As I'd like to hurry things along before my memories of events fade from my old age, I'm going to use this post as a way to briefly give some general impressions on Korea, and the next blog or two is going to skip the days pretty quickly. I promise work isn't all that exciting, and that's most of what I do. Elsewise, this blog is going to be very scattered and disorganized as I try to recollect day-by-days or even weekly chronicles from over a month from now at this point.
Also yes I realize I haven't uploaded any pictures yet. I don't have a home computer, so picture upload has been difficult. I'll make my way to a PC Room one of these days and get all that taken care of.
The Apartment
The apartment they gave me is...nice. It's roomier than I was expecting. Individual bathroom, separate bathroom, kitchen area, separate laundry room. There really isn't all that much room to spread out, though. The main entryway, and the only legitimate room beside the bedroom is essentially all kitchen. The lease does include a microwave (broken) and a refrigerator (tiny) as well as a washing machine (no dryer, had to buy a clothesrack) and a rice cooker which I'll never use because I'm fine with instant rice like a jerk.
The shower in the bathroom is a hole in the ground and a hose besides. The shower nor the sink worked when I moved in, and I had to do some amateur plumbing to get them to acceptable levels. Also, the kitchen sink had bean plants growing in the sink trap that I had to take care of. They sure as sugar went over the apartment before I moved in, I'll tell you. Regardless, everything is in working order at present, even if it does take forever for the bathroom floor to dry after a shower. Debating investing in those raised floor...racks? Whatever they are. Water drips through them onto the ground, dry off easily, yadda yadda. I'd need two for the bathroom (one for the toilet, one for the sink) and multiple for the laundry room (where the air conditioner and washing machine drain onto the floor) and they're 16,000 a pop, so it's really not the top of the list.
I've been donated some furniture, and, with a bit of interior understanding, the place has gotten rather homey, but unfortunately the main area for hanging out is still my bed, which I would like to sleep on and not have people spill beer all over. Fortunately my work still hasn't gotten me the bedframe I was promised, so it's not much better than sitting on the floor to be on the mattress anyways. Huzzah.
The apartment is also on the fourth floor with no elevator, which isn't a problem until you come home drunk and decide you want to move furniture in and out of the building.
Hey, no judging.
Workplace
After being there for a bit, the place I work is really nice... as a building. Everyone who works there is super friendly, it's always very clean and well stocked, they get any supplies I ask for them. We don't have an (official) head instructor, so there isn't anyone spying on my classroom to make sure I'm not beating the kids or anything. I mean, I'm not, but I COULD.
As for work itself, on that subject, 80 percent of the job is student management. The material practically teaches itself, but getting the kids to sit still and look at it is a difficult task. You have to balance getting the kids to enjoy class with getting work done, and too far in either direction makes some or all of the kids miserable who will then rat your ass out to the nearest Korean adult because how dare you just try to get through a lesson instead of letting your kids yell in Korean and hit each other and watch music videos on your computer. Of course, when they complain, they never explain what they were doing wrong (let's face it, neither did we, eh?) so it comes off as you being a terrible teacher at a terrible institute, you risk the kid complaining to their parents and getting pulled out of the place, which loses your hogwan money, which gets you fired. And we don't want that. So make the kids happy.
The curriculum itself is...dull. There is no meat to it, and it's all premade for you. You teach method. Not speaking method, not listening method, not reading or writing methods. Answer finding method. 9 times out of 10, the kids won't even listen to the question you're asking them. They will listen for some words that they can find in the textbook and regurgitate the answer they find without even sort of understanding what it means. You throw them a curveball and ask them a question they need to think about and they cannot answer it, at least not without a lot of leading intonation and help from teacher. It's depressing, at least for me, because you realize nobody is there to learn a language, they're there to pass tests. And they do that very well, because the method they know works more often than not. But for someone like myself with a great interest in languages (despite how good I may or may not be at acquiring them), it's sad to see so many kids just not care about learning the lingua franca.
Which brings me to my next point.
Speaking English in Korea
From what I can tell, there's virtually no reason to learn Korean. And I've made some attempts, trust me. I've learned Hangul, going so far as to even study the exception rules, and I've picked up simple phrases (Thank you, please, left, right, how much, etc), and am trying to get at least some basic knowledge of the language as I progress (although let's grant that my first month here was trying to get adjusted to the country and meet people, so I haven't set too much time aside for language study). With what I know, I can go into a restaurant, order food, pay for it, and thank the person while saying the food was delicious. The majority of the expats I've met here can't even do that. Reason being, there is no reason to. Speaking English is a status symbol here. If they can speak English to you, they will speak English to you. You can order something in flawless Korean, and if you look foreign, they will reply to you in English. And you can answer them in Korean, and they'll respond in English again. I've seen it happen. It's happened to me, in my less than stellar but still comprehendable Korean speaking attempts.
People on the street will randomly talk to you in English. I've had kids stop me on city blocks to practice English with me, just to prove that they can. I don't mind it, it's great that they're trying. But it really does seem like a novelty thing that people do.
Not that that's not a thing that happens in the states, I've seen people at restaurants embarrass themselves by attempting to speak Mexican to the waitstaff (and finding out they're Polish or something, oh ho ho). But it's such a weird thing to have people multiple times a day wander up and say 'Hello, how are you, nice to meet you, you enjoy Korea?, thank you very much, goodbye' for no reason other than to prove that they can. And where I live there is no shortage of foreigners (some neighborhoods we outnumber the Koreans), so you'd think they'd have gotten over the novelty by now.
Foot Traffic (and traffic in general)
This is a big thing with me. I hated how people walked in Japan, seemingly randomly, slowly, and stopping for no reason. They had the luxury of it being explained with the walking patterns differing all over Japan (let's pretend it's island to island) so it's a whole bunch of people from different walking styles all intermingling. I can excuse that, but it still gets irritating.
Korea is quite possibly worse, but in different ways. People will just shove you to the side. I shouldn't say people, ajumas will shove you out of the way. Ajumas are crazy old ladies that dominate everything in their Confucian power grasp. They will stare you down for simply existing as a non-Korean, push you out of the way (even if you weren't in the way), spit on the ground immediately next to you, and do anything they damned well please because nobody would dare tell them to stop. They will ride their bicycles straight at you and expect you to move, even, and seemingly especially if there is a wide gap to either side of you that is completely clear of any obstacles. They just want to see you move.
There's also the matter of cell phones. Cell phones in Korea just...are. Everybody has one. And they're all using them. Constantly. It's just part of being. It's not even considered rude to be on a cell phone. Clerks at stores will be on cell phones. People have them out at special ceremonies. Cab drivers will be playing on them while they taxi you to your destination. And everyone has them glued to their faces while they're walking around, causing them to just sporadically charge in arbitrary directions as they get distracted watching their latest kdramas.
Other than that though, for the people that are paying attention, at the very least they will walk at a good speed on the right side of the path and it's easy to navigate them. Although there is a weird tendency to stop at the traffic lights for... forever. Traffic is unidirectional in Korea. The light on each four sides of the traffic light will go green, one side at a time. Which makes crossing on foot take even longer than that, especially if there is a separate timer for the green arrow and the regular green light. At a crosswalk, Koreans will wait forever until the green man says go. If there is no crosswalk, nothing can stop the Korean pedestrian. They will charge into oncoming traffic face-to-cellphone and dare the world to hit them. Which may actually be a dare, because by law anybody hospitalized by a motor vehicle is the lucky beneficiary of all of the driver's money until their hospital bills are paid off. Which gives you a nice two week vacation as you recover in the hospital. And judging by the way people drive here, they'd be all to eager to run you down regardless. So maybe the crosswalks are just an ingenious way to prevent people from playing chicken with traffic.
Food
Dak galbi, barbecue, HOF chicken, street mandu, jjahjangmyon, kimchi... kimchi. Kimchi. I hated kimchi before I came here. I hated kimchi for my first few weeks. I'm...starting to come around. At the very least, it does taste different depending on where you get it from. Different restaurants will make their own kimchi, and the spicier ones are better from my experience. Kimchi as a cooking ingredient works better than kimchi by itself, though. I think it's the addition of heat. Something about cold fermented cabbage is just...unappetizing. But it's allegedly one of the healthiest things you can put in your body so you eat it regardless, and you keep trying it until you like it.
Street mandu is probably my favorite thing here. Steamed mandu is the best, little dumplings either fried or steamed or a third thing that are stuffed with meat and vegetables, or kimchi, or what have you. Some will be sold from carts, some will have tents set up for you to eat at, generally it's great. Beware the vendors that just sort of microwave it. It tends to be much less appetizing then.
Street food is the best no matter where you are in the world. Street mandu is great, and even better is just street meat. It doesn't matter what kind of meat. It's meat on a stick. Eat it.
HOF's are just chicken and beer places. They're open late, and they have chicken and beer. They also cost buttloads of money. You're paying about 16,000 for a basket of chicken and chips, but at least the beer is cheap. It's no worse than three drink minimum bars with 25 cent wings back in the states, but with the beer being the discounted item, it just feels wrong for some reason.
Barbecue is meat. Meat you cook yourself unless you seem to American, in which case they'll cook it for you. But it's always good. I've found a place called Dino Meat Barbecue that is all you can eat for 16,000 and I don't know why I don't eat there every day.
Dak Galbi is essentially stir fry that they do at the table in front of you. You pick the ingredients, and some poor undergrad stays up til the wee hours of the morning to serve your drunk ass the food. Worth it.
Jjahjangmyeon is one of the more popular Chinese dishes in Korea. It's noodles or rice with black bean sauce, mixed vegetables, and generally some type of meat. Pretty good stuff, but I'm starting to miss American cuisine.
Jimjilbaeng
Like the onsen I went to in Japan, except you can go in with tattoos here, hey~! Also the one near my house has a tub with water jets on it. So relaxing~
Naked time is fun time.
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