One Weekish

Well, I'm finally moved into my permanent apartment here in Cheonan and it's pretty darn cozy. The guy I replaced, Dan, was kind enough to leave me a ton of stuff: food, cleaning supplies, toiletries, tons of dishes, pots and pans, a microwave, a toaster, some books, puzzles, office supplies. There's lots of other amenities in the apartment that my old one didn't have, like a desk and chair, a couch, a side table, a little kitchen table, a drying rack to dry my clothes, etc. He even gave me a card that's sort of like a DC area smart trip card that I can use to pay for buses, trains, subways, taxis, even groceries and stuff at various stores. He also gave me a prepaid cell phone so that I'll actually have a phone number here for local communication. Really cool of him to leave me all of this stuff. He was a cool dude in general, definitely the easiest of my foreign co-teachers to get along with, so it's kind of a bummer to see him go. I shot a video of the new apartment so you can see what it's like. Excuse the terrible cinematography:

Here's a view from the gazebo at the park down the street. For some reason all of the park areas around here have all kinds of weatherproof exercise equipment, including these ones for kids. This park, like any vaguely nature-y area here, is totally swarming with big orange dragonflies. It's sorta funny how the locals treat these like annoying pests but dragonflies, being sorta uncommon in the US, have sort of a mystical or at least exotic air to them so I thought it was pretty cool.

The front of the park. There's a running track looping through the whole park.

7-11's are everywhere here, and strangely all of them have outdoor seating. I guess they think 7-11 is classier than it really is.

The ubiquitous apartment blocks. I would guess at least half of the people who live here live in buildings like these, which totally dominate the skyline of the city. The rest of us live in apartments in the smaller 3-4 story buildings that have things like restaurants, shops, and cafes on the ground floors.

First Days in Korea

I apologize for the slowness of getting to this first post. I don't have a computer with me here in Korea (not a working one yet, anyway - I brought my desktop computer with me but haven't set it up yet) and until last night internet was very spotty as I had been trying to mooch free Wi-Fi with limited success. My neighbor/co-teacher, who is actually the guy I will be replacing, gave his Wi-Fi password though so I can finally post without it taking forever.

Korea is strange in a lot of unexpected ways. There's so much that's so familiar; western chain stores like Starbucks, Domino's, McDonald's and even 7-11 are everywhere. It couldn't have been easier getting to Cheonan from Incheon Airport. The bus terminal was right there at the arrivals area and it was really easy to get a ticket on the right bus to come here. There was a tv in the little bus shelter thing which was airing an American baseball game, with Korean announcers and stats and stuff all shown in Korean. I think car culture here is actually less foreign than when I was in England. Lots of Hyundai and Kia but also some Mercedes, Porsche, Audi, Ford and Chevy. I can't read most of the road signs and their traffic lights are turned sideways, but they drive on the right.

My neighborhood almost seems like an American movie parody of an Asian street. The school is literally one block from the apartment building (where all of us foreign English teachers live) and the tiny, narrow streets are covered in signs and storefronts. There's a coffee shop just below the school with Belgian waffles with nutella or jam or maple syrup for $2-3 and I'm told that's somewhat expensive, but I'm going to try that for lunch today. I had a tasty lunch yesterday at a restaurant across the street called Noodles Tree and a delicious spicy steamed bun full of pork and kimchi that was only a buck for dinner (sorry, no photos of that as I wolfed it down pretty quickly). There's also a nice grocery store around the corner where I can get essentials like bread and chicken breasts and milk and cereal. The language barrier is tough of course but things in general are familiar enough that I don't think I'll have much trouble getting by.

The school is pretty cool. It takes up the second floor of the building it's in and has eight classrooms, a little library, the director's office, the teachers' room and a kitchen. They serve dinner for students and staff but apparently none of the other teachers eat it - definitely warrants further investigation. All of the other teachers seem really cool so far, both the two Americans and the two English people and the Korean teachers we work with. The young kids are super enthusiastic and energetic and seem to mostly like going to school. One little girl even started crying like crazy when she learned that Dan, the guy from Minnesota I'm replacing, is leaving in a week.

For now, they've got me temporarily holed up in an empty apartment in the building with the other teachers and I don't have much in here just yet. I'll have to check out Dan's apartment to see what kind of stuff I'll be inheriting from him and what I'll need to buy. I can't wait to have a place here that feels like home instead of just a futon mattress in a corner and a bathroom, y'know?

Sorry for the lame formatting and brevity of this post. It's a pain trying to do this from a phone so hopefully I'll have a real computer set up soon.

Quick Update

Just a quick update: I received my visa number from the Korean immigration office so I took this to the consulate in DC today and officially applied for the visa, which I'll pick up from the consulate on Friday. In other more frantic news, I did receive flight details last night about my flight on the 22nd, but just tonight I was notified that the school wants me to leave a day early, so I'll be heading to the airport in the wee hours of Monday morning instead of Tuesday. Not too big of a deal except that it cuts off one business day to get things done before leaving. The next few days are going to be insane, but hopefully I'll be able to relax just a little over the weekend before taking off.

Leaving on a Seoul Plane

Since I've been thinking about setting up this blog for quite a long time now and I leave for Korea in just over a week, this first post is probably going to be a pretty long one.

A little background on this adventure: I've kicked around the idea of teaching English abroad a few times in the past, sometimes pretty seriously, but never before have really been in a position where it's been something worth more than serious consideration. After losing my dead-end job at Artists Circle last year, then spending some months on the (fruitless) job hunt, I came to the realization that there really aren't any realistic career options for a guy with an undergraduate degree in philosophy and a few years of what really amounts to administrative assistant experience. Disenfranchised with the utter lack of opportunities here in the States with my current experience and credentials, I once again thought of teaching abroad and started doing some more in-depth research, which led me to understand that Korea offered me the best possible combination of earning potential and probable job offers (since I have zero classroom teaching experience and no teaching certification). Japan pays better but you've gotta find your own apartment and it's tough to get into, while other Asian countries pay less but have lower living costs, which is nice if you're young and have no financial obligations but wouldn't really work for a debtor such as myself. A bit of research later, I discovered that I could potentially earn roughly my pre-tax salary from Artists Circle as take-home pay in Korea, with rent paid by my employer and generally very low living expenses (cheap food, cheap utilities, no car payments or insurance costs). This would allow me to wipe out all of my debt in under two years, so long as I live frugally in Korea, and should I decide to stay for a few years longer I'd be able to save up a nice little nest egg that I could bring back to the States (or elsewhere) to help pay for the expense of graduate school.

I quickly applied to just about every temp agency in the DC metro area, and after a bit of a rocky start finally landed a long-term gig in an IT department at an insurance company. This would allow me to keep the bills paid until I landed a Korean teaching gig and could leave the country. Meanwhile, I started looking into the process for teaching ESL over there, which was pretty daunting to say the least. There are two options for potential teachers there: the EPIK program, which is part of the South Korean public school system, and private schools called hagwons where children of more well-to-do families are sent after regular school hours for additional schooling. In both cases, it's pretty difficult for a job seeker to look for actual jobs from the US (or wherever) on your own; naturally, the market has corrected for this difficulty and thus exists the huge industry of recruiters who work mainly from Korea to seek out applicants and match them with jobs, for which the schools pay them a handsome fee.

I found one apparently pretty reputable recruiter on my own, but a friend I'd met through the vast and clandestine network of metalheads that is the Metal Archives put me in touch with a small-scale recruiter who worked specifically at placing job seekers at schools in the southeast of the country, an area I had become increasingly interested in due to its beauty, pleasant climate, relatively relaxed-seeming lifestyle (not the hustle and bustle of Seoul) but yet still very westerner-friendly in terms of offering services that would be helpful to someone with absolutely zero Korean language skills such as myself.

After a couple of job opportunities didn't work out (one was a public school position that I didn't land, others started before I could reasonably leave the US), this recruiter showed me one that was really promising: a private school gig teaching young students at the Herald School in Cheonan. I hadn't ever heard of Cheonan before but Wikipedia informed me that this city is nowhere near the southern city of Busan, which is where I had been interested in working, but rather was situated just south of Seoul itself. I also found some disturbing reports about the school, including horror stories about teachers who had been fired and subsequently had their work visas revoked, leading to lengthy court battles while they tried to retain their abilities to live and work in Korea. Scary stuff, but I figured I'd give the interview a go anyway just for practice.

The night of the interview (night for us, morning there in Korea) I spoke at length with Katherine Park, the director of the Herald School in Cheonan. The interview was conducted via Skype and the biggest frustration was that the Skype audio was simply pretty terrible, which made Ms. Park difficult to understand even though her English is pretty good. It made for some awkward conversation as I was worried that she'd interpret my requests for her to repeat questions as difficulty with understanding her accent so I kept reassuring her that it was just audio issues causing problems. She was extremely pleasant though, to the point where I was starting to have serious doubts about the woman's ability to be so ruthless as the internet reviews of the school had described. About an hour after the interview ended I awoke to the buzzing of my phone to see an email from the recruiter letting me know that I had landed the job, and that a contract would be coming via email over the weekend and that they wanted an answer from me as soon as I had a chance to look over the contract.

At this point I was freaking out a bit, frantically trying to get in touch with former or current Herald School teachers to get the "real scoop" on what it's like to teach there. Fortunately a couple of folks (one a former teacher there, another a then-current teacher who I think has just recently ended his contract and returned to the US) got back to me in time to assuage my fears; apparently those horror stories dated from a former owner of the school and Ms. Park, who has only owned the school for a few years now, is a good employer if somewhat distant in terms of communicating with her staff. Rolf, the Metal Archives friend I mentioned earlier, tells me that this is the best sort of boss to have there as you won't get screwed but you also won't have someone breathing down your neck the whole time. The former Herald School teacher told me that this wasn't the best choice of schools if you were looking to really craft a teaching style all your own as you're expected to follow the curriculum - again completely perfect as I'd rather have a little more structure and guidance my first year of teaching and living in Korea without having to devote significant energy and time to educational theory and creative lesson planning and all that. It all sounded good to me, so I signed the contract.

Now, during this whole process of actually trying to land a job there, I was busy doing a bunch of other paperwork and such to prepare for the move, all of which was agonizingly slow and costly. This process is extremely complicated and I only got through it through doing loads of research and pooling the insufficient resources of several recruiters, so I figure this is a good place to get a little clinical and outline exactly what you need to do as an American going to Korea to teach English. This is the process for teaching at a private school - I think there are a couple of extra steps needed for those looking to teach in the EPIK program.

1. Get an FBI Criminal Background Check. Most of the information can be found at the link below. Essentially you need to fill out the request form, print a fingerprint card and take it somewhere (I took mine to the local police station) and get fingerprinted, then submit it to the FBI along with a note stating, "Please provide an FBI seal and signature from a Division Officer for the purpose of obtaining a Federal Apostille". The police station charged me $10 to get fingerprinted, and the fee for this form is $18, plus regular shipping costs. Supposedly this background check can take up to 12 weeks or something to get processed (mine took about five or six weeks). So, get it done early. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/identity-history-summary-checks/submitting-an-identity-history-summary-request-to-the-fbi
   
2. Get a copy of your college diploma. In order to teach over there, you've gotta have a bachelor's degree (in anything at all). I just took my original diploma to FedEx Office and had them do a scan of it since it's gigantic. If you don't have your diploma or a copy of it, you'll need to request one from your school, which I think is usually about $50 or so.
   
3. Renew or apply for your passport. You should do this as early in the process as possible since it costs extra to have the service expedited and you'll need your passport number for other stuff later. Whether you're getting a new passport or renewing an old one, it'll run you $110 (plus $30 if you also get a passport card, which is supposedly useful so I went ahead and got one). It's another $60 for expedited processing to get your passport in under 3 weeks instead of the standard 4-8 weeks. You just fill out the paperwork, staple on your passport photo (you only need one for renewals) include your money order for payment and your old passport if you're renewing and send it in. http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/english/passports.html
   
4. You need to get a Federal Apostille from the State Department on the FBI background check, then you need to get your diploma a) notarized and b) apostilled in the same state (it apparently doesn't have to be in the state where the diploma is from, fortunately). There's some arcane and agonizingly slow process for doing this stuff the "correct way" through the actual government, but apparently no one does that because it's complicated and takes a ludicrously long time. Instead, there are these shady little companies that will do all of this stuff for you, quickly, for a fee. The fee seems to range from something like $45 per document well into the hundreds of dollars. I was advised to use https://www.uslegalization.com/korea/ by one of the recruiters but their website wasn't working when I needed to send the stuff in so I used the more expensive http://www.usauthentication.com/index.php instead. I had to stick a money order for the total, the FBI background check document and a copy of my diploma, along with a pre-paid return shipping envelope, in another envelope and send it to the US Authentication people. They actually did communicate with me effectively and the total turnaround time was I think five business days, so pretty quick. I also had my diploma notarized in Maryland before I sent it to US Authentication, but because they had the diploma apostilled in DC they also had it notarized in DC as well. This cost me $120 plus shipping both ways.
   
5. Make sure during this whole process you're scanning all of this stuff as you get it and sending it to your recruiter via email. They only want serious applicants so they seem pleased to get regular updates showing that you're actually doing all of this paperwork prep.
   
6. Once you get the job offer, they'll send you a contract. You'll want to sign that, scan it, send it back, but then print out three copies of it. They'll also send you self medical check form; again, sign it, scan it, send it back and print a copy. Finally, you'll need to send a package (this cost me about $75 to ship to Korea) with the three copies of the contract, the self medical check, the apostilled, notarized diploma, the apostilled FBI background check, a print-out scan of your passport, four passport photos and a copy of your resume to your recruiter, who will verify that everything looks good. If it does, the recruiter will pass it along to your employer, who will then act as your visa sponsor and submit the documents to the Korean immigration office. After 5-10 business days, they'll issue you a visa number, which the employer or recruiter will then pass along to you. At this point the school will usually book you a flight and give you the information. You then take the visa number to your local branch of the Korean consulate and, $40 later, they'll stamp the E-2 teaching visa in your passport.

I'm actually a little hazy on that last part of #6 since I'm still waiting for the immigration office to issue a visa number, so even though I'm due to fly out of the country on July 22nd I still don't have flight information or the actual visa. Fingers crossed, though!

So, in the nine days before I leave, I'm going to spend my time hauling the stuff I'm keeping (mainly books, CD's and keepsakes) to a self storage place down the street, cleaning my house, packing and getting rid of things I can't take and can't (or shouldn't) keep. The biggest item on that list is my car, which I'm extremely stressed out about selling as I just pumped almost $1300 into it to get it to the point where anyone would want to buy it. But hey, this is a blog about moving to Korea, not about trying to sell crappy cars.

I realize this has been a long and pretty dry blog post but hopefully it's informative for someone looking to do this same thing. Unless Korea proves to be exceedingly dull, future blog posts might even be somewhat interesting!