Getting a teaching job abroad

So, in the seven weeks since I've moved to Korea, I've gotten several emails/messages from people asking for advice on how to go about getting a teaching job abroad. The economy's tanking and people are nervous about the state of the world, but the ability to speak English fluently is still a very, VERY valuable skill in the global market.

I'm considering forming a web site or something, to help people get teaching jobs (or any jobs, really) in a foreign country. It seems a bit presumptuous to me, given that I've only done it twice, once for a couple of months (and that was unpaid) and now this one, but... I just seem to enjoy helping people get out here into the rest of the world. I spent a couple hours on the phone with Kat, and I loved thinking of ways to get her to another continent.

I think I know why, too. It occurred to me when Chris said that he could get me a job in Greece and was surprised I hadn't asked him when I was looking into jobs abroad this past fall. And I thought "Oh, wow, I should have done that! I could be in GREECE right now!"

And then I wasn't sure why I thought that. I'm in Korea. That's way more of a different culture, and there's no reason I'd think that a job in Greece was better than a job in Korea. So why am I like "Oh, I should have gone to Greece!"? Because I have such strong wanderlust that, no matter where I am, I'm imagining what it would be like to live somewhere else. Which is not to say that there's no point to my traveling, or that I'd be just as restless in Korea as in Philadelphia. I'm happy to be here. I love the fact that I'm becoming friends with Koreans who have never left South Korea, or the fact that the people who I consider actually from my culture includes Brits, Australians, and South Africans.

That I got to toast to Obama with Brits and Australians!

But I have wanderlust. I'm restless. So now I'm thinking of all the other places I could be visiting, and I want to go there.

So really, even though I'm already living abroad, I want to live vicariously through people who are going to other places.* And I LOVE making plans for travel (even though I know that often I won't follow through and will do something different instead-- that's half the fun, as long as you're seeing new things!). So I get to plan someone else's new life abroad and live vicariously through that. It's great!

I'd love to do that for way more people. Maybe I don't have enough experience to start up a website now, but maybe in a few years. I think I'd really, REALLY enjoy it.




*Which does NOT mean you shouldn't come to Korea, Kat. I would WAY rather have you here than live vicariously through your Germany experience.

So I discovered something interesting on my block: a pizza-parlor-slash-comic-book-store.

For realz. It's totally the same store. Of course, all the books are in Korean, so I can't read them while I wait for the pizza. (I can't call ahead to order 'cause, again, don't speak Korean [yet]. Which is a shame, because there is no such thing as a tip OR a delivery charge here.)

I think this discovery is even more interesting that the boxing gym next door to my apartment that blasts "YMCA" as the manly men inside beat each other to a pulp.

Or you know, actually, maybe it's not.


So, yeah, I'm settling down into Korea OK.

Especially since they took down that sign that was hanging on the wall of the elementary school, that proclaimed "Spare the rod, spoil the child." with a backdrop of a pretty flower-covered field and a blue sky.

Of course, they only took it down because the hanger broke when the water pipe burst on the second story of the English Experience Center, the morning of my first classes ever. We had to have the class in a different building, which considering the fact that our classes were entirely built around the new technology and little mock-kitchens and mock-stores and mock-hospitals in the Experience Center, and thus had to come up with 5 hours of new material off the tops of our heads, is quite substantial.

There were several inches of water. Some teachers were standing on the bottom floor with snow shovels, pushing the water (streaming down the stairs) out the door. All day.

Shockingly, despite the fact that there were tons of COMPUTERS on that floor that had several inches of water on it, nothing was damaged.

Except those picture hangers. They also took down "Eagles don't catch files.", which is a shame.

Also, I recently got a memory card for my camera, and discovered that it takes video with sound. Like, I can fit three and a half hours of video with sound on that thing. It's quite exciting. My dad also figured out how to make the camera in my built-in computer take in sound, too. So mayhap you will soon see some video entries from me?

Hi all!

I have accepted a position teaching English at Bong-Rae Elementary School, a public school in Yeongwol, South Korea. It's in the Gangwon-do province, and the scenery is supposed to be beautiful.

I'm really happy with this decision; I've been talking to an Aussie guy who currently works at the school, Brett, and he really likes it. The town itself is very rural, which actually means there are all kinds of perks associated with the position (most Western English teachers want to go to a city, so there are mad incentives to get them to go to the rural or provincial teaching posts). Personally, I wanted to go somewhere rural, so all the perks are just cool bonuses. I get 200,000 won extra per month (about $150), 35 paid days off instead of 14 (!), and that's not including the national holidays I have off. I also get 15 sick days. The benefits are really good too, pension payments matched by the school district, medical insurance, and so on. Also, I don't have to pay rent; I get my own apartment, which Brett says includes "everything you need, stove, fridge, computer and desk, Internet, TV with western channels..." I do have to pay utilities, but getting about $1400 a month, with utilities and food as my only expense... yowsa!

As far as the town itself goes, it sounds awesome. It's an actual town, with restaurants, a supermarket, shops, doctors, pharmacists, etc, but it's also in the middle of the countryside. The area is known for its great skiing, and Brett says there's great hiking, mountain climbing, rafting, caving (they've got gorgeous limestone caves), and para-gliding.

The elementary school is about to finish building an English Learning Centre, classrooms with fake restaurant and bank, airport etc, to learn situational dialog. Pretty much I'll get to role play a lot with cute Korean elementary schoolers. Sounds good to me!

In order to get my visa I have to get a notarized Criminal Background Check then get an apostille on it. The background check is being a pain in my ass. Apparently there's a three-week backlog of background checks at the state police headquarters. Three weeks! Keep in mind that when I leave is ENTIRELY determined by when I get that background check, apostille, and thus my teacher's visa. Like, if I got my visa tomorrow, I'd be on a plane the day after tomorrow. So this really affects me in a really tangible way.

Luckily, my recruiter says that even though Yeongwol was looking for a teacher sooner than this, he thinks they'll be just fine as long as we do everything we can on our end (ie, as long as it's just the government dragging its feet, not me). His exact words were "The school is looking forward to you arriving, so I guess it’s set in stone." That was definitely a load off of my mind. I was worried that I was annoying them by depriving them of an English teacher for several weeks.

The feeling I get is that, since as I mentioned earlier, rural areas have trouble getting teachers, a teacher reeaally wanting to come to their town to teach at their school is somewhat unusual, and quite welcome. Brett said he didn't even know where in Korea he was teaching until he arrived, so there are probably a fair amount of Western teachers who are fairly reluctantly in the area. So my genuinely wanting to be there, in that particular place, probably does outweigh the fact that my government is making me wait a few weeks. That's just the feeling I get, anyway.

It does sound like a great town and a great place to live, though, doesn't it?

Today's my last day of work, here in Philadelphia. After this I guess I'll be preparing for Korea full-time. My parents are buying me a Korean Rosetta Stone for an early Christmahanukkwanzyuleka present, so I'll spend a lot of the time using that to get at least a basic grasp of Korean.

I figure I'll show up, smile, say "Sorry I'm late, but I really really wanted to come to your town, and look, I even started to learn Korean!" and bat my eyelashes and hopefully they'll like me. And be really nice to the kids and teach them lots of English and make it fun, of course.

The weirdest thing about Philadelphia...

...besides having no Kat, no Lemur, no Andrew, no Space City of a Thousand Teas, no Rocky Horror cast, and no decent kink community...

1.) The local Walgreens does not have any alcohol, and more importantly,

2.) The local Walgreens does not have any Barack Obama books.

OMG OH NOES! I'll have to go to the bookstore to buy Dreams from my Father (which I've heard is much better than the one I have, The Audacity of Hope). How bizarre!

(There are also no Obama cutting boards.)

A Rainstorm: A short story

A Rainstorm

He stepped out onto the porch and found her, finally.

Helena was standing there, in the pouring rain, her red hair drenched and her curls matted against her back and cheeks as raindrop after raindrop pelted her face, arms, neck, shoulders, hands, legs. Her eyes were closed, and her arms were spread away from her gently, palms facing up and fingers curled towards the sky.

“Helena?” Kenneth called. Her white cotton blouse was sticking against her like a second skin and her jeans were several shades darker than they were when dry. “You should come inside. You’ll become ill.”

“I won’t become ill,” she told him, her mouth widening into a smile of pure joy as her eyes remained closed.

“You can’t know that,” he told her sternly. “You need to be careful now, remember?”

This had become an old argument by now, and he waited for the usual reply—that she couldn’t live life afraid of everything, that locking herself in a safe little box was worse than any fate that might result from failing to do so—but to his surprise, this time, she simply said nothing.

“What are you doing out there, anyway?” he tried again.

She took several deep, reverent breaths. “Being,” she answered.

He never quite knew what to do when she entered this sort of flight of fancy.

“You can ‘be’ just as well inside,” he offered.

She lifted her eyelashes, and as she looked at him her eyes twinkled, as though she knew some delicious secret that he did not.

“Yes, I can,” she agreed, but she made no move to step out of the rain.

Kenneth wished that he knew how to reason with her.

Helena held out her hand to him invitingly. “Come and join me.”

He shook his head. “I have no intention of getting soaked to the bone. This is madness. Please come inside.”

Helena lowered her voice conspiratorially. “If you let it, the rain will whisper the secrets of life, of love, of pleasure and pain onto your skin, and it will sink into your soul.”

He wondered, with a sudden pang of alarm, if perhaps Helena had lost her tender grip on reality, had finally gone insane.

“Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” he asked.

She laughed a tinkling wind chime in a leisurely summer breeze. “I’m better than okay. I’m better than amazing. I’m not crazy, Kenneth, I promise. I think maybe I’m saner than I’ve ever been before. Everything’s clear now. I can’t believe how simple it is. I understand.”

“What do you understand, then?” he asked.

Her eyes shone and she beckoned to him. “Come here with me and I’ll tell you,” she whispered, so softly that he could barely hear her voice over the roar of the rain on the roof and the wooden deck.

He reluctantly stepped through the doorway into the downpour. She took his hand and squeezed it. “It’s going to be okay,” she promised him. “We don’t have to worry anymore.”

“So you’ve decided what you’re going to do?” he asked as he suppressed a slight shiver. Even in the tropics, the air was chilly during a storm.

She giggled and shook her head. One of the curls held back in her hairclip fell past her shoulder. For some reason, Kenneth found himself transfixed by that curl, and he focused his eyes on it instead of on the woman in front of him. Despite the heavy rain, the lock of hair was dripping slowly, almost methodically. It reminded him of the hospital room, of the IV.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

His own hair had been thoroughly pounded by the rain by now, and it stuck to his forehead and neck as he felt water trickling down his ear.

“But you said everything was clear,” he reminded her. “You must know what you’re going to do.”

“That’s just it!” she cried, grabbing his other hand as well. “You see now, don’t you? You feel it too. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do, or where I’m going to go, or what’s going to happen next. It could be anything. Isn’t it beautiful?”

She leaned in closer to him as she spoke. Her hands tightened around his, and when she looked into his eyes, she was so radiant, her eyes were so filled with the conviction that whatever she felt was the answer, that shining beacon of universal meaning they’d been searching for, that Kenneth did not have the heart to tell her that all he felt was cold, and wet, and rained upon.

I know this is a topic that has been discussed ad nauseum in the traveller community, but I've been thinking about the traveller/tourist distinction lately, and thought that I may as well weigh in on the debate.

As many people on my friends lists are, inexplicably to me, not travel junkies, I'll start by explaining the issue. “Travellers” hate “tourists.” This has been the case for quite some time, actually, as evidenced by quotes from the great minds of bygone eras such as Paul Theroux:

“Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.”

or G. K. Chesterton:

“The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.”

It's a distinction that has been very much taken to heart by travellers. But why? Why is it so important to travellers to make this distinction, to try and make it clear that they are most assuredly not tourists?

For one thing, travel is important to travellers. I know this seems like a vacuously true statement, but it needs to be noted nonetheless. Travellers make travel one of the top priorities of their lives; it is a lifestyle, and everything they do relates to it in some way. Even when, like me, they're sitting in some normal American city working a 9-5, Monday-Friday job, they're doing it with one purpose in mind: funding future travel. Do I want to buy that bottle of wine? I could survive for 10 days in Cambodia with that money, so, no thanks. Do I want to go to the movies? That's 15 days in Senegal... I think I'll watch something for free on my computer.

When I'm saving money, greedily watching the number in my checking account tick upward, I am not thinking about buying an iPhone (I'm still using my parents' little phone from 2004), or about a down payment on a house (why would I possibly want something to tie me down to a specific geographical spot?!). I'll admit that I am thinking about paying off my student loans, but only because this is a necessity. What I am really thinking is that it will fund a trip. And when I look into airfare, possible places to visit, there's not even a twinge of guilt at the thought of the amount of money it will cost. I don't think, “Shouldn't I be using it on something more important?”, because there is nothing more important (except, of course, family and close friends). Travel is my priority. That's what the money's there for-- if I don't use it on travel, then what?

When something is that important to you, as to be your passion, your life, well, usually you don't like being equated with a dabbler, a hobbyist. Anyone can be a tourist, and most people from the traveller's home country probably are, at some point in their lives. Nearly everybody in developed countries travels at some point. They call it a vacation, and it's a brief, fun, relaxing diversion from their lives for a week or two.

If a traveller is disdainful of a tourist, it's important to remember that most tourists-- who are tourists for a couple of weeks a year, perhaps, and a local for the rest of it-- are probably equally so of travellers; or rather, they would be, if they ever stopped to think about such people. To them, travellers are just taking an extended vacation, for a year or two or three, almost certainly just trying to dodge real life. To them, travel is a vacation, not a lifestyle.

I think that some of the resistance to tourists is a resistance to the view of travel as diversion. If travellers approached travel the way most tourists do, then they would be drifters wasting their lives away on idleness. Instead, to them, it is the only way to live life to the fullest.

So do I think the tourist/traveller distinction exists? Absolutely. What I don't think is that there is any inherent value judgment attached to either of them-- neither is intrinsically superior or inferior to the other.

I don't think that a tourist necessarily should approach a trip the same way a traveller would. What is everyday life to a traveller is a special treat, and a chance to relax and get away from the pressures of their work for a tourist. And, in more cases than not, I'd wager, the reverse is true: what is everyday life to a tourist is a vacation to the traveller: one of those times when they return home to visit family or friends and take the opportunity of returning to their homeland to relax and catch their breath again.

Everybody treats what they regard to be their “real life” as different from their break. The difference between a tourist and a traveller is only what they consider real life, and what's the breather.