Welcome to Korea

Brady and I arrived here ten days ago, on Saturday January 7th.  We're living in Suwon, which is about 20 miles south of Seoul.  According to Wikipedia there are only about a million people in this city, but it feels huge to me.  Everywhere we go, every street I see in every direction seems to go forever, and it's growing rapidly.  There's a whole part of the city that's full of cranes and new construction, for apartment buildings.  There's a lot of history in Suwon, as in most of South Korea, but it feels very modern.  There are modern buildings and technology, and people are wearing mostly Western-style clothing.  I could ramble a lot, so I'm going to break this down into categories....


School
We're teaching at a hagweon, which is a private school, just for English.  The kids go to regular school during the day, but get extra English instruction at our school.  Koreans don't like their kids to do anything other than study, so they go to school before school, then after school they go to school.  There is a range of ages there, from age four up to 13, so what and how you teach varies a lot.  Right now Brady is working full-time, and I'll start working full-time in the middle of February.  Which is good because it gives me some time to get adjusted, and observe classes and the school itself.  Last week I was in school full-time, helping Brady and getting to know the kids and doing a little teaching myself.  The kids are so flipping cute.  There are very few non-Koreans in Suwon, so they're excited and fascinated by new foreigners.  The first couple days, when they saw us they'd stop dead in their tracks and stare.  Now most of them know us, and will call out your name to say hello in the hall.  There's no letter Z in Korean, so they call me "Soo-Jee Teacher."  We were teaching them the word umbrella last week, which is a tough one for them.  It usually comes out as "umblella," or sometimes "umbrerra."  If you have them look at your mouth, then repeat slowly they'll get it, but it takes focus.  


The school itself seems pretty good.  They give us books and we have a curriculum to follow, but it doesn't seem like they'll micromanage too much.  I've heard that other Korean schools can be weird about certain things, so it's good to know that we are at a school that seems friendly and flexible and welcoming.  And the head teacher is from Canada, and she's been here for eight years, so we have someone to go to if we're having trouble.  Oh, and another interesting thing I've heard is how openly racist Korean schools can be.  When hiring foreign teachers they will ask recruiters to avoid Korean-Americans, and black people.  They're running a business, and I guess parents prefer native English-speaking white people, and will move their kids if they don't get that.  It's crazy.  


Food
Korean food is good.  There's always rice, and usually some tofu or fish or spam, (spam is huge; yesterday at the grocery store I saw a boxed gift set of several cans of spam, and some fancy olive oil) and some kimchi, vegetables, and this pickled radish stuff.  Most meals come with soup, sort of thin miso soup with chunks of egg or chicken or potato or seaweed in it.  There's a huge grocery store near our house that has everything you need in it, as long as what you need is 425 kinds of tofu, and 730 types of seaweed.  I had a moment of frustration the other day when I realized that I just can't find anything I normally eat here.  There's no tortillas, wheat bread, hummus, oatmeal, bagels, frozen peas, Greek yogurt....there are almonds, peanut butter, and cheddar cheese, but they're really expensive.  There's a huge dairy case, but I can't tell if the milk is whole or 1%.  There are 6000 kinds of yogurt, but they're all the sugar-flavored syruppy ones, when I just want plain Greek yogurt.  And there's no deodorant, anywhere.  It will be fine, once I adjust, I just felt frustrated by not being able to find anything, and not even being able to ask for it.  Which brings us to....


Language
Outside of the school, no one speaks English.  However, a lot of signs and labels are in English, which is kind of weird.  And I know about 12 words of Korean, so communication involves a lot of hand signals.  Or, some terms are just the English word, with a Korean accent.  I had to buy a bus card the other day.  But they won't understand if you say "bus card," so you have to say "bus-uh cahd-uh."  They add a little upswing at the end of their words.  I wouldn't know any of this on my own, but Brady has been here before, so he explains it to me.  Korean is actually a pretty easy language to read.  It's not like Chinese, where every word has a different character.  Each letter has a character, and you put them together to make each syllable.  So in my free time I've been practicing reading Korea, and trying to learn a few words.  It's a big jump from being able to read it to speaking it, or understanding someone else.  I can ask "how much is it?" but I don't understand the response yet.             


What else....okay, some Korean toilets have a little control panel on the side with all these buttons.  I was in a bathroom last Sunday, and assumed one of the buttons was to flush.  I tried one and it was a fan coming out of the toilet (to dry your butt, I guess.)  Another one turned the control panel off, and a third started spraying water out (like a bidet), so I put the lid down, after getting wet but then it was getting deflected off the lid and onto the floor, and there was a huge puddle.  I finally realized that the flush button is a normal handle on the side of the toilet that I hadn't even seen.  Then I had to mop up the whole floor with paper towels.  


This weekend is the Lunar New Year, so we have a four-day weekend.  We'll get another four-day weekend in the fall, but that's all our vacation time, so we're taking advantage of it and going on a ski trip.  It's with a company that organizes trips, mostly for foreigners, so they arrange transportation and accommodation and everything.  I'll let you know how it goes!