First post from South Korea

I'm finally getting around to posting after nearly 3 months in South Korea. Go me! Here's the first mass email I sent out a month in for anybody out there who didn't get a chance to read it:

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Anyeong Haseyo!

My first email from Korea -- it's been a long time coming! It’s been an absolutely insane month, that’s for sure. I’ve never actually appreciated the expression “running around like a chicken with my head cut off” until these past few weeks.

Our Arrival
After being awake & traveling for the majority of 30+ hours, I felt like I had entered the Twilight Zone. We were welcomed to the Seoul airport around 10pm with snow, a bit of a shock after near-swimsuit weather in Florida. At immigration, my immigration officer informed me that I wouldn't be able to enter Korea. I panicked. Then he told me he was just kidding. It should be illegal for immigration officers to joke about that.

We collected our bags, breezed through customs & were met by one of the school’s bus drivers. After a 45 minute bus ride we arrived at the school, met the Director of the school, Catherine, an older Korean woman who hugged us immediately. Talk about the best way to make me feel at home! We were then taken to our hotel, which, as it turned out, was actually a love hotel. The clues: super dim lighting throughout the room, condoms sitting by the bed, & 2 porn channels on TV 24/7. Oh yeah & the signs with pictures of the rooms out front advertising hourly rates. For those of you who don’t know, these are *huge* in Japan & Korea. Interestingly it was called The Ritz, the spot the school puts all foreign teachers in before moving them into their apartments.

Jetlag was a harsh. Every night we’d wake up at 4am wide awake & then we’d feel like crashing in the early afternoon. Luckily we didn’t have to do much the first week except go to the immigration office to apply for our alien registration card, observe some classes, & be given the briefest training and orientation in the history of time.

Our Apartment
We couldn’t move into our apartment until after we’d already started working full time, so our first week we were without any means of cooking & couldn’t really unpack. When we finally moved into the apartment on March 4, the previous teacher had left it in a bit of a state so we had to clean it after work for a few nights. It was all pretty exhausting but finally got it clean in the end. It’s pretty small for 2 people but it’s double the size of the "cells" for the single teachers so I’m pleased. It’s got a double bed, a crappy ‘kitchen’ (just a sink, 2 electric hobs & tiny work surface) 2 small tables, 1 chair, 1 stool, and a decent size fridge (not the tiny ones single teachers have). Eating out here is cheap & most people tend to eat out pretty much all the time. Maybe that’s why the kitchens are virtually nonexistent. There are places to eat everywhere, loads of street stalls selling all kinds of stuff, I love it! It’s a 5 minute walk to the nearest subway & to school – no commutes! I’m *loving* being back in a big city again after southern Italy.

The Job
Here’s my daily schedule:
09:50-11:10 Teach kindie (Peach class)
11:20-12:40 Teach kindie (Lime class)
12:40-13:15 Lunch time with kindie – I have to serve & clean up
13:30-14:10 Special class with kindie (Art or Science 3 out of 5 days)
14:40-17:30 40 minute classes with elementary school kids who come for English lessons after their regular school day; on Tues/Thurs I get off at 18:15

We have a great working environment at the school. Catherine, our principal, is really friendly & treats us like her own children giving us hugs & such. She really seems to care about her staff, which makes a change from a lot of the schools out there. The Korean teachers are all really friendly & helpful, too. The teaching’s easy but dealing with the kids was completely overwhelming for me at first. For the kindie kids this is their first experience with schooling and with a foreign teacher. Plus they all come from rich families where they’re spoiled rotten so most of them are me me me now now now kids who do what they want to do. I have to keep reminding myself that they’re learning in a foreign language so at first of course they're going to have a hard time understanding me & will probably ignore a lot of it. It’s amazing how much they’ve progressed in a month though! Elementary classes are so short & I have to squeeze in checking homework, teaching, assigning homework & signing their homework check books all in 40 minutes with the kids constantly testing me. I hated being 'the bad guy' at first but now I'm over it as it's the only way to keep the kids in line. That’s probably one of the only things I dislike about this job – having to do so much crowd control & not so much teaching.

I do believe I've rambled enough for one email so I'll end on that note. I'd love to hear from everyone & about what's going on in your respective corners of the world!