First look at Korea

I’ve been in South Korea for more than a month now, and have been able to absorb the culture, get into a routine, see a few sites, and make some new friends. I live about 15 miles south of Seoul in a township or “Gu” as they say. The town I live in is called Surisan, which is named after the local mountain. The city looks really weird and Sci-fi. Everyone lives in these big apartments around a train station. Even the suburbs where people move to because they think it’s a good place to raise a family, but they still live in huge high rise apartments. My place is a one room studio with a small fridge, bathroom, laundry closet, and TV on the 15^th floor. Even though Seoul is undergoing serious suburbanization it is definitely not the white picket fence American Dream. Everything is vertical, which makes finding restaurants or bars sometimes extremely difficult on the neck, and also the eyes because of all the neon lights. This brings me to the food.

The food here is great especially the Korean BBQ, although Kim Chi (the Korean national food) is disgusting. For those who don’t know Kim Chi is cabbage and this red chili pepper paste fermented for three months, and if you think that sounds enticing I can tell you first hand you are 100 % wrong. It is pretty foul, although after being served it twice a day you sort of develop a taste for it. On the plus side Korean BBQ is awesome. At your table is a grill, which they put hot coals into and they serve you beef or pork and a ton of side dishes. Everything else is pretty much above what you would get in the States, so it is nice to have a salary that allows me to eat out every night if I wanted to. A few interesting notes are they love hot dogs here (all varieties), everything has red chili peppers, and surprisingly the sushi here is awful even though its one hour from Japan.

There are some funny aspects of living in Korea that any westerner would think is weird and hilarious. Being from Philadelphia it was nice that Chan Ho Park is on the Phillies because he is the biggest celebrity in Korea. All the World Series games were on even though I had to work through most of them. I’m hoping next year he sticks with the Phillies because they show every inning he pitches on their equivalent of ABC/FOX. Not the whole game, but if he comes in for say the 8^th inning they stop all programming and switch to the Phils game. It is also ridiculous that the biggest video game here is “Starcraft.” It’s a game I played when I was 12 and there is even a channel that shows online teams playing 24 hours a day. The funniest thing for an English speaker is some of the Korean words. I’ll give you the top five so far:

5: Name of my student sounds like “ITCHY ONE”

4: The word for restaurant in Korean sounds like “SHIT-DONG”

3 and 2: Names of a friends students: SUCK-BUM and BUM-Suck

1: The town my girlfriend lives in “BUM-GAY”

The only real downsides to living here is the haze. I feel like a cloud as hovered in Seoul for the past 2 weeks. In that span I’ve seen the sun twice and the moon once. It’ll clear up for about a week and then come back. Pollution sucks, glad to see that the EPA is taking steps in America, so we won’t end up like this.

My day to day life is pretty much as follows: I get up at 8; it takes me about 30 minutes to shower, eat breakfast, and get dressed; leave for the subway and hopefully catch the 838 train, if not the 841 train; I get to work either a little before or after 9; I have 4 forty minute classes, then MWF I have three 50 minute classes starting at 150 or TTH I have two 50 minute classes starting at 250; I’m done teaching at 440 and leave at 5 to catch the subway. The subway is one of the best parts of Seoul. I would say it’s the size of NYC, but as clean and efficient as DC’s metro. It’s really easy, cheap, and fast to get into downtown or another suburb of Seoul.

Overall, this is one of the easiest pay checks I’ve ever seen. I teach students “How are you,” “I want a…..,” “Could I please have….,” and other basic phrases with a little bit of vocabulary. It requires no mental capacity, which is the only downside of it. The kids are awesome though. All Asian kids are really cute, and I do have a few favorites, but the best part is how well they are behaved. The most annoying and disruptive kid here would be a star pupil in America. The only real work here is monthly assessments and lesson plans, which I pretty much just copy and paste. But there are a few downsides to this job.

The school I work for is a private Christian school, and one of the old workers once said he went out drinking on the weekend. Every time after this he said he was tired or not feeling good they would ask, “Are you drunk?” So, I have to hide certain things from the school. Also, the language barrier is quite annoying between both student and administration. The students call me Dave Teacher, and I hear the word teacher a good 300 times a day, which drives me crazy. There’s also the obvious confusion trying to explain things. The problem with the administration is the head people don’t speak English, and in Korean culture you are supposed to follow what your elders say. This is one reason why the guy left before me, although; it has to be something more because he left over a little reason. I think a lot of little things built up and he snapped. But that’s not to say I haven’t seen our director do ridiculous things first hand 90% of director wouldn’t do.

The place she got is really nice and fully furnished, but this old lady who used to live there still uses a part of my place. I have all this kids stuff, part of her wardrobe, and a Kim Chi freezer in my spare room. I don’t really care, but the fact that she can come in when I’m not there (I rarely am there) kind of bothers me. She apparently pulls this stuff all the time. One guy quit after a month working there, and another got a visa run to Japan and stayed in Japan. But so far I haven’t had any real problems. The big problem for her is if her English teachers are unhappy and leave she loses a lot of money. When the teacher, whose position I took left she lost half of her afternoon students, which is about 10K a month.

The nightlife here is pretty awesome. The bars and dance clubs close when you leave. The latest my co-worker said he’s been out was 9am. I think I’ve made it to 5 am once, but if you go into Seoul the goal is to make it to 6am when the subway opens up again. Joe, my co-worker recently spent 6 hours riding around the green line, which is a loop of downtown Seoul because he could never wake up for his stop. Everyone stays up really late here. The locals all drink Soju, which is 20% vodka/wine that gives you horrible hangovers and the Koreans love it. We climbed this mountain (more on that later) and at the top they toast with Soju. But it is a very common site to see Korean men sit at a table for 5 hour just drinking this stuff till they can’t talk, walk, or even they might fall asleep (it’s ok to fall asleep at bars here). But you see these guys in the morning just blacked out trying to get to work. It’s pretty funny. Maybe when I make some Korean friends (not from work) I’ll partake in this past time.

For me I try to make it into Seoul for one night and the other stay local. The places in Seoul with fun nightlife are Handae and Itaewon. I’ve been to Handae, which is the big club area because it’s a University town. Itaewon is the big foreigner area. The US army base is there, and a lot of Americans live around there. I have yet to make it out there, but I hear it can get rowdy. There are two great bars around me. In Bumgay there’s Happidus, which has a quizzo trivia night that I’m convinced is rigged b/c the same two teams when every other week (the winner is responsible for making the questions the next week). The cool thing is 4 times there is a beer bonus, which if you get right you get a free pitcher of beer. I finally won this on the question “How many people in the world are drunk at any given moment?” The answer was 7%, but we were closest with 11%. The other great bar is called pirate bar. Here they serve you beers in ice glasses and when you are done you can throw it at this target and win free drinks or food. The one time I finally hit it after many many many tries I got the X and didn’t get anything. These two bars are two places a lot of foreigners go to in my area.

So far I’ve met some cool people here, but mostly everyone here from other countries is very weird. It almost like they are escaping from something in their home country. A lot of dudes here are really creepy, and the only girls I’ve met have been serious airheads.