Adventures in Daegu

Today was my first day at school. I didn’t have to teach, but I did have a lot to do. First, I met the vice principal and several of the teachers, including the English teachers: Mr. Lim, Miss Baek, Miss Oh, and Miss Doh (pronounced "Eem," "Beck," "Oh," and "Doh," respectively). They were very friendly, and Miss Oh made Korean coffee for me. Turns out “Korean coffee” is the kind that comes as a mix. They don’t actually make it. Then the Vice Principal had me say a few words in front of the teachers, after which he gave me a school tour. It’s quite a big middle school – 6 or 7 hundred, I think, in grades 7, 8, and 9. Miss Oh showed me the teachers’ bathroom. All the toilets are squatters except the “handicap” toilet, which is Western style. Miss Oh explained that the previous female native teacher always used this Western toilet. When they asked her why she used a handicap toilet, she told them, “I am handicapped, because I can’t use squatters.” They told me to use the Western toilet, if that made me more comfortable, but actually that motivated me to try the squatters out—when no one else was around—and, well, it worked out ok. Enough said.


If you want to read more about my adventures, click on "read more." If you want to know what a squatter toilet is, click on "read more" and scroll to the bottom.

Farewell to Orientation

Ok, I have a little free time to try and catch up with the blog. Last Sunday, we had a field trip to a Hanok Village, or a village with traditional houses, as well as a large Buddhist monastery. They were both beautiful places, although the oppressive heat made them a little hard to enjoy.

We had lots of classes at Orientation, some good, some boring. There are definitely a lot of things you never hear about until you get here. If I could ask two things of EPIK, it would be to prepare a more thorough and honest description of what happens here and to put some effort into standarizing the program. It's hard to give an accurate description of what life here will be like, because every experience is so different, but they could compile a collection of stories or some statistics or something. In any case, I finished my crash course. I don't feel all that prepared to teach, but I have some ideas at least.

Now here's our Korean pictures for the entry:

Ok, again the sign is cheating by having the words in English, but we can still figure out the Korean. The sign says:
금연 "금연  구역입니다"
or kuemyeun - kuemyeun kuyeugimnida
"Kuemyen" means "No smoking" and "kuyeugimnida" means "area" or "this is an area." So together, it reads
No smoking.
This is a non-smoking area.

This is the sign on the Jeonju bathroom stalls when they're unoccupied. It reads:
비었음
piessuem
which means:
Empty

Here is opposite picture,
사용중
sayongjung
for:
In use

Now, on to the real pictures!

School Update

I haven't had time to upload pictures, so I decided to make a quick picture-less post. I was finally assigned my city/county. I'm in Yeongcheon. It's in Southern Gyeongbuk, not too far from Daegu, and it's also very near all my friends, who are in Pohang. In fact, a few friends are in Yeongcheon with me. I feel so lucky that things worked out that way! I'll be teaching at one middle school, possibly a girls' middle school. Several people in my area are teaching at three schools, which I guess is pretty common in the rural areas. We didn't actually find out the names of our schools, but now I'm getting ready to bus over to Yeongcheon and meet my head co-teacher. Exciting!

As an additional note, I signed my new contract, and they did accept my printed-out certificate from TEFL Online, so I recommend that people in a hurry don't waste any money on having TEFL Online send them one.

I don't know when I'll have internet next, but hopefully it'll be soon and I can catch up on posting my pictures. Until then!

The Place for Superstars!

Jeonju University is the Place for Superstars. No really. Check out this sign.

That's on the dorm where we're staying. It's also written all over inside. I doubt real superstars would agree, but it reflects a general positive attitude. The campus buildings are called things like "Star Hall," "Hope Hall," and "Peace Hall."

I also forgot yesterday to mention the in-flight movie selections. The movies were grouped by genre which included "Drama," "Comedy," "Classics," and "Beyond Special." I'm not sure I'd like to be labeled "beyond special," especially since browsing through the content didn't really clue me in to its meaning. There were films like Home Alone, the live action The Little Prince, and a special on the life of Van Gogh.

Yesterday they treated us to some special presentations which consisted of the Five Drum Dance, a Taekwando performance, and a Fan Dance. All of them were excellent. I took some pictures and movies, so as usual, they're after the "read more" cut. For my sisters, the Fan Dance fans really did look just like the ones we had as kids! Brought back a lot of memories.

Before the pictures, I thought it would be fun (and useful for me) if, with each blog, I did a little bit on Korean language by photographing simple, but important things like road signs or instructions and trying to decipher them. So here we are:

This is a sign I found walking down the street. It reads: 천천히
Which is: cheoncheonhi
I looked it up in my dictionary (thanks, Robyn and Sean!) and it means "slowly."
Interestingly, it's not at all similar to the word for "slow" in the dictionary.
Obviously, in this case, it's a warning to go slowly because of construction.

This one's kind of cheating. First, it's pretty obvious from the picture what it is. Second, it's just English words. But we'll look at it anyway. So, it says
초코칩 쿠키
Which is: chokochip kuki.
"Chocolate chip cookie." Pretty easy.

This one's a little difficult because the letters are in script form and a bit stylized. Here's what it says:
순창 섐물
That's: sunchang saemmul
Sunchang appears to be the name of the brand, so that's not too important. 물 means "water," and I discovered that 섐물 means "spring."
In this context, it refers to "spring water" or "mineral water."

Very First Day

This morning I woke up in South Korea. Still a little hard to believe. I won't lie, the 14-hour flight was long and unpleasant (despite the very kind staff of Korean Air), but it's over now. It was easy to meet up with other EPIK members in the airport; the vast majority of English-speaking young adults in the "foreign passports" line were soon-to-be teachers. We're set up in Jeonju University for our EPIK Orientation. This is about a week of classes about teaching, EPIK, and Korean culture, which should be helpful. I've met people here from the US, Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, Australia, Ireland, South Africa, and New Zealand, although New Zealand and Australia have very few.

The weather is very hot and humid, a lot like the weather I just left in Minnesota. The heat has been one of the main topics of conversation between us, right after "Where are you from?" and "Have you ever taught/been to Korea before?" The answer to the latter is usually "no" on both points. We had our first experience of buying food at a Korean mini-mart, where the pictures on the packages were the main selling points, as we didn't know what any of it was. I've only met two Korean-speakers in the group so far.

The next bit has a bunch of photos, so I'm putting it under the cut. Just click on the "read more" link to continue.

Greenheart Travel

I'm going to Korea through EPIK, but I used Greenheart Travel as a recruiter. I've heard that it's way better to use a recruiter, and I'm definitely glad I did it. I figured I'd make a few comments about Greenheart here. They do recruiting for a lot of programs in different countries, so it looks like a pretty big operation. Their website is nice and professional, but I couldn't find a lot of reviews or information about them on the web that didn't come from them.

My experience was mostly very positive. They had compiled useful, well-organized documents that helped streamline my application process, they set everything up for me, answered my questions, and helped me keep track of what I had to do. I'm not in Korea yet, but so far no problems. My contact in the company was very friendly and helpful, and I wouldn't have any complaints except for a few things. First, she was a bit hard to get ahold of. She didn't provide a phone number, and while she answered emails very quickly about 2/3 of the time, 1/3 of the emails seemed to never reach her or never get a response. I had to continually resend these emails to her and soon learned that if I didn't get a response in 24 hours, I wasn't going to get one. Since I was joining the program at the last minute (my fault!), and lots of the stuff was time-sensitive, this could be frustrating. Second, the information Greenheart gave me was good, but I wouldn't say it was as thorough as it might be. If you use Greenheart, I would definitely recommend surfing the internet a lot to look a people's blog, other recruiters' pages, and forums, to supplement your information. I want to stress that I didn't have a bad experience. In fact, I mostly had a really good experience! I just wanted to give out those warnings.

TEFL Online

My EPIK interviewer basically told me to do an online TEFL course, both so I could get some experience and to give me a pay increase. He said it was "highly suggested," by which I understood that EPIK really, really prefers it. He said "make sure it's an accredited institute." Well, it doesn't take much internet research to figure out that there is no board of accreditation for this stuff, nor would I call any of the online programs an "institute." My recruiter said any of the popular online (100 hour+) courses would do, so I did TEFL Online, and I figured I'd write a short review of that here.

Click on the "read more" link to see the full review.

Intro

In western lands beneath the Sun
  the flowers may rise in Spring,
the trees may bud, the waters run,
  the merry finches sing.
Or there maybe 'tis cloudless night
  and swaying beeches bear
the Elven-stars as jewels white
  amid their branching hair.

Though here at journey's end I lie
  in darkness buried deep,
beyond all towers strong and high,
  beyond all mountains steep,
above all shadows rides the Sun
  and Stars forever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done,
  nor bid the Stars farewell.  

-The Return of the King

This is the blog I'll be using to keep track of my own journey, though I am at the beginning rather than the end, and it hopefully won't be as bad as Sam's. That song is one of my favorite poems of all time, and I chose to name the blog after it because it's a poem about hope and endurance and being far away from home. The first few posts here probably won't be interesting to my friends, but they may be useful to other people planning to teach abroad. I'll try to be as honest and as informative as I can be. So, until next time!