Where do I begin? The flight was excellent in every respect. Singapore Airlines has world-class service and amenities, there was hardly any turbulence, I had a window seat next to a vacant middle seat, and the retired Hindu woman in the aisle seat was very friendly. I had no problems with immigration, customs, or health screening. Baggage claim was uneventful & accomplished at warrior speed, and my promised ride, though not the person I expected, was waiting for me, right where I expected, and recognized me immediately.
My first disappointment came when I tried to change my traveler's checks for Korean won. The currency counter at the airport charges a commission for traveler's checks, and I didn't want to pay that. I forgot I had some dollars that would be hard to spend in Korea. So, I arrived at the apartment without any spendable money. I also arrived later than I wanted to, because my driver got a little lost, since he was unfamiliar with the route and his directions were not very clear. Also, I won't get a decent paycheck for over a month, and I don't have an up-front settlement allowance. But, things are much better than they could be.
For one thing, the previous occupants left shampoo and other toiletries, so I don't need to buy those yet. For another, the school provides two meals per day while I'm working, so I only need food for breakfast plus the weekends. My roommate shares what he has, and Josh C, the guy who drives the school shuttle and picked me up from the airport, took me to the store and paid for some food for me. Cereal is expensive here, so breakfast is mostly fruit, like bananas, apples, and nectarines. (I could really use some granola, though.)
For another thing, in asking around for some help getting a ride to a bank, I learned that one of the school secretaries was looking for dollars for some reason. I made contact, she got some cash from the ATM, and I changed all the dollars I had for won. The rate was fair, and now I have some money to buy groceries. Since I don't have to pay for transportation, and my roommate won't ask me to kick in my share of the utilities until I get paid, and the school provides up to 10 meals per week, I should be OK.
One of the downsides of being where I am, is that there's not much within easy walking distance. For another, hardly any of the Koreans here speak any English. On the upside, the air is clean, the crime rate (aside from public drunkenness) is virtually zero, and the people are pretty friendly.
I've been very busy. On Sunday night, Josh C told me that I would be expected to start teaching Monday morning. I felt unprepared, not to mention jet-lagged, but as a warrior I can do whatever it takes to do whatever I have to do. Teaching math when I'm jet-lagged and disoriented is nothing compared to the challenges I conquered at Warrior Camp.
Then, on Monday morning, I met Chris Lee, who seems to be Dr. Cho's right-hand man. (Dr. Cho is the principal of the school.) He told me that, because of my recent arrival and the government's strong recommendations about containing the H1N1 (swine flu) virus, I wouldn't be teaching for a week, although since I was healthy I was free to come to the school, work at my desk, eat meals, etc. So, I got my books and computer, and I wasn't in any hurry, because I had a week to prepare lessons for two different classes.
Then, on Monday evening after 10pm, the doorbell rang. It was Chris Lee, and he had come to tell me that Dr. Cho wanted me to start the next morning, September 1. (That was the date I had originally promised that I could start.) Again, it would be hard, and it might not be pretty, but as a warrior I can do whatever it takes, so I agreed. The kids had been in study hall instead of math class for over a week, and Dr. Cho didn't want to lose any more time. I can't blame him, although the timing of his decision was not the best.
So, I started my teaching career on Tuesday, 1 September 2009. (Yes, this is a red-letter day for me.) First we had to get the textbooks, and then I had to teach without having prepared anything. I've often thought that I could do that, and it turns out that I can. However, I don't recommend it as a habit. By Wednesday I had a plan, and on Thursday and Friday I was able to cover two lessons per block, which is necessary to get through the required material on time. (No, I haven't planned it out with a calendar yet. I'm just doing as much as I can.)
Between teaching, settling in to the school, planning my lessons, settling in to the apartment, and trying to study Korean, I haven't had time for much else. So many things here are different, there are challenges everywhere when trying to do the simplest tasks, which makes them take much longer than they should.
For one thing, the unified laundry machine is labeled in Korean. (Thank God there are English instructions available!) Trying to do a load, I was convinced it hadn't dried them properly, so I tried to run a dry cycle. Again, not convinced. Then my roommate comes home and tells me it uses steam to dry, so they won't be dry like home, I have to shake them out. I hung everything on hangars wherever I could find a place to put a hook on my side of the apartment.
Then, on Friday, I had my biggest challenge in Korea to date (outside of the classroom):
It started because there was no shuttle available on Friday afternoon, since Josh C. and his wife Meagan were coaching the volleyball teams at their away games. So, I caught a ride home with Dick & Sherry, before dinnertime, which meant I needed to prepare my own dinner for the first time since arriving here. Not having enough of my own food in the apartment for dinner, let alone the weekend, not feeling comfortable using that much of my roommate's food uninvited, and finally having some won of my own to spend, I decided to do some shopping.
There is a small convenience store here at the apartment complex, that sells some necessities and sundry items. Between that and the farmers' markets that take over the streets every 5 days, I could buy all the food I needed. However, Friday was not a market-day. There is also a shuttle bus that I learned about, chartered by the management of the apartment complex, which provides transportation between the complex and the downtown area at no charge.
Feeling adventurous, and not finding what I wanted in the convenience store, I decided to take the shuttle. The driver spoke more English than most Koreans here, which isn't saying much. I was able to communicate that I wanted to go shopping in town, and that I needed food, not a restaurant, but food to cook. (At least, I think he got that message.) Where he let me off, I didn't see what I wanted immediately, so I decided to walk up and down the street.
I went into one or two stores, I crossed the street twice, and then I finally found a little side-street with a few open-air produce stands. I had been looking for brown rice, but I didn't even know how to say "rice" in Korean, or spell it in hangul. What I ended up buying was a handful of bananas, a few brown potatoes, a few yellow onions, and 10 brown eggs. The eggs were in flats of 25 (on the metric system, of course), and I used hand motions to show that I wanted fewer. The woman at the produce stand put 10 eggs in a bag, without additional padding. (Needless to say, I was very careful with that bag on the way home!) I offered the woman two 10,000 won bills, she took one and gave me two 1,000 won bills and a 500 won coin. Seven and a half thousand won for a handful of bananas, a handful of onions, a handful of potatoes, and a metric dozen eggs. Not as cheap as Imwale's, perhaps, but not bad, considering I started with over 150,000 won to last until payday. And, I should be able to cash my traveler's checks before then.
(This shopping trip taught me a valuable lesson: Be flexible in my purchasing plans until I know where to find what I want. Instead of putting "brown rice, lentils, eggs, tofu, milk," I need to write: "carbs (complex), protein, lipid/oil, calcium" as the nutrients that I need to shop for, and get what I can find to meet those needs.)
I walked back down the street until I was near the place where the bus driver had dropped me off, and looked in vain for the bus stop he had mentioned. (If I saw a bus-stop sign, I didn't recognize it.) As Providence would have it, before long I saw the bus itself, with the logo of the apartment complex, and I waved and ran (carefully holding my bag!) to meet it. The bus stopped, the door opened, I boarded, saying, "Go-map seumnida," to the driver (which he acknowledged with "ne"), and carefully took my seat.
At the apartment, I put away my purchases. I found one of the eggs was broken, and 9 whole. It was better than I had feared, but not as good as I'd hoped. Next time I go shopping, I'll bring something like newspaper for padding. (There was a Korean newspaper by the door on Saturday. I can't read it, but that doesn't make it usless!) I sautéed a sliced onion and ate it with spaghetti sauce, which was good. I also made two eggs in a hole with some bread from the fridge, and cooking oil from the pantry. That was dinner on Friday.
Saturday I mostly worked on lesson plans. Didn't finish with all the plans for next week, but I am prepared for the next two days. Now that I'm familiar with the lesson planning software/templates, I should be able to get caught up by Monday evening. For lunch, I baked a potato in the microwave, and sautéed a chopped onion and pepper (from the fridge). Next time I'll seed the pepper first! Wow, was that spicy!
Saturday I also went shopping again, this time at the convenience store. I got some spaghetti and a small bag of what I thought was brown rice. Since there's plenty of spaghetti sauce in the apartment, I cooked some of that first (after translating the instructions with my computer), which was good for dinner.
Sunday, I spent a fair bit of time translating the writing on the "rice" package. (When you need to translate Korean cooking instructions, Google translate is worth its weight in gold. So is a computer that can type in the source language.) It turns out the "rice" is some kind of rice-barley mix. It cooks in 15 minutes, so it must be white rice. I'm not sure how much of a complete grain the barley is, but the package says (in Korean) that it's an excellent (quantified) source of dietary fiber. It has kind of a nutty flavor, and I bet it would be good with milk for breakfast.
I'd like to post some photos, but the job of teaching and settling in to Korea hasn't left me much time for photography. I'll try to take some shots of the farms and grave markers on the road between my apartment and the school. That's about the only time I have when there's nothing else I need to be doing. If any of them are good enough to post, that should give you a flavor of what my commute is like.
Prayer Requests:
First, praise God, and give glory to Him, for enabling me to learn a few words of Korean and some of the Hangul writing system before I left! Thanks to that, I know how to greet people and take their leave, thank them and acknowledge thanks, introduce myself and say where I come from, and ask people their names and where they come from. Also, I can slowly sound out the writing. While I can't really use the language to get things done, this limited vocabulary is still very helpful. It makes a great first impression, when I bow to someone I've just met, and say, "Mannaso, pangap-seumnida (Pleased to meet you)." It's also good for impressing my students. I'm pretty sure I'm the only new foreign teacher at the school this term who introduced himself in Korean, or asked a student his name in Korean when there was a problem communicating in English. This brings me to my next prayer request:
Please pray that my students would be able to understand me. Some of them don't speak or understand English very well, which is very understandable, considering how slow my progress is in learning Korean. I'm trying to make sure that everything important is also written down on the board, because students of a new language usually master reading more readily than oral comprehension. Please pray also that I would develop a habit of speaking slowly and clearly, to help my students understand me.
Please pray that the visa/currency conversion situation would get worked out. (Because the provincial ministry of education refuses to grant accreditation to my school, it is very difficult to get a school-sponsored work visa. Most of the non-Korean teachers used religious worker visas until the government caught on and refused most of the renewals, which created the vacancies that I am helping to fill. That's why the school is planning to move to a different province within the next two years. Green cards are even harder; I would have to marry a Korean woman to get one!) What concerns me is that I will eventually need to convert won to dollars, to pay some bills incurred in the U.S. Official currency exchangers will stamp my passport every time they do so. If I leave the country on a tourist visa, and the immigration officials see that I've been converting a lot of won to dollars, they'll wonder if I've been working illegally to earn that many won. While immigration officials recognize that the government doesn't grant enough E-2 visas to meet demand, and they don't go around to schools checking teachers' visas, they can hardly ignore evidence that's right in front of them. Please pray that God would work everything out in His time.
Finally, please pray for my relationships with my co-workers, especially my roommate. There's no cause for concern yet, and they're mostly a pretty cheerful, easygoing bunch, but I'm still working on finding my place socially. Language barriers are part of the problem, as is the limited time that we have to get to know each other. Also, I've only been here a week, and most of them have been here longer. I'm taking Tae Kwon Do, starting next week, which should help. (Other foreign teachers are also signed up, including the Korean-American twins, Rachael and Sarah. I'm looking forward to getting to know them better, so I can tell them apart!) The instructor's English skills are quite limited, which will make things interesting, so I'll need to pay close attention.
Thanks for reading. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you. And, until we meet again, may the Lord hold you in the palm of his hand.
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