kiddies wids

Alright, it’s time I told you all about some kids.

The first thing you need to know about Korean kids is that they love to poke you in the ass. Generally speaking, whenever someone loves to poke you in the ass, that’s the first thing you need to know. Ass poking is a major pasttime for the children, and there is a certain form to it, just like there is a correct form for diving or throwing a baseball. Basically start out with your hands folded, fingers crossed over each other, like you would do in elementary school when you wanted the teacher to know you were being really good. Then pull back your thumbs like the hammers on a pistol. Last, extend your index fingers and keep them together. This is your ram. Make it strong.

Now… poke! Bonus points if you catch someone off guard while they’re standing at a urinal.
OK, so now that you know that most important point, we can talk about a few kids who stand out in my mind in some way.

My first class of the day is Madrid class. 8 students. 6 year olds. (This means they are 5. Koreans reckon age differently. All these kids will turn a year older on Korean New Year’s, and they were all 1 year old when they born. It can be confusing.) Erica, Carrie, Henny, Sally, Elliott, Jade, Amy, Jasmine. We used to have a 9th, Rachel, but she has now left the school because Erica kept punching her. True story. Erica is going to be a mob enforcer one day, I swear.
It’s hard to pick a favorite, because almost all of them can be really funny and cute, but I think Henny stands out as a great example of why it can be great to teach kindergarteners. Henny is ALWAYS happy. He always has a huge grin on his face, no matter what. Even when something is bothering him, like the time I told him I had to confiscate a toy from him for the rest of the class period, he still smiles. I could see by looking at his eyes he was concerned about this toy, kinda worried when he would see it again, but whatever anxiety he was feeling about that, it didn’t reach his smile. He can be happy-go-lucky while protesting someone taking his toy.

He was so hilarious in this month’s “phone teaching”. We call up the kids and talk to them for about 3 minutes, asking them questions about that month’s topic. Sometimes the kids don’t understand what you’re saying, either because they aren’t used to the phone, or the question is just beyond their level. Usually when they don’t understand what you said, you get a long awkward silence followed by a quiet “I don’t know”. Not Henny. Henny was somehow more enthusiastic about not knowing. He seemed to really enjoy not knowing the answer, because then he got to shout “WHAT?!?” into the phone. Kid cracks me up.

I also teach one of the school’s legendary students, the dreaded Michael. He’s one of those kids who’s pretty smart, gets along pretty well with his class mates, but needs to be shouted at roughly six hundred million times a day. He proudly declared to one of his other teachers, (my friendly neighbor, Mark) “Everyone in school knows my name, teacher!”. And Mark told him, “Michael, that is NOT a good thing.” He’s a big time attention seeker, and he knows how to get it. I do really like this kid, though. He’s amazingly creative. One time we had an arts and crafts project that was supposed to teach some basic civics stuff, like what a police officer does. As if they need any help on that one. As all seven year olds will tell you, and show you, police officers shoot people. Duh.

Anyway, the kids were supposed to make some 3d buildings out of these paper cut-outs. Michael wanted to do something a little different with his. Since my job is teaching English, and you don’t learn any more or less English if you make the 3D building model or if you set it on fire instead, I said he could do as he pleased. Three minutes later he had made a box kite with a decorative tail, and was demonstrating it by floating it over our classrooms portable AC. It floated so perfectly, like he’d made dozens of these things before. I was really impressed. Maybe he was just doing it to get people to pay attention to him, but dammit, he did a really good job. He frequently surprises me with his creativity. He’s a great kid, he’s just a pain in the ass to teach.

I feel a lot of affection for the kids overall. Little children are so different from adults. It’s almost like interacting with another species or something. And yet, working with them like this, it struck me almost right away how much kids everywhere are exactly the same. They’re just like I was at that age, just like my friends were. If everyone in the world was required to teach kindergarten for a year to children from a foreign culture, I think racism would be eradicated pretty fast. When you do a job like this, you see how fundamentally similar people are across cultures. No matter where your from, looking into a kindergarten class is like looking into your own past.

Till next time, I love you all,
Randy

Exploring the City by Night

The first couple weeks were long, sometimes in the sense of feeling drawn out, sometimes in the sense of feeling infinite and open. The feeling of endless possibilities that came with being dropped into a new world, an unknown quantity to my colleagues, and untested as an explorer was both liberating and intimidating. Here I can be anyone, and no barrier stands in my path: I'd better not fuck this up!

Basically everyone who decides to dust off for Korea to teach will experience all of the following in the first two weeks: jet lag, illness (from the indigenous germs), feeling in over your head at trying to control kindergarteners, indigestion, and having no phone and no bank account for at least 2 weeks. But more memorably (and therefore, more importantly, once you survive those weeks) you will also see, taste, touch, smell and experience: new food, new streets, weekends out sightseeing, and drinks and fun with colleagues and fellow foreigners who can't wait to welcome you to your new life.

Go up to the top of Namjang tower at night and look out at the lights of Seoul, extending outward in every direction, your field of vision too small to encompass it all, even from here, the top of a tower on the highest hill in the area, once used to light beacon fires warning of enemy attackers. Both the lights and the buildings go on and on forever. The scale of it is incredible. It's as though the city is built of legos. Normally, when you are down there, you are a lego man, or woman. Up in the tower, you are once again a full-sized person, looking down at lego buildings and little lego people that you can watch through high powered binoculars for 1000 Won. Except a lego city is usually confined to a living room, where the walls are less than 10 feet away. Here the city fills a vast, open expanse. Imagine every inch of a meadow covered in the small blocks, or an emptied-out hayfield whose borders are beyond your vision and you start to get a sense of its hugeness. To a new arrival, this view represents all that is unknown--but none of it is unknowable. All you need to do, if you ever want to find out what's there, is to go back down to street level, and start walking. Now more than ever the world's great cities are grounds for endless exploration. There are more than 44,000 people per square mile in Seoul. In that kind of density, you just start walking and you're bound to get somewhere.

Now, I don't actually live in Seoul. I live in Deokso, which is technically considered the outskirts of Seoul. They don't have suburbs here, but if they did, that's what Deokso would be, most likely. If I want to go to downtown Seoul, it takes me about 45 minutes by subway. Between here and there is Donong, Guri, Wangsimni and a few other places whose names are really hard to remember. Each of those places is larger than Deokso, and each of them are technically considered to be outer reaches of Seoul. They are distinct entities, but it's only about 5 minutes rail travel between each one. They almost blend together, with small patches of mostly undeveloped area between. One way to picture it is to imagine the railway lines as fingers extending out from Seoul, and the population centers around the line stops are like the knuckles on the fingers. Deokso is a faraway knuckle.

So, the title of this post is "Exploring the City by Night". By "city" I mean Deokso, not Seoul. This is a city of 80,000, which by Korean standards, is pretty small. But to me, Deokso is still the most urbanized place I've ever lived. Gainesville has a greater overall population, but it doesn't feel half as "cityish" as Deokso (not that that's a bad thing. obviously gainesville is awesome no matter what). Deokso, in turn, is dwarfed by the unfathomable immensity of Seoul. Seoul is taller, deeper, busier, wider. It's an ocean. Deokso is barely larger than the University of Florida campus. And in that space are alleyways filled with neon signs and twenty storey apartment high rises and many more of the markers of possibility that make Seoul such an overwhelming experience to try to drink in from above. Basically, what I'm trying to tell you is, Deokso is the perfect place to wander around by myself. It's geographically small enough that I feel I can get to know its ins and outs easily in 16 months, yet it feels like I'm an ant of an explorer when I stand beneath its tall buildings. This is a place where there is still a strong rural presence. Behind my apartment complex there are small one room houses next to fields that might be about 30 yards square, farmed by families who are living just like their ancestors did, except now their view has white concrete buildings mixed in with the mountains. Oh, and they have cars, TVs, and they send their kids to schools, and they have national health care and... OK, maybe it's a fantasy to imagine that they live just like their ancestors. But it's still striking to start off on a walk with the plan of exploring, to step outside of my building to get a view of tall buildings, a big bridge and a subway station, then to turn around, walk a quarter mile and find myself in cabbage fields where farming families live.

This mix of urban and rural makes me feel like I never know what's around the corner when I toss on my headphones, pick a random direction, and just keep going until my feet tell me to turn around. It's great alone-time, and I know already it's going to be a reliably excellent experience to put on some music, grab a camera (or leave it at home, either way) and just find what's out there in Deokso. I've always enjoyed observing, and I feel like I've landed in a great place to be an observor.

Until next time.
I love the world and that means you.

Randy

Life in Korea

It's now been more than a month since I arrived in Deokso. It's easy to remember my arrival anniversary, because it was my birthday. I don't remember what time it was when I walked out of Incheon International to meet the cab driver sent by the school. I was bleary-eyed and dog tired, near the point of hallucination. Somehow, I forgot to check the time. In fact, all I really remember of that cab ride was the feeling of taking in all the red neon crosses that top every church in Korea. In a country that averages more than 1200 people per square mile, you can find a church every few hundred yards, so when an exhausted traveler crosses 30 or so miles of it as the passenger in a car that is out late enough at night on a weeknight to be almost alone on the road, he will find himself in a surreal landscape of bright, ominous Christian symbolism in an otherwise blurred together mass of cityscape. It felt like we were travelling from cross to cross, the way a monkey swings from branch to branch. They were everywhere. I can see four red neon crosses from the balcony of my apartment, each to a different church.

So, anyway, that was my first impression of the country. The next thing I remember was arriving at Mark and Emma's apartment in Deokso at about 1 AM, October 13th. It seemed perfectly timed. It felt symbolic that I would be starting a new year surrounded by new people, exploring new places.

It's pointless to try to accurately recall the first week. I was jet lagged all to hell after 20 hours of flying, and, like most people who do this, I got sick almost right away. Between the ordeal of traveling and the sudden exposure to the unique strains of cold of a different region of the world, first week illness is almost a given. So, between those two things, and the sheer overwhelming nature of a new job in a new country with a different language, different food, different everything, it's all blurred together.

I remember that teaching kindergarten seemed crazy hard. I thought that there would be a Korean teacher in class at all times. It turns out, that's mostly just in public schools, and that I'd be on my own every class, every day. That had me thinking "Oh, shit!" until everyone assured me that I would be fine, and everyone figures out the teaching eventually. I remember finding it very easy to get along with Mark and Emma right away, and going with them on a great trip out to Seoul where we wandered into a brand new exhibit on Korea's most legendary monarch, King Sejong, and then visiting the nearby Imperial Palace, where the grounds, which are vast and beautifully landscaped just took my breath away. Beyond that, things are a little sketchy.

I remember my general state was one of being caught between excitement and stress. So much of what I was experiencing was wonderful. The restaurants are great. The view from the apartment. The river that lies just past the train station (that's a pic from some tall grasses along the bank up at the top). On my second day at school, we had a field trip up in the mountains. The views were so gorgeous. I wish I'd had a camera. I wanted to be able to share it with everyone. But then I remembered we were only 30 minutes from where I lived, and I could go hiking at places just like this almost any weekend I choose.

All of this was amazing, but I still had some sources of anxiety. Would I really be able to figure out teaching kindergarten? And, although I liked the teachers at school and felt confident I'd be able to make plenty of friends, I hadn't done so just yet. It's a little scary not to know many people when you're in a new place.

Since then though, things have just gotten better. I'm meeting new people all the time. Just last night I went to big meet-up in Seoul of foreigners and Koreans who want to meet foreigners. I went by myself, but that was no problem at all. I immediately found people who seemed really good to talk to, and spent the next 3 hours chatting with Dan from Canada, Rob from Boston, and Chris and Mika, sisters from Korea. That's the way it's generally been with regards to meeting people here. It's a cinch.

As for teaching, I've discovered you get what you give. If I take the time and plan my lessons, so I always have something to do, and always have a back-up plan in case my first plan isn't working out so well, then lessons are a blast. When you know right what you're doing, you can have fun and teach effectively at the same time, and work is like play. When I'm not prepared, improvising just doesn't cut it, and I get this fish-on-land-thrashing-around type feeling. This weekend (just today, in fact) I wrote up lesson plans for the entire upcoming week. I've learned.

OK, so that's it for now! I'll be updating this blog every Sunday, and maybe other times too. I will continue to use facebook for pictures.

Until next time,
Randy