and work here and other stuff.
More about this later.
Okay, time to go back and edit this one. Initially, I put this posting up just to test out my category icons and needed a “Korea” post to check this one. (For those who don’t know, the icon is Mashimaro , the deranged rabbit beloved by people all over the world – if they’ve heard of him.)
So anyways, yes, I live and work in Korea. I seem to keep bouncing back and forth between here and the US. I first came here when I was in the army. I spent one year here from 1995 to 1996, and it was okay. Then I went to El Paso, Texas, which was an absolute shithole. I volunteered to come back to Korea because it was the quickest way out of there. (Even so, I was stuck there for 18 months.) I came back with the army from 1998 to 2000, when I went back to the US to finish up my military service. I hung out in Tacoma (and occasionally Seattle) for about a year, going to school and generally not working. The job market blew, so I looked into teaching English in Korea. It sounded good so I went for it. After a year of that I needed a break so I went back to the US. That lasted four months, and now I’m back here once again.
Teaching English isn’t so bad. Some days it’s not so fun, but most of the time it’s okay. At my old school I taught adults and elementary school kids, with the occasional middle school and high school class. Now I teach only 6th, 7th and 8th graders. Fairly stable bunch with no major issues. I have a really slack work schedule. I have to be at work from 3:30PM to 10:00PM, whether I’m in a class or not. When I’m not teaching I mostly hang out in the office and plug my computer into the network to do stuff online. Classes are short, only 30-40 minutes and most of the kids are pretty sharp, so there’s no serious pounding of information into their heads. Something I’m very thankful for.
Living in Korea is pretty easy, despite the language barrier. Once I learned to read Korean (just being able to look at it and pronounce words – not understand what it all meant) things got a lot easier. The alphabet is pretty simple to pick up. Only 24 characters and phonetically straightforward. I don’t speak a whole lot of it – mostly just food, basic conversational phrases and bad words. Hey, I’ve got to know what my students are calling me, right?
Food’s cheap, clothes are cheap (finding larger sizes can be tricky sometimes), my apartment is provided by the school and internet service is at least six times as fast as in the US – for the same price or less?
What’s not to love?