First few days

So it begins, we have officially taught for the first time yesterday after shadowing for a single day on Friday.  We were thrown into the fire with two classes yesterday.  I will get to how that went, but first lets talk about our day of shadowing.

Our shadowing day was interesting.  There was a sense of wonderment about these new honkeys in the classroom which made the children act out quite a bit.  I have my sights on some trouble students who I probably won't be able to change but at least I know who to look out for.  The first hour or so of the day is spent on something called the "morning message" which basically consists of anything I really want it to which is a weird sense of freedom I didn't really expect.  The rest of the day pretty much follows a pretty normal schedule, story time, phonics, lunch, special classes, then the older kid classes begin.

We were thrown it literally knowing nothing for the older classes which sucked because the first class of the older children is the problem class.  Out of 5 students there are two serious problem children in the class.  They were unruly and disrespectful, but that is to be expected since Manda didn't know she was supposed to be helping and I didn't spell out any rules.  We now have decided on the rules and will enforce them strictly.

The last class of the day is four older girls who are super giggly and nice.  They are all surprisingly good at English, and pretty smart in general.  We have decided for that class we are going to do a song of the week since they all enjoy music, and teach them the lyrics and discuss the song.  We should be teaching for the first full day tomorrow, which is terrifying to me, but I know we will be able to survive.

Typhoon Update! (x2)

We would like to interrupt this regularly (hah! I'm funny, aren't I?) scheduled blog to give you an update about the status of Typhoon Bolaven being in the region. We woke up early this morning to wind picking up outside and blowing through the kitchen fan and the windows sporadically. The sky was just an endless flow of clouds of different colors.

I was anticipating a normal day, but things were a bit different because of the weather forecast. Instead of the normal 30ish students there were about half that. There were 6 in my soon to be class (Silly Sally), but that was with an extra kiddo, Stella's little sister, who is way too young to be in this school. After being distraught for quite a while, despite being near her sister, she finally came around and had fun playing with Stella. That left Zach's class (Rainbow Fish) with two, one of the girls from our 4/5th grade class, and the remaining students of varying ages, but mostly the 2/3rd graders.

That said, we had morning classes, which were pretty laid back because so many students were gone and then everyone went downstairs and had lunch in the Humpty Dumpty room so that they could watch a movie later.

The small amount of students and the weather meant we all watched Wall-E.

Sarah and Zach.

Sarah is very affectionate and hopped to my lap too.

That's the cook in the apron, we had cooked potatoes for afternoon snack. They were slightly sweet on the outside.

I tried to chase John but he was too fast and I got a floor burn on my knee. :(

The BEST cartoon/animated comic.

The students that leave later cuddled under the covers (once they stopped wrestling) and watched a movie. We had donuts and peaches as a snack since it got so late.

So that was our day in a nutshell, we actually start teaching our classes tomorrow as we take over from the current foreign teachers who are leaving Korea on Friday (after their 3 and 2 year stays, respectively). Since we got done with everything and the students left the wind picked up and was howling and it got dark very early, despite their being blue sky behind the clouds. 

What's next for us though? Another typhoon later in the week that goes by Tembin! By later in the week I mean all of Thursday. That's especially interesting because I will be teaching at another private kindergarten on Tuesdays and Thursdays (in Dongbang, wherever that is) and I think I start on Thursday!! So not only do I get to wonder what this new school is going to look like, but I will be wondering about the inclement weather as well. 

Hi there tropical storm Tembin.

Traveling to Korea!

The day has finally come (and passed) for us to travel to Korea and start our ESL Honeymoon Adventure for real real (not for play play).  I've dreamed of this moment for months now, and I'm really happy it is finally here.  The night before we got a scant more than 2 hours of sleep before waking up at 12am to take showers and make our final preparations for the long LONG flight.  We arrived at Philly international around 3am after being picked up by a driving service.  It was hard to stay awake in the car, but once we got to the airport I was absolutely giddy.  Much to Amanda annoyance.

I thought she was going to beat me

We checked in, however there was no one there to greet us at the United Airlines counter, so we waited and waited and waited what seemed like forever (although was really about 30 minutes) and got our tickets.  We walked to airport security which I must say looks really freaking futuristic and daunting.  They really hide the fact they are looking at your junk really well.  After that it was just the waiting game, and wait we certainly did.

Ignore my nostril

The first flight was....very uneventful to be honest.  I fell asleep and there was a very business looking Indian gentlemen sitting next to us.  We upgraded to the better economy seats so there was actually a bit of room to stretch a bit.  The only cool part of the flight was the fact that there was a kitty cat in the row next to us.  Which made me miss our kitties very very much, but its okay because they are in a good loving home.

The San Francisco Airport was extremely busy and we did not have a lot of time between flights so we ran to grab some food and grab a quick gift for our school director.  The flight from San Fran was...interesting.  We got to see four different movies, The Avengers, Mirror Mirror, One Thousand Words, and some other movie I couldn't be bothered to care about.  I was excited since I enjoyed the Avengers, and Mirror Mirror was pretty good actually, but by the time One Thousand Words rolled around I was so sick of being on the flight I was kinda like fuck it!  The 12 hours did really drag, but after about halfway through the flight you become comfortable numb to it other then your legs aching like crazy.  Sadly for the 12 hour flight we were cramped into seats that were barely wider than my already wide frame.  What was worse is the people seated in front of us both leaned their seats back as far as they could go so Manda and I literally could not move our legs unless we got up.
I have never been good with travel but the flights actually weren't that bad.  It was just hard hitting the 24 hours awake mark before we even landed in Korea.  Going through customs and getting our bags was very quick surprisingly and after meeting our contact we were off on our way to Cheongju.

On the bus to Cheongju outside the airport

The bus ride was interesting while Koreans drive on the right side of the road the buses drive like the drivers are insane.  The driver we had served between lanes randomly and beeped at people he cut off.  I admit I was only awake for about 1/3rd of the ride since we had been up for a total of about 30 hours by that point.
The architecture around Seoul was really cool, all of the tall buildings shared similar design and theme making the city very nice to look at.  There were also some strange buildings to spice things up like the Children's Library as shown below.

The weird dome building is the library

By the time we hit the bus station in Cheongju we were dead out despite all of my efforts to keep myself awake.  After we got our bags from the bus we just kind of stood off to the side wallowing in our own awkward.   We were alone, 7000+ miles from home and did not speak a single word of Korean.  Despite what we had been told 90% of the signs (that I saw) were solely in Korean, and we had no idea what to do. While Manda guarded the suitcases I went looking in the bus terminal.  Sadly I don't have any pictures but it was just like a mini-mall/flea market, I didn't find any information booth so I went back out and luckily a teacher from our school was there waiting for us!
She introduced her self as Christine which I found out later was the girl who interviewed me!  After loading our stuff up into the car we headed on out to the school!  We are actually in a long alley out in the more rural part of the city, but still within walking distance of a lot of very cool things.  We ate some food with Christine and turned in for the night.  Only to be woken up a bit later by one of the couple we are replacing is named Rachael.  We had a very brief chat with her before crashing for the night.  I will leave you with the parting picture for now.

Sleepy Manda on the bus

Hello Cheongju! (Manda's version of the trip)

This was one of our first views of Choengju.

We finally made it to our destination! Said destination being Cheongju, Chungcheongbuk-do, South Korea. It was a very, very long trip, but we're glad to say that we did make it back in one piece.

First things first, we made it to the Philly airport around 2:30am or so (on very little sleep), which meant we had forever to wait. Luckily for us, the airline had a way to make us be patient and wait. By that I mean that we waited around for an hour for the person from United Airlines to check us in until probably 3:30am. Then we finally waded through security with no issues and waited for the plane. We did manage to grab a quick breakfast before the 6 hour flight, which was great because the trip did not include a whole lot of food in general. So breakfast was an egg and cheese sandwich and a smoothie. 

Then we boarded the first flight, which was okay, but not my favorite thing ever. Sleep was kind of an off and on thing all day, but nothing major so we were already getting tired.  The flight was pretty non-remarkable though, which is fine. Though Zach just reminded me that there was a pretty white and black kitty across the aisle from us in a carrier. It was so good, it didn't even make a peep. 

At that point we had made it to San Francisco and had little time to spare since our layover was only for an hour and twenty minutes. We had just enough time to grab something to eat (which we didn't even have time to eat all of our sandwiches!) and get to the terminal before it was time to start boarding. In that time we also had calls and texting to do, plus I was able to just make it to suspend our phone accounts so I won't be billed for 3 months and we can still use them in South Korea by picking up free wifi. So we fit all that into the tiny bit of time and then we boarded the plane.

Did I mention that the plane is huge? 

As weird as it is, I actually enjoyed the longer flight more than the smaller one (mostly). The lack of leg room was already bad and the guy in front of me leaned back his seat so I stuck my legs into the aisle as much as possible. I guess there's only so much you can do when you pack approximately 300 people onto a plane though. 

Really long flights are interesting in my perspective though. I feel like you absolutely hate it and the time drags in the first 3 or so hours, but then you reach the point where you're just like, "well, I'm here, might as well just suffer with everyone else" and then it isn't as bad. Then you just watch the crappy movies (we got to watch The Avengers though, so that was pretty nice), eat the kind of crappy meals (first it was chicken and rice or beef bolgogi and rice, then it was either a turkey sandwich or noodles and potstickers; they even gave us a late night snack!), and learn little things about the people around you just by being in close proximity. 

You can see Zach in the picture above (on the right side with the plaid/stripey stuff going on), to his right was this short woman with an accent I didn't recognize. She had brought her own slippers and had a stuffed moose that she cuddled with. She was nice. Then you can see the guy across the aisle from me in the white shirt. He was alternately on his iPhone or his Mac and did some reading on a few powerpoint presentations, so I'm thinking he was a student. One of the papers he was reading was about Buddhism and Chinese writing or something. The rest was in Korean so I had no idea. 

I think we both catnapped off and on, but it was very hard to sleep for longer periods because the lack of leg room makes your knees and legs ache. I got up pretty frequently, especially later on, because sitting there not being able to get comfortable can drive you crazy. All things considered, not a bad flight.

Just flying over Japan, no big deal.

So I finally took the picture above near the end of the flight as we were going over Japan. That was pretty neat and the mountains were gorgeous. 

I wish I had taken some pictures at the airport in Incheon, but I didn't as I was mostly just trying to get on the wifi to send emails to people to let them know we made it (okay, and I checked in on Foursquare, I will admit it). Then we shuffled through immigration and downstairs to gather our luggage. After that we just turned in our information to customs and went through were we met a man who helped us buy a bus ticket to Cheongju and waited until we left. Zach ran back into the airport while we were waiting to get a bottle of water as we both needed it, and it was 1,000 won, which is about $ 0.88 USD, which isn't bad. 

You need one of these to hop on a bus. 

The bus ride was interesting, we went through Incheon and then Seoul, watching the buildings and signs. There are so many buildings and so many businesses in buildings everywhere. On the way through that area I saw a Papa John's, a Dominoes, and tons and tons of other businesses. There was also this really neat children's library that was round and kind of made me think of the Death Star from Star Wars. The architecture around here is really neat though, lots of big artsy buildings and art and generally interesting things. 

This was just as we got on the bus, shortly after leaving the airport.

At this point, I have to say that things were less interesting for me, because I fell asleep. After being awake and traveling for more than 24 hours (we're clocking closer to 30 hours at this point in the trip), it just caught up with me and it was time to sleep for a few. We both fell asleep off and on while we were on the bus and and about 2 and a half hours after we boarded the bus we were off and at the bus station in Cheongju. 

We weren't sure what was happening at that point as we thought that we would be meeting the director at the bus station. Instead we met Christina who is a part time teacher at the school. She was very nice and got us where we needed to go, after a little confusion. 

Cheongju welcomed us with a rainbow!

Just in case you needed to know where you were.

Finally, after the short drive we made it to the school and found out that we're going to be living upstairs, above the school. We're on the 3rd floor of the building, which is kind of neat. As far as location, we're located on the southern side of Cheongju (I think) near the outskirts, which has its advantages and disadvantages. 

We had a quick dinner at a local restaurant and had pork and the other usual Korean fare, which we will get into more later on. We also met the current foreign teachers that live here, they will be leaving in a week to head back to the states after being here for 2 years. I am really hoping that they will be able to show us the ropes before we go so we aren't flailing quite as much. We are actually shadowing them today (it's 9:30am here, so almost time for classes to start). Since we have had so much morning downtime we've been listening to dogs bark and I've been doing some bird watching (there are some noisy black and white birds outside that I've been watching).

After that we fell into blissful sleep after an exhausting day. Once we were told how to turn on the air conditioner it was even better. It's apparently been hot and wet here, so I guess we'll get used to that. In fact, we're expecting this early next week...

This is Bolaven apparently, which will hit us on Monday.

I will update this again soon (and add what I probably missed), for now it's time to start the day's adventure though and hope we make it through in one piece. ^-^

Our final date and prep, also Pennsylvania (again)

So this blog post is from the magical and mystical realm of Pennsylvania.  We decided for several reasons it would be best to leave from Philly airport even though it would add an even longer flight before our already 12ish hour flight from California to Incheon international airport.  There at the airport one of the recruiters from Starteachers is going to meet us and make sure we get on the correct bus to Cheongju, where the director of the school will meet us at the bus stop and everything will be fabulous.  We still have not actually seen pictures or know any sort of layout of the apartment we will be staying in but we are optimistic that it will be nice.  The first few months are going to be an adventure of not knowing any of the language, not knowing our way around, and not being terrible teachers to the poor students under our care.  We are also going to be provided two cellphones from the school, we are not sure yet whether we will be paying for the monthly or if the school will foot the bill for that particular expense.  Our official leaving date is Wednesday the 22nd around 6am.  We will then spend about 20ish hours total until we reach our destination on minimal sleep and extreme stress.  Luckily when we arrive in Korea it will be early evening so it will be easy to crash and get on their sleeping schedule (hopefully).  

Its hard to describe how excited I really am at the prospect of the trip.  It has been such a long and drawn out process just getting to this point, and more expensive than I would have liked.  Despite everything that could have gone wrong we have our visas in hand, and we have our tickets all paid for and a car coming to get us at 1:30 in the morning Wednesday (yaaaay).  It is going to be 20 hours in the air and about a three hour bus ride.  This will be the longest I have ever traveled straight and I will probably be super cranky and tired.  I will be sure to fill this blog with all my travel comments minus the copious amounts of expletives I will likely use.

In other news there is an island in Japan called Cat Island (Tashiro Island) which is filled with old people and kitty cats.  I have decided I must go there and pet all the cats.  I have not decided whether I will attempt to pet the old people or not since I am not sure if they have their rabies shots yet.  I will ask their cat owners if the elderly are up on their shots when I go there.  CAT ISLAND

CAT ISLAND








CAT ISLAND

What do I want out of this whole thing?

I feel like one of these right now. Busy busy busy (and kinda sweet).

So it's probably pretty obvious that one of the primary reasons we're going over to South Korea is to teach English and work full time in a new culture. One thing I've been thinking about though is what my personal plans/goals/ideas for South Korea are.

I've had to come back to this blog entry, so it's probably kind of disjointed, but things have been even more busy. Things have been changed around a bit and we are now leaving later since our flight has been moved and we both got colds! I still have some plans in mind for South Korea though.

So why do I want to go to South Korea? Well, I find people and culture very fascinating, including our own culture here in the US. While there are lots of types of adventures to be had in a foreign country, I am also just really interested in visiting the neighborhood. I would love to travel and see different parts of South Korea, which I am sure we will do, but I'm looking forward to just going shopping at a local store or walking around in the city. I am fascinated by the food and the people and historical sights, museums, lots of small things that aren't something you may really even think about. Those are the things that I'm hoping to capture and bring to this blog, because it's always more fun with people who can (sort of) experience things with you!

Wow we're almost there

Bling

Look at that glorious neck-beard

So its been a while and life has been a blur.  We have a contract set in concrete and have sent out our information for the our E-2 visas.  We will be leaving next Friday August 17th for South Korea.  I am really looking forward to the experience, but I am admittedly beginning to become more worried about how well I will do as a teacher.  I want to be able to teach my students well, and to help them grow as people (albeit very small amounts).

I have been thinking about what I want to do while I am over in South Korea, and I decided I want to hike, run, and see as many historical sites as possible.  I also really want to visit as many festivals as I can and really experience the culture.  Luckily the city that Amanda and I will be in Cheongju City, was the main base for Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea and it has a large historical fort which I am really looking forward to checking out.  Otherwise it is just the waiting game now that everything has been sent out and we have secured a place for our cats for a year.

I guess theres not much else to say currently!  Stay tuned!

Contracts and conversations about contracts

This classy photo may or may not be what a contract looks like. 

Contract. For being a small word, contract means a whole lot, so it's something to take very seriously. More seriously than a whole zoo full of multi-talented otters. Probably serious enough that you should consider consulting people on the internet, just to be on the safe side.

So contracts are important, but it's especially important to know what to look for, what should be on a contract, and what you should probably insist on having if it isn't listed on your contract. I'll go over these and give an idea of what is on our contract that was sent to us by way of the recruiter and school.

What does our contract look like? That's our contract pictured above, just a portion. The first page has a form to be completed with information from the school and teacher at the top, including the school location and things like the teacher's passport number, etc. In total it's 11 pages long, but this also includes the English and the Korean translation of the text. Then it ends with dates and signatures, pretty standard contract-y kind of stuff.

Back to the meat of the matter though. There are some crucial things that should be covered in your contract, which I will quickly highlight: 

- Visa Sponsorship. It may seem like a no brainer, but your employer is responsible for sponsoring you for your visa (E-2 visa for English teachers) as well as helping you obtain your alien registration card and setting you up with a Korean bank account.

- Housing. Contracts should definitely include this, your employer will typically pay the rent, while you pick up all utilities. Is your housing furnished? Some programs like EPIK and GEPIK do not provide furnished housing (my understanding of it, anyway), but hagwons will provide you with already furnished housing. Our contracts specify exactly what will be in our apartment, down to the air conditioning and gas hot plate.

- Teaching Hours. Keep a close eye out on this one, we ran into a shifty contract that stated that our working hours at the hagwon would be X to Y, but the hours could be changed at the employer's whim. We quickly steered away from that because it just sounded like it could be trouble. Our contracts state that we will be paid the standard salary (in our case, 2.1 million won) for 120 teaching hours per session (month) and class prep. For each teaching hour after the 120 hours we would get 20,000 won for overtime pay.  More specifically, our contracts state that we will be teaching from 10am to 7pm, Monday through Friday.

- Salary. How much you are getting paid. Does this include overtime, and how much are you getting paid for working overtime? Our contracts are very clear, stating what we will be paid per month and what we will make for any overtime hours worked.

- Health Care. Your employer should be paying half of your healthcare premium while you pay the other half. If it's not 50/50, then it's probably not in your best interest to sign.

- Transport. The school should either be paying for your ticket over, or you should be reimbursed by the school after arriving and starting your job. We have the added bonus of having a recruiter from the agency we worked with meeting us at the bus stop after we arrive. If you should happen to leave the country and end your contract prior to the 6 month mark, expect to pay back the school for the plane ticket there and to shell out the money to get yourself back home.

- Severance Pay. Severance pay is something that is pretty nice that you should definitely keep an eye out for. The gist of the severance is that once you have completed your year's contract that you receive a months salary as your severance payment. Per our contracts, this is "mandated by the Korean workers protection legislations."

- National Pension. Additionally, per our contracts, "approximately 4.5% of the employee's gross salary will be deducted each month for pension. Employer will match  4.5% each month for the total requirement of 9%" and it goes on to state that upon completion of your year of teaching you need to request to collect your pension from the Korean government.

- Vacation!! This is a big one, for pretty obvious reasons. You should without a doubt be getting national holidays off, but vacation can really vary depending on if you're teaching at a hagwon or a public school. Our contract states that we will receive two weeks of paid vacation, 5 days in the summer and 5 in the winter, so 10 days total.

- Taxes. Another no brainer, but it should be there. Korean taxes are 6-8% for those of us from overseas. Teachers for public schools have to complete a residency certificate, but they do not pay taxes, while those at hagwons and other institutions do. I'm in the process of working out the details of US taxes though, so that will be in the works for later.

Other contract stuff of lesser importance (you may or may not agree):

- Orientation and/or Training. You may or may not receive training or some sort of shadowing/orientation.

- Sick Days. The employer might give you some form of paid sick day, but in our contracts it specifically states that you need to bring a doctors note.

- Apartment Safety Deposit. It's apparently becoming more common for the employers to ask for a safety deposit to ensure that all is well with the apartment as you typically want a safety deposit back. In our case we're looking at a safety deposit of 300,000 won each (taken from our paychecks the first 3 months as 100,000 won) for the apartment. Once all is deemed well when we leave we should be receiving the deposit back.


This is just my experience with contracts thus far though. We had the benefit of having informed individuals look over our contracts and also having a horrible contract and a really good contract to compare and contrast. It really made things easier. The internet is always a good resource too, but you have to know where to look and who to ask is all.