Many heartfelt greetings to all friends and family reading this blog! My first post will be longer and more picture-filled than most, to make up for the wait. Before this week is over I expect to have internet access from my apartment, along with a Korean bank account and cell phone to boot – we are just waiting on our temporary citizen ID cards.
The change in climate, culture, and profession has left me scrambling to adjust to several new environments at once, both physically and mentally. Seoul is incredibly large: a sprawling, smoggy, smelly metropolis. New sights, sounds, smells, and tastes accost my senses everyday. I am still getting accustomed to the swing of things around here.
The local food tends to be boiled, fried, or grilled and accompanied by spicy-sweet hot pepper sauces and chewy rice dumplings. You can watch all manner of seafood-to-be swimming, darting, and scrabbling around in open-topped glass tanks outside storefronts. Vendors blanket the sidewalks with their baskets of fresh fruit and vegetables (the local purple grapes are delicious). Around meal time, outdoor food stalls on every block become little hives of activity, offering cheap but delectable, fresh-cooked, waste-free meals. Chicken-on-a-stick and seafood tempura are popular appetisers: all you have to do is follow your nose. I've temporarily given up on my vegetarian diet as one kind of meat or another is included in nearly every dish and an adequately nutritious meet-free meal would be time consuming and expensive to acquire or prepare myself.
As far as alcohol goes, the stories I've heard from other travelers were true - both the beer and soju (a sweet rice liquor) are inexpensive and very drinkable. The temptation makes me glad that I'm still a lightweight. Bars and other drinking establishments are indicated by prominent “Hof and Soju” placards (hof = beer). Common side-dishes at any bar include roast nuts, grapes, radish chunks, hot peppers, crunchy dried minnow skins, and the ubiquitous Korean side dish, kimchi: basically pickled cabbage and hot pepper. Chewy strands of squid and octopus covered in batter are also commonplace. In our first week here, all the new teachers were treated to dinner at a traditional sit-down buffet, courtesy of BCM. The long table was laden with appetizers and soups containing numerous unidentified vegetables and seafood items, most of which were exquisite.
Soon after settling in to the apartment I was provided with, I discovered little ants crawling in pairs along the door frames, numerous blood-sucking mosquitoes, and the odd cockroach. The Korean equivalent of raid has frightened most of them off, but I'm keeping my food sealed. At first, I was struck by the smell of mildew that permeated my place, but it appears to permeate the rest of the city as well. The apartments conserve energy well: the water heater must be turned on before showering and lighting is of the glaring fluorescent type (I bought a small incandescent lamp for the evenings). Thankfully, my bed is a double, and though I have blankets I hardly need them in the stifling summer heat. There is, of course, no air conditioning, but the electric fan I bought has made my bedroom survivable. My bathroom has a washing machine, and I use the extra room to hang dry my clothing. The bathroom itself is a feat of economy (as opposed to luxury): the shower consists of a spray hose that hangs against the wall right next to the toilet. The drain in the center of the floor serves both shower and washing machine runoff (and potentially a plugged toilet). There is also a gas stove, sink, and refrigerator on the left, as one enters the apartment. Fortunately, the last tenant left a few dishes behind. Both my place and Jared's face a narrow residential alley criss-crossed with power lines. I'm grateful that the alley muffles the traffic sounds from the main street, though I can normally hear one neighbor or another making some kind of racket in the evenings. I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking.
The transit system is a blessing in more ways than one. The subways are fast and efficient, and it is relatively easy to find your way about from any station in the city. The various line names and numbers are clearly displayed and detailed local maps are located at every stop. Jared and I discovered the indispensable T-Money card on our first day here. You load any amount of money on it then scan it whenever you board or leave the subway or bus; the scanners keep track of how far you've traveled between destinations and automatically subtract the requisite fare from your card. The average cost per trip runs about 1000won or 1$-- less than half of what it costs to ride the bus in Victoria. The wait between subways and buses is usually no more than 10 minutes (also less than Victoria!). The subway runs above ground in our district, providing a reliable landmark, especially for directionally-challenged people like me, who find the city layout somewhat perplexing, to say the least. The city is broken down into smaller districts ('- Dong') within larger ones (' - Gu'), and addresses are assigned chronologically, with the construction of each residence, rather than spacially. Street names are sporadic. Other useful landmarks include modern art sculptures, mega-malls, and giant churches (with neon-pink lighted crosses at nighttime), to say nothing of their questionable aesthetic value.
Walking down the streets, you find multi-story building after building covered in colourful, garish signage, flashing lights, and giant lettering. The pace of city life and traffic is relentless and there is no priority accorded to pedestrians. All modes of transport are on the same footing, which is to say that a scooter or a van will be driving over your foot if you aren't careful. Crosswalks phase neither bus nor taxi drivers, let alone the ordinary driver on their way to work, as they weave through groups of pedestrians. Cyclists, scooters, and drivers also have no qualms about blasting down sidewalks, alleys, and what I originally thought were pedestrian-only plazas(!) as long as they have a few inches to spare on either side. Honking, as Jared noted, seems to be a national passtime with its own linguistic subtleties.
As for the job, Jared and I agree that we had to hit the ground running, but things are improving by the day. The work hours are long, travel to and from work eats up time, and preparation is required, but so far I've welcomed the challenge. Back home, Cindy, our TESL coach, had scared us by saying that school classes might have 30 – 40 students each, and boast large glass window panes so parents could observe the foreign teachers at work. I'm grateful that that particular nerve-racking scenario did not materialize: none of my classes contain more than 16 students, some considerably less – and no glass observatory. The children at Kwangwoon elementary are noisy bundles of energy and curiosity, if not discipline, just like kids anywhere. Sometimes they weave around me in the hallways between classes, with cries of “Hi Jordan teacher!” as they pass. For a while I was also greeted by the odd sounding exclamation “Pelpus!”-- because I remind them of the Olympic swimmer, Michael Phelps. Most of the blocks that I teach are at the grade 1 level, but I also teach a number of language labs with grades 3, 4, 5, and 6. Each block is 40 minutes long, and teaching averages out to five blocks a day. A delicious cafeteria lunch is provided everyday to students and staff (usually including rice, kimchi, and some kind of soup) – certainly healthier than its North American counterpart, and all of the foreign teachers are agreed that it is one of the perks of the job.
Teaching young kids has been hit and miss for everyone so far, but we are quickly learning and swapping tricks of the trade. Some days I can focus everyone's attention on the lesson at hand and other days it seems like nothing I do will help— I just have to weather the storm. There are usually one or two keeners in each class, who like to jump up and shout out all the answers, as well as someone with motivational problems who finds it a challenge to even open his or her book when asked. I do what I can and the Korean teachers, who speak little English, will sometimes offer instructions or disciplinary assistance in Korean. There are a half-dozen English-speaking Korean teachers (all beautiful women) whose job it was to acquaint us with the curriculum, but they do not typically teach in class with us – each one teaches the same students as each of us native-English speakers, but at a different time, complementing our own schedules. In addition, all the students and staff have provided themselves with English names, in an effort to make it easier for us foreign teachers.
...Which brings me to the topic of friendliness and Korean hospitality. Seoul is nowhere near the multicultural society that Victoria and Vancouver are, and I am easily recognized as a foreigner. However, all of the new teachers have had positive experiences with locals who could hardly speak a word of English, yet went out of their way to make us feel at home—government workers, shop owners, bar managers, mountain hikers and other perfect strangers. I think that it was one of Jared's students who explained to me that, as teachers, we are already respected and high up on the Confucian 'food chain', as it were, as long as we don't betray that trust. Being Canadian doesn't hurt either. It was a slightly surreal experience when Jared and I, completely jet-lagged from the 12 hour flight, dragged our bags off the bus from the airport into the sauna-like night air, and Tom asked us if we wanted pasta for dinner. Tom is the the English name of our perpetually harried and downtrodden, yet unflagging, go-between for us and the bigwigs at BCM, our employer. He has served diligently as our driver, dinner host, translator, escort, doctor, repair-man, and city guide, to name a few roles—for which all of us are tremendously thankful. We learned that Tom completed a degree in electrical engineering at university while being hired time and again to try to bail out ill-fated and badly managed international trade businesses, before ending up at BCM. The adult students I teach in the evenings at BCM are also very receptive, hospitable, and generous (not to mention better behaved than the kids!). They are interested to hear about me, Canada, and my first impressions of Korea. At first, I had to coax them to start talking, but now they seem more at ease with open dialogue. Just before the weekend I received a gift of sweet rice dumplings cooked by one of my students – a traditional treat at Chuseok, the Korean Thanksgiving. One of Jared's students also took us out to a local bar on Friday, and BCM gave each of the teachers a large box of dried, seasoned seaweed – which adds a nice touch to my omelet.
Can you spot my workplace?
On Saturday, Jared, Sean (one of the other new teachers, from the U.S.A), Jenice (one of the English-speaking Korean teachers from Seoul) and myself, rode the subway to Bukhansan National Park, and wandered down a lane of restaurants and hiking-gear shops, passing sweaty groups of locals extravagantly decked out for the climb up one of a dozen different trails. We laughed about it at first, but we weren't laughing when our projected 4-5 hour hike turned into 7 hours, and we had to scale some remarkably steep and treacherous terrain. The experience was well worth it though. We stopped at several beautiful Buddhist temples on the climb up, and the view from the top of the ridge was spectacular. A friendly Korean man greeted us just before sunset, at the highest peak, on Mt. Jubong (700 + meters above sea level). He was familiar with the mountain and led us down the quickest route as day turned to night. We were very lucky to have a full moon, and even luckier, our host said, to see several dancing fireflies on the way down, given their increasing scarcity nowadays. It was an exhilarating treat to escape the constant din and smells of city traffic those few hours.
The previous weekend, Jared and I observed an outdoor evening pop-concert taking place in the swanky pedestrian plaza, just a block or two from our place.
The first day in Seoul for Jared and I was a Sunday, so we had the opportunity to do some exploring and sightseeing in part of the downtown core, before beginning our first week of work. Here are some pictures of views and aritifacts preserved on the grounds of Deok Su Gung Palace.
I do miss Victoria weather, some types of food, and everyone from home, but the good experiences I've had here so far bode well for the rest of my year in Seoul.
Looking East across the "suburbs" of northern Seoul.
From left to right: Michael, Jared, Mr. Kim Kwan Bae, Jenice, Sean
Looking towards our destination. Can you see the wall?
Panoramic view from the peak, looking east across the city
Looking south toward downtown and the Han River
Ancient fortress wall guarding Seoul's borders
Jenice, nicely framed by some gnarly trees
What the serious hikers do in preparation
From left to right: Sean, Ty, Myself, Jenice, Jared
The bubbling floors of the local Noraebang
Jenice proving her Korean pop credentials
You should have heard our rendition of "Puff the Magic Dragon"
Tom, Sean, Jared, Ty: talk about photogenic.
