settling in

week 3 in korea is halfway over and i'm finally beginning to feel like i'm settling in. that is said in reference to the things that will always be a part of my daily routine (walking to work, teaching, planning lessons, meeting ellie for dinner at the bibimbap place by school, sleeping) because soon my apartment and most likely my teaching schedule will change. we'll be moving to another apartment downstairs in about a week when crystal, one of the other foreign teachers, finishes her contract, and our class schedules will probably change with the start of a new session in may.

some of you have asked how teaching is going. i still don't feel like a real teacher, but i'm beginning to get the hang of it. today marks the end of my second full week of teaching; if you've heard any of my frustrations with kindergarten classes, you'll realize that this is a big accomplishment. the youngest students i have are five years old and they barely understand a word of what i say. that makes teaching them for an hour every day rather difficult (read: literally near impossible). i've been happy to get five minutes of actual learning in daily (we go through a mountain of coloring pages) and hope that for the remaining fifty-five, they don't kill each other and i don't kill them. beyond that, i have classes i like and classes i don't like, classes who love me and classes who i'm pretty sure don't...it's a mixed bag. if i were to have thought about teaching before coming, i think that this is what i would have expected. there are definitely challenges but there are also moments that make going to work each day rewarding. the hardest part for me so far has not been coming up with enough to fill 80, 60, or 40 minutes of class but rather how to deal with each class having a wide range of abilities. the words “i'm finished!” have begun to grate on me, thanks to the two or three kids in each class who always finish five minutes ahead of the other students. why they feel the need to let me know that they're done seventeen times after i acknowledge that fact, i don't know. but then there's the class each monday/wednesday/friday at 2:40 that explodes with excited “heather teacher! heather teacher!”s when i walk in...a korean teacher telling me that all my kindergartners love me even though i yell at them for at least half the class period every day...the kid who spends half his time out in la-la land and the other half glaring at the desk surprising me by filling out his worksheet perfectly...these things make me smile and make me glad i've come here to try this.

korea itself has been great. i told my mom in a message earlier that just being here, just living overseas, is awesome. it feels like we've done a lot considering we haven't been here too long, and i think it's because other cultures are both stimulating and full of ways to act on that stimulation. there are mountains to hike, temples to visit, kimchi to try, festivals to experience (it's buddha's birthday in two weeks and there's a lantern festival happening. i'm pumped). this is not a place that ever on my list of “countries i really need to go to” but i am so glad i am here. it hasn't fully hit me yet that i'm here, but that, along with so many other things, takes time. it did hit me the other night that i am truly gone from virginia, though. the idea of home is something that i've been thinking about a lot since coming here. harrisonburg was home for four and a half years, and the quickness with which i left didn't allow for much consideration of the idea that it won't be home ever again—not in the same way at least. that is a strange feeling, one that i've had with both perkasie and dc, and one that i know i'll have at least a few more times before i find a home that's [semi-]permanent. a friend asked me once if i thought it was the place or the people that made somewhere feel like home. i think that although there's something to be said for knowing a place, and feeling a comfort and familiarity with it, it's really the people who make it home. in every place i've called home, i have been surrounded by amazing family and/or friends. around them i've first of all been able to be myself and second of all, feel like i was where i was supposed to be. all that said, i'm really curious to see if korea ever feels like home. i'll get to know the area around where i live and maybe some other parts of seoul, and i'll get comfortable with finding my way around. but the community of foreign teachers here is a) really large and spread out and b) always changing with the starts and ends of people's contracts. so i think it's going to be hard to find a few good friends like the ones i've been so fortunate to have over the past several years.

in other news, i can say seven words in korean now! they are: hello, thank you, here, station, no, yes, and airplane. that last one gets credited to my kindergartners' deep love of folding their coloring pages into paper planes. i am also starting to learn how to read the language. korean seems really complicated but i'm excited to learn it. i love words and languages so this is a fun challenge for me.

so in spite of all the good stuff i just mentioned, there is a crappy part of the experience that just came up. nothing is certain yet and we really have no idea how things will play out, but here's what's going on: we just found out that our school does not pay pension and actually has us registered as part time, individual business people instead of full time teaching employees. this is illegal. apparently, though, it's somewhat common in the english teaching industry in korea. the pension office is aware that our school has done this, and could launch an investigation into our school. basically what this means for us is that although we're not in any legal danger (we did everything by the books in coming here), there is a possibility that the school would get shut down and we would need to find new jobs teaching elsewhere in seoul. we know very little about situations like this in general, so at the moment we're going about our daily routines and waiting to see what happens, while making back-up plans in the event that we would need them. it kind of sucks but i guess that part of the risk in doing this was that you can't be fully sure of what you're getting into when you plan it from the other side of the world. foreign countries are always an adventure :)

first impressions

That title seems slightly misleading to me because although I've only been here four days, somehow it feels like it's been much longer. So far I have to say that it's been pretty good...I like it here, there hasn't been any real stress and things are going pretty smoothly. I've only freaked out once and that was ten minutes ago when I (mistakenly) thought I had permanently switched the language on my Blogger page to Korean characters. They are fully illegible to me right now and they were everywhere--it was a bad scene. Big thank you to Apple for including Korean with the languages provided in Dashboard's translator widget on my MacBook. 

Getting to the point, though, here are my first impressions...

-Seoul. My first impressions are based on Songpa--that is where Ellie and I live and pretty much the only part of the city we've experienced. It is very much like almost all cities which I have lived in or visited, and in that respect it's been a fairly easy transition. The city itself is very clean (the nicest subway system I've encountered to date) with plenty of trees, etc. Everything is in the process of blooming here too so it's beautiful right now! One thing that will take some getting used to is the size of Seoul. The streets haven't felt overly crowded but there are certain places in which the size becomes evident. Example: Today some of the other foreign teachers took us to TechnoMart to get cell phones and find adapters for our electronic things. The place has eleven stories which were all full of people, two sets of escalators and three sets of elevators running to these floors and what is the equivalent of a full-size Wal-Mart (their version is called Lotte Mart) on the lowest floor. TechnoMart seems to have more things than could ever be bought. Case in point: There are three full floors devoted to digital cameras. Three! I've never seen so many cameras in my life. 

-Teaching. It is the one part of this experience for which I truly had no expectations. In the rush of getting things together and everything that goes through your head when you move to a foreign country, I didn't make any time to think about the reason I was even able to come here in the first place. I think that's been a good thing, though, because I will get used to teaching and develop my perspective on it rather than have to reconcile the reality of it with expectations I may have had and then adjust my perspective. So far it's been an up and down experience. I was thrown right in because the teacher whose classes I am taking over left just before Ellie and I arrived. The school is a little disorganized to begin with and is also entering a testing period right now which means the Korean teachers are stressed and the foreign teachers are a little out of the loop as far as instructions. That said, I haven't gotten very much orientation/guidance. As far as the kids go, there is a wide range of ability to grasp English, motivation, willingness to talk and energy across the eight classes I teach. Not having thought through the language barrier and what it actually means to teach a language, I have been very frustrated at a few points (especially in my class of five-year-olds) because of how little the students and I can communicate with one another. But with time and once this testing period is over I think I'll gain a better sense of how things work here and a better understanding of how to effectively teach the kids. On a more positive note, both the Korean teachers and the other foreign teachers have been super nice and extremely helpful and welcoming. They're all great (though I don't think I'll ever have co-workers as awesome as those at Park View :)) and I am excited to get to know them more.

-Education in Korea. I put this separate from teaching because I haven't decided how to reconcile the two yet. From the little I've seen so far and the perspective offered by others who've been doing this much longer, everything about education here is intense. The amount of time kids spend in school, the expectations of the parents, the importance they place on knowing English...I don't agree with any of it yet here I am participating in the system. When I think about that, it feels like I imagine it would if I were to join the army--there are some good benefits but--it goes against what I believe. However, I signed up to do this for a year and I plan to stick it through. I just arrived, though, and so I want to learn more about why Koreans view education the way they do--if it's cultural or I don't know what, exactly. I don't want this inner conflict to be something I just ignore.

-Learning Korean. Eeek! I've picked up a few words and phrases so far through necessity/situation/chance, but only the pronunciation and/or the Romanized spelling. I love words, so I tend to pick up languages easily, but Korean is very different from any other languages I've studied or of which I've picked up bits and pieces. I wish that I could just take a few weeks now that I'm here to do intensive study of the language as I'm initially being immersed in the culture--if I could I'd travel the world a year at a time doing that in a different country every time. But I'm here to teach English in a school that has "No Korean!" signs posted throughout its halls, so learning Korean has to be secondary. I'm excited to work on it though!

-Food. I've tasted kimchi once and strongly doubt I'll ever grow to like it, but the rest has been pretty enjoyable . They make good sticky rice here, and also eat a lot of pork, seaweed or seaweed-flavored things and veggies. Chopsticks are challenging but I haven't done too badly during the two meals at which those were the only eating utensils I was given. I am looking forward to improving my skills.

-Being a foreigner. People react in one of two ways: They either straight-up ignore you, or they stare. There's no welcoming smile or anything in between. It's been kind of weird to go from the bubble of the school where the Korean teachers have gone out of their way to greet and welcome us to the sidewalks on the way home. It has also been strange when I compare it to being a foreigner in Latin America, where it's a rare thing to walk down the street and not hear a whistle or a catcall or "tsch tsch tsch!"

Okay well that's long but there's how things are going on this side of the world. Thanks for comments and emails so far; I definitely appreciate it all. Hope you are all doing well!

Love, 

Heather

no turning back now

In a little under fourteen hours I will leave the country with two suitcases, a carry-on, a personal item and my best friend. As of 1:35 pm tomorrow, I will be en route to the exact opposite side of the planet to begin a new chapter in my life...a chapter that kicks off in Seoul, South Korea, and in which I will be an English teacher. 

Crazy? Yeah, maybe. The closer I get to boarding that plane, the more I think I must be insane to pack up my comfortable life for something so unknown. In a lot of ways, I have no idea what the next year will hold. But I do know that there will be plenty of adventures, challenges and new experiences along the way, and for that, I couldn't be more excited. 

Every time I return from traveling somewhere, I almost get on the next flight back out of the country. I talk all the time about how I don't want to spend the rest of my life in the US, about how I can't wait to go live overseas somewhere and here I am, doing it (although to be honest, I kind of figured that living overseas would be a few years down the road...like maybe post-paying off of loans). Korea for me is going to be simultaneously a fulfillment of a deep desire and a test to see if my words are more than just words--if they are truly how I feel. This is a culture which I have never experienced and whose language will truly be foreign to me, and so I have incredible challenge and opportunity ahead. 

Thank you to everyone for your best wishes and kind words as I set off on this journey...I will miss all of you tons, and will be sending out updates via this blog. 

Love, 

Heather