Year: 2 Month: 1 Complete

Wow the first month of our second year in Korea has already come and gone!  We definitely stayed busy getting started with our new jobs have been slowly starting to enjoy the warmer weather that has been arriving.  Today we took advantage of the 50ish degree weather and went for a walk.  Throughout this week it is supposed to get quite springy, as much as 65 degrees maybe!  We both remember last March feeling extremely cold here, but we're pretty sure it was about the same as it has been this March.  It's just this year it feels SO much warmer after going through the last four months!!  We continue to hope that this means winter is officially over!!  Though that can only mean that summer is coming even closer.....

On Saturday night I had a few friends over for dinner (Eric was nice enough to let us girls have the house to ourselves for a few hours while he went to the movies).  It's really nice to be able to have enough room to have people over to just hang out for a while.  House parties are a very rare thing in Korea because the houses are so small.  It's much easier to sit at a restaurant talking for several hours than to go to someone's house for dinner.  For us, this is the first time we've had somewhere big enough to actually have people come over and we intend to take full advantage of it, whether that's the Korean way or not  :)

Since today was Easter we decided to cook a nice dinner together of a little Samgyupsal, a little marinated pork, some baked potato bites, broccoli and rolls.  It was quite delicious and we also enjoyed so homemade strawberry shortcake for dessert.  We laugh when we think about how last year we didn't buy much fruit for the first month or so, definitely never strawberries because we thought the only place you could get them was at the big marts for $10 for a couple berries or $20 for three or four apples.  Fortunately we have figured out a few things over the last year and have been enjoying produce (especially strawberries lately!) from the numerous fruit trucks on the streets.  They say the strawberries are grown in Korea in greenhouses.  I don't know if that's true or not but they sure are delicious!

A picture of our delicious Easter dinner we home cooked together

GEPIK Orientation 2013

I just finished three days of training for my new job and I can honestly say I did not learn much.  At least not much that I felt I can put into practice right now.  However, I did meet a lot of new people, some of whom I plan to keep in contact with, and I did learn quite a few tips that I will hang on to and try out when I am teaching some kids with a bit more English knowledge, either here or back home.  A bus picked us up near the school that I work at Wednesday morning and dropped us off again on Friday afternoon.  The orientation was for all of the teachers who are new (or haven't attended before) to the Gyeonggi English Program in Korea, basically the official name for the department that handles all of the foreign English teachers in the public schools in Gyeonggi province.  In case you are wondering a bit about geography... Gyeonggi-do is a province in Korea that surrounds Seoul on all sides.

 

The red is Gyeonggi-do and the white area near the middle of it is Seoul.  Seoul is not part of any province it's just a city/area by itself I guess. My school is in Guri, Gyeonggi-do which is just slightly east of Seoul (only twenty minutes by bus from our house in Gwangjin-gu, Seoul to my school in Guri).  I met a couple of other girls who just arrived a few weeks ago and also work pretty close to Guri.  I met a lot of interesting people of all ages and from all over the world.  I was actually quite surprised by how many South Africans were there.  Before now, I'd only run into maybe two or three teachers from South Africa but apparently there are A LOT of teachers from South Africa working for GEPIK which was neat (I'm a bit jealous of their accents actually).  

The orientation started with a traditional samulnori presentation (if you haven't seen a samulnori presentation before you should youtube it.  I think they are very neat!) and was then followed by several sessions about various topics that ranged from activities you can do in the classroom to how to work best with your Korean co-teacher to important cultural information, etc.  Some were definitely more interesting than others but overall it was a nice little getaway to the Gyeonggi-do countryside and opportunity to meet new people I suppose!  Oh and the free food and real shower wasn't bad either :)

Since some people have been asking us about the atmosphere surrounding the North's latest threats I thought I would just say that there is no concern whatsoever coming from the local people here.  Every time a new president is inaugurated in South Korea the North finds it to be a perfect time for a new round of verbal threats.  The things they say may not sound entirely intelligent at times, but at the end of the day everyone is very certain they are smart enough to know the consequences that would come (like no more North Korea) in a very, very short time if they were to venture outside their space.  They cannot single handedly decide to void the armistice agreement nor do they have the means to attack the United States like their propaganda videos suggest, but they do enjoy using their imaginations.  We are just glad we went to the DMZ/JSA last year and didn't wait since I heard they may possibly soon be cutting back on what tourists can see or even putting tours on hold for a time.

We also got word today that our first (we're not sure how many there could potentially be) meeting between the Ministry of Employment and Labor, us and our former employer will take place next Tuesday morning.  This is much sooner than we thought but we are very thankful and now hopeful that this means all of our last financial things and ties to our former employer will be sorted out, in our favor, sooner than we expected.

Here are the few pictures I took at the training...

 It was at the Korean Standards Association Training Center in Anseong, Gyeonggi-do

 The buildings where our rooms and the conference rooms were

It looked like the countryside!  No tall buildings or lots of people!

Mid March

We had a fairly relaxed weekend this time.  We were invited to dinner with one of my former kindergarten students' family who had been saddened by the fact I had left the school and was no longer his teacher.  Fortunately his parents understand the situation that caused us to leave unexpectedly.  However, since Tommy had become so attached to me (and vice versa!) they want to stay in touch with us and meet up again, though I will say he completely ignored me all night!  I think this was the first time I've had parents of a student thank me so profusely for teaching their child.  After the hard work we've put in to sticking up for ourselves over the last month and striving to give all we had into our teaching this last year, it was definitely a very rewarding evening.  Their very generous comments and actions will stay with me for a very long time I'm sure.

Last Thursday we went to the immigration office and officially completed all of the legal requirements involved in transferring our work visas from one work place to another.  Living and working legally in a country can be an exhausting process with much paperwork!!  But we're glad it's finished for the last time.

This week I will be going to a required training for all new teachers that work in the GEPIK program.  The public school that I work at now is part of the Gyeonggi English Program in Korea so I will go with all the other new foreign teachers to the training for three days this week, where I will hopefully learn more about how the program works and some teaching tips as well.  It's still strange being the only foreigner in the school.  I was thinking today about when I had to write work samples during my student teaching time, a large part of the introduction had to be about the diversity within a classroom (a hot topic in American public schools since there is so much diversity in all schools).  I don't know for sure, but I think I found maybe two or three kids that look like they might not be full Korean out of the 300 I teach.  We've known for a year about the lack of diversity Korea seems to have as a whole, but I think I'm discovering it even more by working in a school that sees over a thousand students and employees come and go everyday, only one of them being "different."  It's interesting and a different concept to think about for sure but overall I'm still definitely loving this job!

Public School Teaching

I have successfully completed my first two days of work at Guji Public Elementary School!  I was pretty nervous Monday morning since I was starting a week later than I should have been and knowing I would be the only foreigner in the whole school, but the day flew by!  It is very different than the hagwon we worked at for the past year, but so far they seem to be very welcoming differences!!  I am teaching all of the third and fourth grade classes.  There are five third grade classes and six fourth grade classes, so I teach eleven classes for forty minutes twice a week.  Those teaching hours are less than what I did just in afternoon elementary classes at the hagwon, not counting the four hours I spent with kindergarten every day.  It's also really strange to be home and have dinner before dark... I haven't had a work schedule like that since maybe never!

Lesson planning is quite easy and I seem to have more than enough time to do it.  I only plan four different lessons each week, two for third grade and two for fourth grade, then I teach those lessons over and over.  I taught the same lesson four times before lunch today.  I think I'm pretty good by the fourth time!  Korean public schools start teaching English in third grade so the lesson I have been teaching all the third grade classes the last two days is very basic speaking.  We learned how to say "Hello, my name is... What is your name?"  (I'm not sure who helped them choose an English name last week before I started but some are quite interesting... like Dragon and Pooh and Jespel and Call and Apple Pie just to name a few...) They don't start learning the alphabet or anything with reading and writing until second semester of third grade.  There are, of course, some students who have been going to a hagwon since they were kindergarten age and can learn English at a much higher level than I am teaching.  Then there are other students who are learning how to say "hello" for the first time.  Each class has about 25-28 students.  There is also a Korean teacher and we co-teach together.  Since many of them don't understand any English I usually teach part of the lesson in English and she teaches it in Korean.  The school is huge.  There are about 950 students and the building has five floors.  I have my own desk, classroom and computer.  More things I've never had all to myself before that excite me!  I'm the only foreign teacher in the school and only two or three other Korean English teachers speak English so there's not a whole lot of conversing for me to do in the halls, but I do hope to learn more about how their public schools operate here.  I'm very excited to have my first official public school position!!

A New Chapter

The first week of our second year in Korea has already come to an end.  As I mentioned before, this second year will end up being quite different than the first.  Eric began a new job this week as a part time kindergarten teacher at Little Planet.  He works at a Korean kindergarten that offers an English class.  He teaches English to four different classes of kids ranging in age from 3-6.  The first week was a bit of a challenge but he thinks it will work out to be a nice job once the students become more used to him.  Many of the students have never seen a foreigner before so there were many tears the first couple days!  That is still such a foreign concept to us, that some people have never seen someone in person that doesn't look just like them, but I guess that's what happens when you live in such a homogenous society.  Just something else you never think about until you actually experience it!  Unfortunately he has to commute a pretty good distance, about 50 minutes by bus, since the school is actually a bit outside of the city limits of Seoul in Gyeonggi Province, but we are confident all of the adjustments will be worth it.

Now that most things have been resolved with our previous employer I can explain the situation that led to our decision to make a last minute job switch (though it's quite a long story!).  I officially received the paperwork that I needed from our boss on Friday that allows me to legally transfer my work visa over to another employer.  Basically as a foreigner on a work visa we can only work for the employer that is sponsoring our visa.  We thought things were going pretty smoothly at the place we had worked for the past year so went ahead and signed a second year contract and the employer extended our visas for another year, meaning we could only legally work for them during that time unless they agreed to let us go and transfer them to another employer.  However, after we had signed the new contracts, we began to get a very uneasy feeling about working for this employer.  It seemed that something had changed with their finances in the last couple months as they had begun to pay us a day or so late and not give us everything we were due according to the contract.  Additionally, we discovered the boss had been deducting more income tax than was legal (supposedly a common problem with Korean hagwons but still very much illegal) and some of the Korean staff weren't getting paid at all.  This made us feel very nervous and unsecure financially and we felt like we needed to try and get out of the second contract we had signed.  We assumed this would be an easy process since the employer was the one that had broke the law and broke the contract.  However, it was definitely not.  When we informed her we would like to complete our current contract and cancel the second, she was originally fine with that idea, realizing the amount of money she could save since there was no reason to replace both of us with the lack of students the school had.  Unfortunately her mind quickly changed and she decided to throw a lot of bogus threats our way, I guess with the intention to scare us into staying.  Well it didn't work and we pursued legal action through the Korean labor department but found out that process would take much longer than we really wanted (by this time we had jobs lined up to start the first of March so needed to get the legal paperwork from her asap).  We had to resort back to trying to negotiate with her and eventually she did consent to giving Eric the necessary paperwork.  I had to stay.  She claimed that if I left she would lose students (aka money) so I wasn't allowed to leave (I guess that was maybe intended to be a compliment to me?  But I felt more like a hostage!).  I continued to try and negotiate and finally she consented.  I had to work a week longer than I wanted to since my new job should have started this last week, but fortunately the other school held the position for me.  Needless to say it has felt like a rather stressful few weeks lately with multiple trips to the labor department, immigration department and negotiating with a lot of people! We are so fortunate to have a couple of great people to help us out with the language barrier and give us advice on what to do and are also very blessed that things have come together for us to start new jobs right away!  So now that you have read this long explanation the bottom line is that we are both out of what we felt could become a very unstable situation and appear to have each found a much more secure place to be for the rest of our time in Korea.   I will start at Guji Public Elementary School on Monday as their foreign English teacher for third and fourth grade.  I will also have to commute about 30 minutes by bus.  Our previous employer still owes us quite a bit of money in severance pay and deposits, which we are doubting we will see anytime soon so we aren't completely finished with that yet.  Fortunately, we still have another year to pursue that while we are still in the country.

Leaving the school was definitely a hard decision and not something we particularly wanted to do but something we felt very strongly we had to do.  The more we research and learn, the more we realize a lot of foreigners just take whatever the hagwon boss does (or they go home) which is why they can get away with cheating foreigners a lot.  No one seems to ask questions, or research the laws and their rights, or care enough to say anything.  Maybe we were crazy to bring it up but we felt like someone needed to say something and stand up for their rights and we won't be backing down now.

In other news... it was over 60 degrees today!!  We walked over to Children's Grand Park to spend our Saturday afternoon walking around the park and enjoying the warmness.  We're sure winter will come back before spring comes to stay, but we did our best to take advantage of the first spring-like day of the year!

 This is park food in Korea: Pork cutlet, sausage, egg and rice  It was pretty yummy!

All the animals were out at the zoo within the park.  Here is a baboon family.

One Year Reflections

One year ago today we stepped off a plane in South Korea, exhausted, anxious and trying to drag four suitcases, two laptops, backpacks, etc.   We try to remember our first thoughts about that night but honestly it’s hard to really remember.  We remember being very tired, it was the longest flight either of us had ever been on, and we had been too anxious to sleep much.  By the time we made our way from the airport in Incheon towards our workplace and apartment on the east side of Seoul we continued to become more anxious and curious about what this would all be like.  That first night we met one of our coworkers who would end up becoming a great friend, mentor, and the person who would (and still is) help us navigate through everything that we had to do to get established here.  We remember seeing our apartment for the first time, thinking it was small but honestly not overly shocked by how small it was.  We went to E-mart that first night with our coworker and boss so that the boss (who spoke no English making it a seemingly awkward situation at the time) could buy us bedding since there was none in our apartment.    We spent our first two nights in one twin bed with no pillows.  I remember waking up the morning after we had arrived thinking that there was no way I could do this.  There was no way I could live in another country away from everything and everyone familiar.  We didn’t even know where the grocery store was to buy food, nor could we ask some random person on the street since we didn’t even speak the same language anymore!  Yet somehow, someway everything seemed to fall into place over the next few days and weeks and months.  Work was challenging to get used to at first but we managed and quickly learned to enjoy it immensely.  We found the grocery store and learned how to use the public transportation to get anywhere we wanted to go in the city.  We enjoyed learning about, and doing our best to fit in with, the Korean culture and learning some history as well.  Having been married for almost seven months this was the first time we had lived not only on our own, but literally on our own.  There was no family or friends to visit or be with.  We learned to rely completely and totally on each other and we both agree that our marriage has been strengthened by all of it.  When one of us didn’t feel like we could do it, the other was right there so we could keep on going together.  Somehow we have survived and made it through an entire year living and working abroad together.  I think the reason it is so difficult to recall how we felt those first few days after we arrived in Korea is because we have come so far since then.  A year ago we took a leap of faith without being able to see where it would lead, but even now as we are going through some challenges that come with being foreigners in another country and wanting to change jobs, we have no regrets and wouldn’t change anything that we experienced over this last year.  In a way, we feel like it is a big accomplishment with how far we have come this year and what we have learned.  Yes there have been challenges at time, but there’s no doubt that every single experience has helped us grow and become stronger.  We have learned how difficult it can be to become totally immersed in a culture that is completely different from your own.  We learned how difficult it can be to learn a new language- not only from teaching it, but trying to learn a new language ourselves.  We had the opportunity to look for and purchase our first apartment ourselves in a foreign country and turning into a home that we really love.  We have had the opportunity to travel to Thailand and plan to do some more traveling in Asia this next year.  We have been blessed to meet some amazing people that have helped us immensely in the time we have been here.  In the end, we have grown and learned so much over the course of this year.  We have grown as a couple and we have grown as individuals.  As difficult as it is to be away from home and everything familiar, we wouldn’t change anything about this past year and we cannot wait to see what this second year brings.  A year from now we will be packing our things and preparing for the trip home to stay.   But in the meantime, we plan to not waste a single day to grow more, do more and learn more together.

We have seen a lot during our first year in Korea and have thousands (yes, thousands) of pictures to prove it.  Here is just a small sampling of a couple places we have been...

 Field trips with our students.  This was at Seoul Forest.

 The War Memorial of Korea Museum

 The Korean Folk Village in Suwon

 Phuket, Thailand

 Dorason Station at the DMZ with North Korea in the background.

 Haeundae Beach, Busan, South Korea

Namiseom

Friday was a holiday in Korea so we had the day off!  It was Independence Movement Day, a national holiday to celebrate one of the first times Korean resistance occurred during Japan's occupation of Korea in the early 1900's.  Since everyone had the day off, a couple of my friends and I decided to venture outside of Seoul to Gangwon-do province.  The Han River runs into Gangwon-do and is known as Bukhangang (North Han River)  In the middle of the Bukhangang, 67 kilometers away from Seoul,  is a small, half moon shaped island called Namiseom.  It was named after General Nami who led a great victory during King Sejo's reign of the Joseon Dynasty in the 1400's.  General Nami was killed when he was only 25 years old and his grave site is on Namiseom.  We had to take the subway for a while and then a short ferry ride to the island (foreigners got a discount on the ferry ticket!).  Although it was a little bit windy and chilly, it was a beautiful day with the sun and we spent a few hours walking around the whole island enjoying the fresh air.  There are a lot of trees on the island also.  They were all tall and some were even green pine trees and it almost seemed like home!  The island is actually a popular filming location for some Korean dramas and movies.  I think the island will be even more beautiful in the spring/summer/fall so I would definitely like to go back again as the weather warms up and more flowers will be blooming.  It was clear enough that we could even see some of the mountains in North Korea.  The island is also located close to the city of Chuncheon which is where dakgalbi (Korean spicy chicken) first started.  Before we headed over to the island we stopped at a Korean restaurant for lunch.  We had spicy chicken, similar to what is used for dakgalbi (spicy chicken stir fry).  I will be uploading my many pictures soon, but here are just a few...

 Our spicy chicken lunch

 View from the island

 

My friend, Bianca, and I at one end of the island

 Some of the tall trees