Back to my arrival.
Sun, 1 July
Visited a nearby cybercafe -- 1000won/hr. It had moved recently so Glenda wasn't sure where it was; I located it by reading the letters "PC" in romanji and "Internet" in hangul.
In the evening I went out to a local restaurant with Glenda, and discovered that I'm really bad at sitting on the floor. :-) But it was a very cool meal; there'd have been almost twenty side dishes cluttering the table, with meat cooking on a grill in the middle.
But Glenda and Michelle are both so much more active than me, going out and eating out all the time. It's going to be difficult to settle into the way I want to do things without feeling terribly antisocial.
Mon, 2 July
Today I'm observing three classes to see how things work at the school. I'm so glad that they've got a decent system for introducing new teachers -- and decent materials -- it's so much better than the school in New Cale. I'm observing this week, then next week I start teaching 16 classes a week, which is almost a full schedule at 24 hours, plus prep time. Some of these classes have already had the syllabus for the week planned. Normally each teacher has to plan the syllabi for all her (/his - there's one guy, Jamie) classes by the end of the previous week.
Later -- the three classes wore me out a little, even though I was only watching. Mid-afternoon I felt like dozing off, and had to concentrate hard not to. All the students laughed at my name, because they think it sounds like "zebra". Which of course it does... I've been just observing this week, next week I start teaching 16 classes a week, which is almost a full schedule of 24 hours, plus prep time.
Tues, 3 July
Three classes again, but two hours each - exhausting just watching.
Mi Yan, one of the receptionists at SLP, rang my ISP of choice (I websearched back in New Zealand) to sort out an account for me; they're supposed to call me when it's set up. The payments are going to come out of the school's bank account, and will come out of my salary. A very neat approach. The thing I'm really curious about is that I wanted "zeborah" as my username, and she told me that I couldn't use "z"; I said "d" would be okay. But she wrote down "debranz" as my final username (because one option I'd written was zebranz) which also has a 'z'. Odd. So maybe someone misheard and it's debranc, (American "zee" vs "cee") or maybe it's just inital 'z' that doesn't work, or maybe they actually had a 'zeborah' on their files.
Sung, the programme manager, tried to convince me to get an ADSL connection instead, because she thought my flatmates mightn't like me tying up the phone line. I tried to convince her I only use it for five minutes at a time (by contrast, Glenda spends ages talking to her friends and family, calling her parents every day), but she didn't get it, so I just agreed to think about it.
The supermarket was shut for some bizarre reason. Judging by a poster on the door showing today's date and lots of hangul, and by all the staff inside, I'm guessing it was a stocktake or something. So for dinner I tried ordering a bulgogi burger at McDonalds with my limited Korean; unfortunately it didn't work out, so I had to resort to the point-and-nod technique.
Wed, 4 July
Three more classes. Some of the students are adorable, others are holy terrors. I went into one class today, the door had been torn half off its hinges! Apparently that's really unusual as these kids are from, uh, families in the higher socioeconomic range. :-) Because it's not a high school, just an extracurricular thing, the students just come for an hour and a half, three times a week (or two hours twice a week plus extra homework). They're all younger than the ones I had at Jules Garnier, and smaller -- much less intimidating. Also smaller classes, and the walls of the staffroom are lined with texts and worksheets and materials, and we're forced to prepare good lesson outlines. So once I get settled in it should all be good.
It's hot here. There's a consistent 70-90 fahrenheit predicted for the next few days, according to the American Forces Network -- it's such a sweet channel, the advertisements are things like "Be careful of official secrets, and if you suspect someone of espionage then tell the authorities. Someone may be committing espionage if they make excessive copies of documents, .... visit foreign consulates or embassies frequently without a good reason..." And ads about avoiding protests, and about how 90% of "you" (read, troops) here are unfamiliar with monsoon season, etc. I laugh at them, they're truly amusing. While Glenda buries her head in boredom because she's seen them all a thousand times before.
I visited the cybercafe again and found myself next to a smoker, and my eyes hurt. Everyone smokes here, even my flatmates, but at least they mostly do it on the verandah. Still I'm nervous about my asthma; watching my peak flow closely. It's hovering at 365 right now, which is okay for me.
Flatting with Glenda and Michelle is working out more easily than I'd feared. I'm just going ahead with my cooking, and they cook a little more than I thought they did to start with.
Thur, 5 July
Still no news from my ISP so I convinced MiHyun to call again. Though they should have got all my details on Tuesday, they asked her to fax them through again.
Observed just one more class -- they decided suddenly to give me one of Glenda's classes -- and worked on my syllabi.
Went out to dinner with some of the other teachers, at a restaurant near the subway station. The place was absolutely thronging -- this at eleven o'clock at night. There's one street closer to home which is so lit up with neon it reminds me of Las Vegas, except the signs are all in hangul. There are signs everywhere, absolutely crowding the place. In the restaurant, I managed to sit a little more comfortably than last time. (Shoes are taken off before stepping onto the eating platform, like you take them off before going into someone's house. There's a low table for the food, and only a thin cushion to sit on.) There were "not many" side-dishes at this meal; only about half a dozen to each two people. Afterwards, we wandered back to get a taxi, and passed someone selling puppies from a padded perspex cage, with holes for people to stroke them through.
Fri, 6 July
Got MiHyun to nag the ISP yet again, and they rang back to confirm my ID and password and give me a phone number to use. The number's only five digits, which made me sceptical, but it turned out that different phone services have different types of numbers.
Finished my syllabi and discussed them with Beverley, the academic coordinator to make sure everything was okay. Then hurriedly went home to see if my ISP worked; it did, no problems, so that took care of the rest of my evening.
At one point while I was checking email, the 'phone' on the wall (which I thought was one of those intercom things to connect to the person wanting access to the apartment) suddenly started speaking. It did it this morning too, with a different voice. In Korean of course; very long-winded but didn't seem to want a reply. I've got to find out what it is. At the moment my imagination's supplying the idea that it's a big brother device to dispense propaganda at certain hours of the day. :-)
Sat, 7 July
Had a niggling sore throat last night; it got worse through the night and I tossed and turned all night, as it hurt heaps when I tried to swallow. I had the most interesting dreams, which I immediately forgot on waking. When I definitively woke up, I taught myself to say "Excuse me, but I have a sore throat, do you have some medicine?" but after carefully locating the necessary vocab for this, and laboriously practising it, I didn't even get a chance to use it, because my sore throat went away.
(The Easy Language CD that my parents gave me as a birthday present once is a very cool thing. That's where I found the word 'throat', because it's not in my guide to Seoul or my Teach Yourself Korean book. I need a dictionary, really.)
I went in to Seoul with Glenda and SungSook, one of the teachers. Here in Puchon we're about twenty kilometres west of Seoul, not far at all. We just take a taxi a short distance to the subway station, then the subway (which at 850won costs about a third of the taxifare from here to the station) in to Seoul. We went to a restaurant she recommended, but didn't stay long after lunch, as Glenda was getting rather hot, and they were really there for shopping rather than my goal of being a dedicated tourist. I'll go in by myself a few times in the summer holiday, as most of the anglophone teachers are going overseas for that week.
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| Glenda at our table at the restaurant. | Random street scene in Itaewon, Seoul. |
Back home, I got an urgent mail from Dad that there wasn't enough money in the bank account that automatically pays my visa card; hurriedly logged onto the web banking site to transfer the amount I owed them. The next email from him informed me of my snailmail at home:
Sun, 8 July
Woke this morning, sat in front of the computer, and felt totally blah -- dopey and slightly nauseous. Heat and dehydration. Put the fan on, drank water and played the Sims for a couple of hours before I felt right.
Then continued playing the Sims. It gets more interesting the more you play; I invented the "Fitchett" family, but they couldn't afford a big house and only had the bare basics in furnishings, had to hot-bed it and let's not talk about the bathroom problems.... Mum and Dad were working a military career, I was a stunt person or something, while Russell stayed home to try and tidy everything up while the kids were at school. He nearly went crazy, getting no fun or socialisation, and even when resources became better (due to Sonia perishing in a fire(*), and Stephen being sent to boot camp because his unhappiness was resulting in low grades) he was slower to recover than the others.
(*) I didn't do it! The stove just caught on fire (while Mum was cooking) and when I tried to get someone to call the fire brigade, I discovered that there was a chair blocking the phone; and I couldn't go to another option to move the chair. And the stupid people kept crowding around the fire instead of running away like clever people, so before it burnt itself out, Sonia caught fire. I was lucky there was so little furniture that it did burn itself out... Since then, I've installed fire detectors; they call the fire brigade straight away.
I think I'll invent a smaller family next time....
In the evening Glenda and I met Michelle and one of her friends at a bar. I managed to read a decent selection of the drinks on their menu, but that turned out to be for the afternoon only and we were left with a very poor choice. We ended up with a cheap beer which must have been bad because I didn't have to repress a shudder as I sipped it. I think I had about a third of it before we got bored and left.
Michelle and her friend went to a movie. Glenda and I visited the supermarket instead -- and while she was asking the supermarket employees for the bread section by repeated requests of "Bread. Bread? Bread!", I managed to remember the Korean word for it (pang) and to get help that way. I picked up some things designed to convince myself to bake a cake, then we went home.
Mon, 9 July
Only took me half an hour to get rid of this morning's heat-lethargy. Tonight I'll sleep with the fan on.
Had my first day of teaching yesterday, which had me very nervous. I've already had a week observing classes and preparing lesson plans. But I was totally intimidated and freaked out, because I have nearly six hours in a row of teaching, with just a few ten minute breaks, which means I *have* to get it right. At least in New Caledonia the kids' parents weren't paying a fortune for me to teach; here they are, so I really have to deliver.
I actually fell into the swing of things very quickly; it was a real mixture. There were a couple of classes which were basically ten little creatures under my feet shouting "Teacher, teacher!" trying to get my attention. And one class very much like what I had at Jules Garnier, very shy about talking though if they tried they could say a lot. And a couple of good classes -- one I took over from Beverley was great, well-behaved and working well. I caused great consternation in one class because I drew my (reward) stars as an asterisk instead of a pentacle, and it looked too much like an 'x' (punishment) to them.
They're going to round off my schedule with a couple of pre-school (morning) classes, starting observation on the 18th and starting to teach the week after. That'll bring my hours up to just over 28/week, plus prep time. But I'll still be just the "follow" teacher for a month, which means I won't have to plan any of those classes until the second month.
Continuing with the Sims, I've invented a new couple based (loosely) on my friend and her husband. Managed to get them to have a baby, which turned out to be a girl, so I named that after their daughter. *Somehow* I managed to organise them enough to look after the baby *and* to keep both of their jobs, just for long enough for the baby to turn into a child who can fend for herself a little bit. So they're now getting their social life back, inviting "Deborah" over from time to time. "Rafaella" (the girl) keeps inviting "Christina" over, but she keeps making bad excuses and not coming.
Tues, 10 July
Still very hot here, but slept with the fan on last night and didn't wake up feeling quite so blah as the last couple of days. Only thing is that the sore throat I've had intermittently since Friday night came back a little this morning, and I've been trying to figure out whether it's a regular virus or related to my flatmates' smoking or related to being dehydrated or, just occuring to me this morning, if it's mild tonsillitis. Drinking cold water numbs it quite nicely, so at least I should be properly hydrated soon....
Today I didn't teach until 4.50, but I had to go in earlier to get my paperwork together and start thinking about my syllabi for next week. Tuesday/Thursday classes are really hard, because they're two hours long, split into two one-hour classes, instead of Mon/Wed/Fri which are eighty minutes, split into two forty-minute ones. The lead teacher does all the planning and takes the first class, the follow teacher takes the second while the lead teacher becomes the follow for the follow teacher's class. (Squint and it'll make sense.) So today just an hour before classes as I was preparing stuff for tomorrow, my follow teacher for one class told me I needed to give her more to do (despite Beverley having approved my syllabi last week) because it's hard to fill the time. I decided to get an extra worksheet for my other class as well, which was a good thing because I was going to teach them how to tell the time, and it turned out they already knew how. I spent most of my hour just practising it with them on the board, alternately drawing clocks for them to describe, and calling out times for them to draw; luckily that kept them interested in competing with each other for turns, but it didn't leave much in my original plan for the follow teacher to do.
Wed, 11 July
More classes. Discovering it's still difficult to prepare everything I need, and to juggle the timing of the classes. And the day's quite long; there's no dinner break, so I've got 4-5 hours non- stop -- well, with a few 5min and a few 10min breaks. In one of the breaks we get a snack provided by the school; today it was pizza, most days it's some sort of Korean food. Anyway, the classes are getting easier already, but tomorrow I really have to go early to start working on next week's syllabi. Started one today, but didn't get much done.
For my older class, I was terrified today I didn't have enough to keep them busy; but somehow I managed to stretch out the class long enough by focusing on an insect one of the boys had brought (looked like a praying mantis until I got close, but had two prominent horns; he called it a pang'agebi) and asking where he found it, etc; and later in the lesson when I got stuck again I got to ask what he was doing with it and *why* the heck had he painted it black? (with his felt pen)
Thurs, 12 July
Settling a little into the teaching, but the whole suddenness of everything -- of going from lazy writer layabout to busy ESFL teacher -- is pretty stressing. Today I went in early today to get my syllabi done, but they're hard. Only managed to do about half, so I've got to go in early tomorrow to actually finish them, hopefully. Very early, to make sure. (And then I can study Korean if I chance to have time left over.)
"Everybody's doing time at SLP." -- Today I had my "telling the time" class again, and ran around flusteredly trying to locate the materials I needed from all the other teachers teaching the same topic.
Very nervous about filling the time (so to speak) for this class, as they already know the stuff, and I couldn't modify things too much from my lesson plan; but on Tuesday I'd carefully refrained from doing any minutes past thirty, so I did that today. And it was difficult enough for them that for 9:45 the little hand is closer to ten than to nine, so that got us through the session. (I suspect that digital is probably more common than analog. Also, the numbers themselves slow them a little. I have to repeat everything several times before they're sure it's "thirty" instead of 40 or 50. And then there's the occasional strange thing, where some kid hands in his homework saying it was "5 o'clock, 15 o'clock, 35 o'clock, 60 o'clock" -- instead of 1, 3, 7, 12.)
I've been drinking a lot of water, trying to cope with the heat. (I've calculated I need at least 2 litres a day, and it's not at all hard to drink more than this.) The inevitable consequence of this is that I have to go to the toilet all the time, and the toilet at SLP doesn't have toilet paper (it's shared with another place down the corridor, and there's so many people trooping around) so I have to remember to take my own. The other inevitable consequence is that I'm so full of water that I'm never hungry, and find it hard to remember to eat.
Had a wonderful iceblock on the way home from work tonight. (My classes run from 3pm until 9pm.) Tastes mainly of pineapple, its shape and spiralling colours are reminiscent of a candy cane. I swear it's the best iceblock I've had in my life; I'd love to take some back to New Zealand with me, but....
Continuing to get on well with my flatmates. They're mildly crazy, and tease each other all the time, like if one borrows money or gets an iceblock from the other, they say something like "You can fondle me for it later." They're definitely interesting to have around. :-) Glenda's got the loudest laugh, which we always tease her about, and Michelle has a huge pile of friends who she has to juggle because some of them don't like each other. Michelle knows a little Korean, Glenda uses the "If I repeat it in English enough, they'll understand by osmosis" method. I think they don't go out quite so much as I'd thought -- well, Michelle does, but Glenda stays home a bit more -- and they're not putting any pressure on me to, just inviting me from time to time, and for that much I'm happy to go.
Learning Korean, I've got up to ten now, and that magically gives me up to nineteen, because the teens are just "ten-one, ten-two, ten-three" etc. But 20, 30, 40, *are* dreadful, because for some reason they don't seem at all related to 2, 3, 4 like they are in most any other language. Most languages will have some variation of "two tens, three tens, four tens" -- even English does it. But Korean has completely separate words which need to be memorised.
Fri, 13 July
Did eventually manage to sort out my syllabi. My classes were mostly pretty good too, except for the last. This is my rowdiest class (even Beverley, who's been here for five years, hates it; she had it until she could shuffle it off on me), but I still kind of like because it contains the sweetest girl in it, Seo Young. But they're so rowdy that today I ended up throwing my whiteboard pen across the table to crash in front of the boys making most of the noise; it stopped them for all of half a minute.
Now it's the weekend, yay! Though next week, we have to write all our report cards by Friday. This is going to be hell on me; I just don't know the students yet, so I'm going to have to make notes in class and bluff it with rubbish about how it's a pleasure to have this student in my class. (Report cards are sent out once a month.) I also have to mark a test this weekend, and I'll have to work hard next week to get all my classes prepared and to write my syllabi early.
This evening we had a dinner party of sorts -- semi-planned. We'd invited one couple around, and they'd invited more, and it got larger. Ended up with about a dozen people in total, and a great deal of alcohol was consumed (while I downed lots of water).
From left: Glenda, Michelle, MiHyun, Nagille, Jamie, MyungJu, (Beverley just out of the picture), her boyfriend Paolo, MiHyun's boyfriend ByungDu and someone else's friend. Playing "three, six, nine" as a drinking game; get it wrong and take a drink.
Someone brought heaps of meat, so that was good for my continuing struggles to remember to eat. As the party continued, I learned how to say "pervert", "prostitute" and "male prostitute", and "Cheers!" I should write them down somewhere, actually, so I can revise in case I forget. (Quick diversion to write them down; longer diversion to find a program that'll let me switch easily from English writing to Korean. Word *sucks* for that, I've just discovered.)
Sat, 14 July
A couple of people stayed the night in the living room but didn't seem to wake up when the phone rang at 4.30am; I stumbled to get it, answered with a "Hello" and got a click from the other end of someone hanging up. Probably a wrong number. Went back to bed as Michelle, still drunk, went shouting into Glenda's room. Woke at something like eleven, and a bit later Michelle and Glenda got up with bad hangovers.
We'd been invited to MiRan's house for lunch -- note, this is a teacher, not MiHyun the secretary; MiHyun and her boyfriend picked us up to take us there. We met MiRan's twin four-year-olds, one of whom is afraid of foreigners. (Apparently he once took a single look at Nagille and burst into tears.) After a huge lunch, the bolder of the two gave us a performance of a story with accompanying actions, and as we were semi-watching "The Phantom Menace" on video (in the original English), he kindly translated what was happening into Korean for us. He also passed around some delicious Korean biscuits for us, and after a while his slightly-younger brother joined in, pressing chocolates on us. We were also treated to icecream in the Korean style: crushed ice with milk poured over, covered in a chocolate bean sauce, then sprinkled with soft candies and a couple of glace cherries.
Went to play pool. This actually took a few stages; first a couple of people left while the rest of us stayed to play Jenga. While we were playing, the first people called and we told them we were in the taxi. Then we finished the game and tried to get a taxi as it was raining. But, because it was raining, there were no taxis to be found. So several of us decided to walk, while a couple said they had a taxi and would meet us at a certain McDonalds. We arrived there and waited for them, but they didn't turn up and their cellphone was off. So two of us went to meet the first people at a certain convenience store while the other two waited a while longer; it took a while for the first people to turn up, but they did, and took us to the pool place, where we waited for the two who were waiting for the taxi people. They turned up sans taxi people; we started playing; eventually we got a call from the taxi people saying that the taxi was already full and their cellphone was dead, they'd decided to pack it in and had just got home.
But we had a good time playing pool, though none of us were really any good at it, and the Koreans kept springing odd rules on us, saying they were the Korean rules.
In the evening we had a huge thunderstorm lasting for hours; at 2am while I was trying to get to sleep it was still going on, lighting up my room. I thought something like 'Why not?' and got up, got dressed, and went out in raincoat and umbrella. It was *raining*; my skirt got soaked. Even in the middle of the night, in the pauses between lightning, there was enough light to read by, if a book could have survived the rain, just because of the lights from the buildings and reflecting off the clouds. As I went back inside, the security guard came along and asked me something, obviously trying to figure out what the hell I was doing out there at that time in that weather.
Sun, 15 July
Glenda and Michelle's hangovers are better now, so we finished tidying up the apartment from the party; dishes, mopping the floor, cleaning the bathroom and bagging the beer bottles.
I settled down to grade the test one of my classes had on Friday. Got the paper graded easily, but suddenly discovered a section they were supposed to read to me for 4%, and I'm wondering whether or not to do this quickly on Monday. Also, for the oral conversation, I'd run out of time and left my follow teacher to do it for one of the kids; but she's just ticked "correct answers" and has made no notes. From what the other students said, I very much doubt this kid was grammar-perfect, and the questions are 2% each; shouldn't be a correct/incorrect response. So this has got me stuck for a bit.
Watched a video I'd borrowed from MiRan yesterday. Did some tiny amount of writing.
Continued in October 2001.
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