Reflections on a month in Korea

The road to work

This weekend marks the end of my fourth week of teaching in Korea; on Thursday I will have been here for a full month. In some ways it feels like I have been here a lot longer, in other ways I have barely been here.

The passage of time, I suppose, is as good a place to start as any other. In one sense, it feels like I have only been in Korea for about a week. This is because on my work days, I exist only between home and work, with a little stretch of Korea in between. I work in English and my co-workers are native English speakers, so the majority of the time, work doesn't feel like Korea at all. Then the work days blur into work weeks, which are blurring into a whole work month, leaving only the weekend days to remind me that I'm actually halfway across the world from home.

This also means it has taken me a long time to set up the routines in my life. I didn't have a computer for a few days, and a cellphone for weeks upon arrival. I only just found a place nearby to buy veggies, I only last weekend started to decorate my apartment, and I still haven't managed to find a volleyball league or buy a bike. Part of this is the language barrier, but I'd say most is the lack of time, and my current need to use most of my weekend just relaxing.

But in another way, I feel like I have been here for long time. The friends I have made here - Erin and Angela, who I had over for dinner tonight, Jay and the rest of the Poly gang - feel like old, dependable friends rather than new ones.

Same-same Korean buildings

It feels like forever since I've gone into a store or restaurant and was able to communicate fluently with the staff, and my adventures of the first weekend feel like the distant past.

My impressions of Korea itself have definitely changed in the time I have been here. From my vantage point on Anyang mountain (read: hill), my primary thought was that the city was architecturally dull, somewhat dirty, and very uniform. The buildings exhibited a distinctive sameness - all the same height, all the same colour and, as I wrote at the time, "all from the same school of drab, institutional design."

Well, the city is certainly no architectural wonder, and it is more dusty than Vancouver, but I have found there is a gentler, less drab side of Korea. I started to see this on a walk I took before work one day. I went to pick up my newly-tailored clothes, and there was a vegetable stand! Both in the same one-story building, these stores were nestled into one of the drab apartment complexes. Intrigued, I decided I would take a bit of a detour going into work.

A playground nestled among the apartment buildings

There, among the beige apartments and their parking lots, were playgrounds! Lots of them! As it was around 1pm, there were plenty of young kids and their parents heading home from school or daycare, and so in the middle of an apartment complex, I was surrounded by the bustle of family life. I couldn't help but smile. I had scratched off a bit of the superficial drabness, and found a sparkly glimmer of the familiar: community.

My outlook for the next couple months here is about the same as the first: work will continue to be hectic, I will add to my home routines weekend by weekend, and slowly will begin to experience more of Korea. This weekend, I got in contact with the coordinator of the Anyang amateur volleyball club (with the help of my Korean-speaking friend Jay). Their league play is unfortunately during my work hours, but the contact is a good start towards actually playing volleyball at some point. As well, now that I have my apartment and phone set up and have made some friends, I can spend more of the weekends exploring this strange and wonderful land.

Slang, our "clubby bar". I love the sign at the entrance - click the photo for a larger version.

One part of my life that seems to be going nowhere soon is dating and romance. I have actually been thinking of doing a separate post on being gay in Korea, but so far don't have nearly enough material. I have heard tell of other gay guys here, but haven't personally met any yet. I hope soon to get out to a gay bar in Seoul, where I hear there is a bit of a scene, but this hasn't been a priority yet.

I suppose the last thing to reflect upon is work. As I mentioned before, from the weekend, I see my work week as one long period of non-weekend. But from the work perspective, this month has been both challenging and rewarding.

The rewarding part is the teaching itself. I feel a connection with the students and an intuitive sense of the teaching role, especially with the older kids in my debate and writing classes. Although the Grade 1s are adorable, some of them are not at all well-behaved, and I often struggle to balance being nice (they're 6 years old!) and getting them to pay attention.

This is partially due to a lack of preparation time. As I was reminding one of my first-graders to stop poking the boy next to her and listen to the story, she said, "But it's boring."

Me as drawn by one of my first-graders.

It struck a chord, because I realized that my discipline problems wouldn't be nearly as bad if I had enough time to prepare the material in a way that would be fun. After all, when kids are being active and playing their brains are more engaged and they will actually learn more. I personally don't have the talent to engage a grade 1 class impromptu for a whole 40 minutes, so I need time to prepare a lesson. And the less time I get, the more practice book we do, the more teachers resource worksheets we fill out, the less my kids are engaged, and the more they act up. So I struggle with that too.

With the older kids, I am actually more comfortable improvising. Even there, I feel the paucity of my prep time. Often I will step into class and look at the material for the first time while lecturing. I draw extensively on my debate and speaking background to make this part of class interesting, and of course always try to include an activity of some sort. Debate classes are particularly easy, as the subject is by nature interactive, and it feels I have been training for 10 years just for this job.

I'll end this long and wide-ranging reminiscence with a thought from Erin today: we take Korea one day at a time. This remains true for her after 6 months here, and is certainly true for me after a month. Today was a good day: I finished a project I had been saving from Canada, cooked all my own meals, and had a nice dinner with Erin and Angela. (Pork medallions with apple and mushroom, steamed Asian veggie #3, and sweet potato curry soup.) Up next: tomorrow!