Up to Speed

If you’ve been reading any of the posts previous to this one, I’ll inform you here that although they were written during my years in Japan (save for The Haunted Islands), they’ve all been pre-dated to their appropriate times of completion upon uploading to my blog, which was only established recently this year.  As lengthy as some of them were, I consider them to, for the most part, be somewhat shallow representations of my time in the country as they are concerned mostly with periods of travelling rather than with people, my work, everyday life, etc .  Be that as it may, I felt they remained fitting documents to form a sort of foundation for this blog, effectively bring me up to speed to where I am now.

Upon writing this I’ve been living and working in South Korea for the better part of eight months, continuing to teach English.  I’m living in a small, rather conservative town called Yecheon and am happy with my decision to move here.  The nature of work in middle and high schools has proved very different from that of the eikaiwa (private English school) I worked at in Japan—one of just many differences.  I’m sure the reasons that I’m glad to have made this my next step will become apparent in future posts. 

Initially, one interesting thing to mention here is Korea’s mainstream intense dislike and general mistrust of Japan and, in many cases I've encountered so far, it's people, reflected even in the molded opinions of children who have never so much as met a Japanese.  This stems from a considerable amount of bad history between the two nations (Japanese invasion of Korea, 1592-1598, and 20th century colonization, 1910-1945), plus an ongoing dispute over the island Dokdo (takeshima in Japan) in the East Sea (or Sea of Japan).  I only bring it up at this point to say that having only left Japan, my home for two very defining years, five months prior to landing in Korea, makes for an interesting (though I was to some extent aware of these cultural memes well beforehand), sometimes startling experience from the get-go indeed.  I’ll continue to write about this in more detail later.

South Korea is a small but geographically beautiful country and a hot spot for ESL teachers.  There’s a large number of positions available, between public school programs and hagwon (private English schools).  I’ve already met plenty of other foreigners (waygookin) here, not in the least because I had a mass orientation with about four hundred of them upon arrival, and they (we) are an understandably mixed bunch.  There are three main types of people that come to teach in South Korea: those who come primarily for making money, those who think they want to experience a new country but in actuality expect to continue their exact standard and nature of living, and everyone else.  In my experience so far, many of those in the first two camps haven’t come to learn about another culture, to travel, to rough it out when necessary, or in short to step away from their own world in order to see it with new eyes.  Some of these people will adjust to the fact they are living in another country on the other side of the world and some won’t.  I’m used to seeing this. 

Me?  I’m here for the adventure and everything that comes with it.