School Life

Although I haven't started formally teaching lessons at my school (I don't start until mid-December), it's been an interesting experience thus far. My time has really been spent surfing the 'net at school and fretting about what I will possibly contribute to these students, besides talking in an American accent. I think I just need to get through my first few classes before I get the hold of everything.

Some of the students have come by and introduced themselves to me, which I think is awesome. Considering that they're already a bit shy about speaking English in front of native speakers, I think it was quite brave of them to say hi and wish me well on my first few days at school. I even got a few notes from them hoping that I feel at home here in Korea, and generally telling me that they're happy to have me here. One person even gave me a gift of brownies!!!

(The gift from one of my students. And yes, they were real brownies, as opposed to fake brownies.)

One odd thing that we do at school though is that we eat lunch with the students. Normally, in American schools, the teachers can often retreat to the teachers' lounge and bitch about their students, but not here. We have to eat in the cafeteria with all the students. It's a very communal thing actually. We all eat the same exact food. The food itself, well let's just say I've ate as much kim chi in the last week as I have in my whole life. If you don't know what kim chi is, it's basically cabbage and carrots in some sort of spicy sauce. It's not too bad, but I think this will get old really, really quickly. I asked if I could bring my own lunch a few days ago, and the idea was just a bit foreign to my co-teacher. Why would I possibly want to do that, when I have a sweet meal of rice, kim chi, and shrimp and octopus soup waiting for me in the cafeteria?

As mentioned before, the school itself is pretty new. The hallways, classrooms, and offices are very pristine. At the same time, there is absolutely no heat in the hallways. I pause to see if I can see my own breath sometimes when I'm walking around out there. At the same time, my office is like a sauna. There is no in-between there. Also, as per Korean culture, you're supposed to wear indoor shoes when indoors, and outdoor shoes when... you know. So I have to walk around in this cheap, $3 pair of sandals that are so flimsy and dangerous, they are bound to come off at anytime. I have a feeling they're going to slip off while going down the stairs, only to result in a very embarrassing accident. Below are some pictures of the school. Enjoy!

The cafeteria where I am one with my students

The view of Daesan from near my school

A hallway, note the cubby holes for outdoor shoes along the wall

A mural in the school. Note: Not my actual students. At least I don't think they are.

Korean television

I was blessed with 78 channels of cable TV programming in my apartment. That's probably not a good thing though, since I could be doing better things with my time, like studying Korean and reading worthwhile books. But who has time for that?! As far as I can tell, Korean television consists mostly of terrible talk shows where people laugh at the most inane things. I'm sure if I knew what they were saying, I would find it mildly amusing. I'm sure foreigners in the US probably would think the same thing about the shows we watch. (Except "The Jersey Shore," which I hear is equally awesome and awful. I'm so jealous of everyone that gets to watch those dudes fist-pump like champs). The Korean shows usually have guys like these two pictured below who mug for the camera.

I've seen one show quite a few times where two Korean comics walk around NYC asking people in broken English if they know about Korean food, such as kim chi. I'm not sure what the point of the show really is. Another interesting thing is the home shopping networks in Korea, which are on multiple channels. They often advertise exercise equipment, and always show the actual sweat that is coming off of the models. They make a point of continuously showing close-ups of the beads of sweat on these people, almost as if to say, "This is really working. They're sweating!" Also, a lot of the shows have panel-style seating, such as the one shown below. According to the blog I got this picture from, the theme of this particular episode was allergies, such as peanuts and seafood. They also discussed sports and fruit. Riveting TV.

Besides all this regular TV that I see, I get somewhere between 4-8 channels of English-language programming, depending on the time of day. There is a fashion channel that I hardly watch (no really, you have to believe me, I don't watch it. I swear!), a Discovery channel, a National Geographic channel, a channel dedicated to men's volleyball and soccer, and an awesome channel that only shows American action movies and Ultimate Fighting. It's like Spike TV, only if Spike TV didn't show "Bloodsport" and "Kickboxer" 5 times a day. My testosterone level raises just watching this channel for a split-second.

Anyways, on my second day at school, I was sitting at lunch with the other teachers, and they are talking about me again in Korean. I can tell because they are gesturing at me and giving me a generally positive look. Then one guy, who is going off on something at lightning speed, all of a sudden says, "He looks like Bruce Willis!!!" I'll take any compliment I can, I guess. So I go home that night, flip on the super macho action movie channel, and what is on, but a movie with Bruce Willis. I don't even know what it was called, but I thought it was a fitting end to my day.

My new home

So....here I am, getting off of an airplane in South Korea, and jumping into a job teaching English to a bunch of high schoolers. I honestly never gave much thought to the idea of coming here to teach English, but after doing my Teaching English as a Foreign Language certificate (TEFL, for those in the know) in Prague, I quickly realized that this might be a good place to start off my stint in teaching English to people who want to know it. I actually knew little of Korea before coming here, except that they hosted the World Cup in 2002, they border a country run by a talking puppet (America....F*&% yeah!!!), and tons of people come here to teach English and sock away some cash. They must be onto something, amirite? Hence, here I am, in Korea, and waiting for some dude with my name written on a sign at the airport to take me to my new home for the next year.

(I must admit, I don't like bad for someone who just traveled for 20 hours)

Anyways, after changing into my Men In Black suit (all I was missing was my sunglasses and my device to wipe your memory clear of this blog), I met the dude with the sign waiting in the airport arrivals lobby. We traveled about 2.5 hours in traffic to a small outpost called Daesan, where I would be teaching public high school. Daesan is southwest of Seoul, and about twenty minutes from the (relatively) big city of Seosan, where the population is a whopping 150,000. I was met by one of my co-teachers who then took me around the school and introduced me to the top brass. OK, so this is where you learn about the name of the blog. I was being introduced to the VP of the school, and he's talking in Korean of course to everyone else around him. He's pointing at me and he seems very impressed by the cut of my jib, and then my co-teacher says, with a straight face, "You remind him of a famous actor from America. His name is Macgyver." I was floored. Speechless. What a compliment.

Thinking the day possibly couldn't get any better, I was taken to my apartment, fully furnished and paid for by the school. I expected a dump, to be honest, with my bed doubling as a desk, and my bathroom barely giving me enough room to take a shower. I couldn't have been more surprised. The place is the size of a respectable studio in DC or NYC, which is saying something. I always thought that the Koreans did more with less space, much like the rest of the countries in the world not named "America," but this was different. I guess when you get out of the larger cities here, they have more room to house native English speakers who are used to abnormally large beds and bathrooms with two sinks.

The coolest thing about the apartment though, by far, is not how big it is or how I have 78 channels of Korean television (I'll get to that later), but is the previous tenant. Now, I don't usually bestow sainthood on people too often, but this person did something that only an angel from heaven could do. He left me a box full of Amy's Macaroni and Cheese. That's right, the best organic mac and cheese that doesn't even require me to put butter in it. I don't know if this guy had to bolt out of here in the middle of the night and leave his most precious belongings, but I believe he has good karma coming to him in the near future due to this. He also left some other cool stuff, such as liquor and a set of weights, but those aren't as important as mac and cheese. The previous tenant was actually the guy whom I replaced at my high school, so maybe I'll track his address down and thank him 1,000 times over for his kindness. I almost feel like I should do something great now for someone, like that kid in "Pay it Forward." We'll see about that.

Check back here often for updates on my life as a teacher in Korea, and all the cultural mishaps that are bound to happen. For now, enjoy the pictures!

My high school, from a distance. It's almost brand new, having opened in 2008

There's more where this came from. He left tons of weights under the bed.

A good omen for my stay in South Korea

The view of my living room/bedroom