the place for analogue cameras, Itaewon is the centre for foreigners where you can find Western groceries and the Hard Rock Cafe. Each place has its own flavour, unique in the Seoul sprawl. There are few chain stores - Starbucks and the local Kimbap Heaven make appearances in most suburbs, but mostly it is as far from the dull English high street as you can get. I'd never realised how bland British towns have become until I saw Seoul.

At first it takes some getting used to. It's impossible to go to a mall and pick up everything you need from camera film to clothes to sewing needles. Your day must be carefully planned with a comprehensive shopping list and a subway map to hand. However it's started to become second nature for me - I know where I can find everything, and in each place there's an unimaginable range of whatever it is you desire - if one shop asks too high a price, you turn around and there's another for you to try.

On Saturday, I needed wool. Yes, I have indeed started to knit! My room is filled with half-finished hats and scarves and notes for future patterns to try out. Unfortunately, the huge shopping area close to Paju doesn't contain a single haberdashery or fabric store, so when I run out of wool, it means a day in Seoul. Wool is sold in the Dongdaemun area, in a squat grey building devoted to all things crafty.


The entrance area is filled with tailors' shops, the shiny grey suit material adored by Korean businessmen filling shelves from floor to ceiling. Keep going and you come to the buttons and lace. I've been here once before with a friend, but it's impossible to really know this place, and even though the last time I memorised the route to the wool section, I still inexplicably find myself suddenly staring down corridors of fur and rabbit tails. Turning a corner only takes me to the sewing section where men hunch over sewing machines in their tiny stalls, the walls made of threads and fabric. The clack clack of the machines follows me as I search for some stairs - the only thing I'm sure of is that the yarn section is in the basement, so I need to go down. I finally find some, but they lead me not to the piles of wool I'm hoping for, but some kind of upholstery section. I keep thinking I'm getting close, seeing wool down at the end of the tunnel, but it turns out to be threads or crochet supplies, and I can't find the familiar stalls I shopped at last time. Suddenly, I turn around, and there it is: the stall that sells expensive but irresistable yarns, handmade in Southern Asia. My mind mentally rearranges itself and I understand exactly where I am. Shopping can commence.

It's quite difficult to shop because, despite being fairly first-world-ish in general, Koreans like to haggle. I struggle to haggle. So shopkeepers either love me for accepting the first offer, or hate me for just walking off without even asking for a discount. At least I now know the numbers so I can ask "Olmayo?" ("how much?") and understand the response. And occasionally I drum up the courage to complain in a whiney voice "Bisayo!" - it's too much! Usually the shopkeepers are so amused at my Korean that they drop the price by a couple of thousand Won, which makes me ever so proud. Sometimes they call to their friends busily knitting in the back, presumably saying "Will you listen to this rich foreigner, thinks she can haggle! With me! The cheek!", after which they turn to me, and laugh until I apologise and skulk off down the narrow alley...


My second-favourite stall is owned by a gentleman who is eating his lunch when I arrive. He jumps up to help me match a piece of wool from an unfinished project. The last time I was here with Andrea, we were trying to use Korean numbers, but he, being Korean and therefore naturally over-helpful, decided to use Western numbers. Unfortunately, his mind was ahead of him and he started spouting Spanish at us... Interesting to meet someone here who's learned Spanish - high school language classes usually consist of English, Japanese and Chinese. This time he smiles at me and goes straight into English.


Cheerfully laden with shopping bags, I leave the building, stopping at my favourite fruit stall in the whole of Korea, where you pick your bowl of naartjies and interrupt the seller, who's always playing a checkers-like game with a friend round the side. Judging by the exhortations not to push and to "line nicely", it's also pretty popular with everybody else who passes by.


Meanwhile, Korea has been getting pretty damn cold lately, and nowhere more so than little old Paju, lying in the middle of a wind channel that apparently directs Siberian winds south. The ponds are iced over and it snows every few days, although nothing's settling yet. Unfortunately, English Village is designed for maximum discomfort, so all those drainage-free areas that in summer became dams to be crossed only in wellies, are now scary ice patches in winter. We wake up most mornings to thick fog.


















Yes, that is the sun in the photo on the right... Apparently this is still the run-up to Real Winter - I'm grateful for my Australian Christmas, but dreading, absolutely dreading, coming back to bone-chilling weather...

What I Do

So I thought I'd explain what it is I actually do at EV, just in case you thought it was all parties in Seoul and trips to look at flowers!

I'm in the One Week Program. We also have Day and Month programs, as well as Special Programs for families and the military and other organisations. The One Week Programmers work weekends as well when they cover Special Programs. There's also a group of Edutainers (Haha! see what they did there? Took "Entertainers" and "Education" and put... um... yeah... we don't think it's that funny either...) They put on shows and musicals and talent competitions for people who visit during the day as paying customers.

This is a picture of the Village looking uphill from City Hall, which is where the day-to-day admin is done for us teachers. On the left are our bank (real) and some roleplay venues, like a travel agency. Above the venues are teachers' flats. On the right are more flats. I live further away from the actual village than these flats, which are right on the main street; this is pretty busy with children and One Day Programmers during the weekends in particular.







In the One Week Program we teach children who come from schools in the surrounding province, which includes Seoul. They're often from poor families, and the government pays for them to come to EV as an English immersion program before their exams. Most of the children are 15 and at middle school (13 - 14 in Western age). The idea is not so much to teach English, but rather to let the children meet foreigners, experience an English environment, and become more comfortable using and listening to the language. We don't teach grammar classes particularly, but teach grammar through classes like Cooking, Music, Drama, Robotics, Science, Broadcasting and Movie-making.

Our week in English Village starts with a morning meeting where we collect our schedules for the week and pick up our class details and their passports. Then it's off to Immigration where our students have been delivered by their school teachers. It's a bit of a mad trip - there's generally around 500 kids milling around, not entirely sure what they should be doing, and often unable to read the signs we're holding up - or else they've forgotten what class they were assigned to. Once you manage to round up your 15 kids (and it's taken me 20 minutes before) you can lead them off to their hotels, and the week begins.

This is Caitlin waiting for her class of boys to get in line.

There are lots of different classes we run for the students during their week at EV. I'm in CSI, which means I do Maths, Science and Invention. We have one lesson for each subject which is in Powerpoint - I'm already wordperfect at Invention, which I've been teaching right from the start, and as lessons only change every few months, I can see I'm going to be pretty sick of teaching the lessons very soon! :) They are fun though, and when the kids get started on the activity it's usually lots of fun watching them fumble their way through. In science, they make either a boat or a catapult, and then (hopefully, depending on time) race the boats or fire the catapults. The girls below made one of the best boats I've seen so far:

There's actually about 4 girls around, but they scattered when I pulled out the camera - Korean girls are incredibly shy in a very girly way, and most pictures have them with their hands in front of their faces or in hysterics! The boys on the left are about to race their boats on the greenhouse pond. Normally they race on the big pond in front of City Hall where there's no greenery, but it was mysteriously emptied that day...

So far, I've also had a homeroom every week. This is one of my homeroom classes:

That's my coteacher Michelle helping out a couple of the girls with the exercise I've set them. Normally, you teach a combined class of 15 girls and 15 boys for homeroom, but this week I was in a small classroom so I just had one class. In a combined class, you will have at least 2 teachers. There's lots of us at the moment, so there's enough for 2 teachers even in a single class. In homeroom we teach things like survival English, a bit of grammar, games and administration tasks. It's their first and last class of the formal day and their last class before they go home, so you tend to be their most important teacher. It can be pretty tough if you mess up with them! One nice thing is that the scheduler tries to place together a Korean and a non-Korean teacher in a class, so that although Korean teachers speak only English, they discourage the kids from swearing in Korean, as well as being able to deal with true traumas quicker than you can in English.

Right now I work from 9am to 5pm. I have homeroom in the first period, then I take 3 classes within my content area - and will teach any one of the 30 or so classes, not just my own. Then homeroom again at the end of the day, and then it's finished :)

Next month, I will probably be on the 1pm - 9pm shift and won't have homeroom. Instead, I'll take them for the evening classes, which aren't really classes - they play games (baseball, soccer, or board games, etc) and then have an evening activity, which includes movies, quizzes, disco dances and things like that.

Every week ends on Friday at 1pm for the kids when they attend a closing ceremony and then go home. We carry on for the afternoon with a packed schedule of meetings and workshops. I really like this as it's a very visible form of support from our head teachers and the admin of EV, and a chance to talk to each other about events during the week and classroom problems, and learn a bit about teaching from each other. Of course, it also involves Content Area meetings, which for me often means scrubbing down the labs and washing out test-tubes in preparation for the next week.

And believe me, the next week comes soon enough - with so much routine and ritual, the time flies by, the weekend disappears in a blinding flash of light, and suddenly it's time for the next batch of darlings, trouble-makers, geniuses, shy wallflowers and all the rest of those characters from my own teenage years.

It's a lot of fun, and a lot of hard work.