School and such

As of today, I've been back for a month. In some ways it feels like I never left Korea, and in other ways it feels like I just got here.

I'm still kind of settling in to my new apartment. I had a few problems when I first moved in, but they've all been sorted out for the most part. The main issue I had was with a gate on the third floor landing - I live on the fourth and last floor.

view from my front door down the stairs

When I first moved in, I was told that the landlord locks the front door and the gate at 2:30 in the morning. The problem with this is that the gate has a bolt on it that can only be opened from the inside.

note the bolt on the bottom

So if I came home after 2:30am (which to be honest, isn't that often), I would have to call the landlord and ask him to come open the door. This was a problem for a few reasons.

1. He has a wife and daughter. I don't think it's fair to call anyone at 2:30 in the morning (or whatever time) to ask them to open someone elses' door. It's doubly unfair to wake someone up who will probably wake up others in the process.

2. He said that the bolt is there because all the tenants in the building are women, and it's safer to bolt the door. The problem with this logic is that all the tenants except me live below the gate. The only people past the gate are me, and the landlord.

3. Late at night, there are 4 locked doors you would have to get through to get into my apartment. The first one is bolted with a key-code alarm. The second one is the gate (which has a key lock as well as the bolt lock that remains constantly locked). The third one is my front door. The fourth one is the entry-way door that has a lock as well. If someone is that determined to get into my apartment, a bolted gate is not going to be a deterrent.

4. I've never had a curfew. Even when I was living with my parents, there was not a set time I had to be home. It was simply a matter of being responsible and making sure that they knew when I was going to be where, and an ETA for getting home. And I haven't lived with them for 10 years. I don't need a curfew now.

I tried to explain to him that I didn't want him to bolt the door. My Korean isn't that good, and his English isn't that good, so the communication was probably amusing from an outsider's perspective, and could probably make a good sitcom joke, but it was annoying and frustrating in actuality.

So, I wrote my landlord a very polite letter explaining my position and reasons for wanting him to not bolt the door. Then I politely asked my co-teacher to translate it into Korean for me. Then I taped it to his door, along with my payment (early) for the electric bill for the month.

He hasn't bolted the door (that I know of) since then. And I did get home at 4:30 once this weekend.


I've also been settling in at work. I've gotten my kids into a routine, which of course makes things in general much easier. I enjoy working with the kids that I have, and the small problems I was having with the curriculum (like getting a power point and worksheets for a lesson the day of, and being expected to add things to it and do extra research) have been resolved for the most part.

My boss seems to like me quite a bit. I've been told on numerous occasions that I'm one of the best teachers that they have. I was observed once for each of my lessons, and then they added more observations so the staff could see what I was teaching (things like learning centers) and learn from what I was doing. The principal sticks her head in my room just to look at my bulletin boards, and she's asked me to send her files for things that I've done so she can share them with other teachers. It's certainly a different atmosphere from what I'm used to in Korea, where if you don't hear any feedback you're doing fine, and any feedback you do get is usually what you're doing wrong.

I'm also a member of the national council for ATEK (Association for Teachers of English in Korea), an infant organization that's still in it's first year and in the process of electing its first president. I haven't had to do much so far, though I feel like I should be doing more. At this point, it's more a matter of keeping current and up-to-date with things happening in the ex=pat community, like the H1N1 virus that has a lot of teachers quarantined without pay, or the recent cancellation of foreign teachers' contracts in the Seoul public school system a week before school started.

And I've been traveling a bit as well. I went to the DMZ a few weeks ago, I went to Busan last weekend with a friend who's leaving in a few weeks, and I spent this weekend out in Seoul celebrating a friend's birthday (hence coming home at 4:30am on Sunday morning).


Don't ask an ajuma to take your picture in Busan. First she'll refuse, thinking that you want to take a picture of her. then she'll squint at your camera like she's trying to look through a viewfinder, when your camera only has a 3inch LCD display and no viewfinder. And then she'll cut your head off when she does take the picture.

Saturday and Sunday: reprise

On Saturday morning we slept in until noon, when we got a call on the room phone in Korean, supposedly telling us it was check-out time. So James went and re-booked our room for one more night since we were going to leave from Busan on Sunday morning to head back to Uijeongbu.

It had taken us a good 2 hours to get transportation home on Friday. First we tried to get the KTX (Korean Transport something-or-other) train back, but there were no seats left for Sunday back to Seoul. So we asked about a bus, which we were able to book straight to Uijeongbu instead of Seoul. The only problem was the express bus terminal was miles away from the train station and they don't sell tickets over the phone, so we had to get on the subway again to get two tickets for noon on Sunday. 

We decided to take it easy on Saturday, and wandered around Busan a bit, first looking at "Foreigner's Street", which was really more like Russia street, since most of the signs were in Cyrillic. Then we headed to the Jalgachi Fish Market, the largest fish market in the country.

It's  a long street covered in colorful umbrellas with people sitting outside with every type of seafood imaginable for sale or consumption on the spot. Some of it was pretty normal; crabs, clams, etc.

Some of it was normal for Korea, such as mounds of dried little fish.

Some was a little hard to find, like shark.

And some of it was downright gross. Like the dried turtles and the dog:

The people there were very sociable; trying to get you to buy whatever they were selling. I think most of them thought since we were foreign we didn't know that you could eat the fish they had swimming around in tanks. They kept trying to tell us that they could cut up the fish and feed it to us, and it would be delicious. 

After the market, we decided to head up to Busan Tower, which is 120meters tall and has a great view of central Busan.

On the way to the base of the tower, we heard some good music (which is very rare here) and decided to check it out. About 20 minutes later, we were rewarded with a break-dancing competition with dancers and DJs from Korea, the UK, the US, France, and Germany.

James used to break-dance, so he was having a great time, and I was fascinated by some of the things these people (guys and girls) were able to do with their bodies. The setting itself was also amusing to me, as the dancers were performing in front of a traditional pavilion.

After watching for a few hours, we headed up to the tower.

It had a great view of the dancing competition we'd just been watching,

as well as the rest of Busan.

After looking around for a few minutes, we headed back down to find some dinner. We tried to find s0-galbi, but were unsuccessful, so we had samgyopsal again before heading down to Dadaepo Beach for the International Rock Festival that's held there every year. We got there rather late and only saw one band, T-Earth, which was pretty, well, boring. I think it was a bad 80's Korean rip-off of Aerosmith, but not entertaining in the least. We ended up meeting up with some other foreigners (one of which recognized me from Vinyl Underground the night before - we'd danced together for a little bit) and spent the rest of the evening with them.

After the rather disappointing concert concluded, we all headed back downtown in a couple taxis to go dancing. We ended up back at VU around midnight, where I suddenly ended my night by dislocating my knee dancing. Luckily (I think), I had dislocated my other knee back in 11th grade at the Homecoming dance, so I knew exactly what had happened and what to do - I knocked it back in to place. I had to have someone help me to the nearest chair, where I spent the rest of the evening putting ice on it, telling James I was fine and to go dance, and trying to keep a rather creepy Russian guy from hitting on me when I couldn't really move anywhere to get away from him. We got back to our hotel around 4am with a taxi, set the alarm to get up in time to catch the bus, and went straight to sleep.

Either we both slept through the alarm, or my alarm-setting skills at 4am are rather lacking, because we didn't get up until 11:42 - with 18 minutes to get packed and get to a bus station that was 45 minutes away. James was (understandably) very upset, so we packed our stuff as quickly as possible (I was hobbling pretty badly at this point) and headed to the train station near us to see if the tourist info center could help us get another ticket. They told us that we could exchange our tickets for a W10,000 fee, which was fine with us, but the next bus wasn't until 5pm. So we grabbed some food, and took the subway to the express bus terminal, where we waited for a few hours for our bus. (We waited outside because, as most public buildings in Korea, the bus terminal didn't have air conditioning, and at least there was a breeze outside). 

We left on time, but getting closer to Seoul the bus got caught in some pretty bad traffic. James and I were amazed at how many people got up out of their seats to come to the front of the bus to tell the driver where to go to avoid the traffic. There were at least 6 people sitting on the stairs and in the aisle-way trying to tell the driver what to do. He let about half the bus off somewhere outside of Uijeongbu, and we finally made it into town around 11:30, about 2 hours after our scheduled arrival. We grabbed a taxi from the bus stand and went straight to my apartment, where Cherita brought me a knee brace for my knee. We talked briefly for a bit about what our weeks had been like, and then I sent James and Cherita packing because I had work the next morning.

I'm very thankful that I didn't hurt my knee until my last night of vacation, otherwise the week would have been ruined for me. I've been going to an acupuncture clinic (on the advice and insistence of my boss) for the past week to help it, and it may be working, though I'm not completely convinced. I've also resolved next time I have a vacation to give myself at least 1 day to recover. We should have gone back to town Saturday night instead of Sunday morning, but now I know. And knowing is half the battle.