Summer Schedule blues
The end of July is getting dangerously close and with it the school summer vacation season here in Korea. Proper schools that is, not the dodgy private institutes such as the one that employs me. Rather than time off, all summer vacation means for the hapless hagwon teacher is an earlier start in the morning. Not good news at all. From this Wednesday I will have a 9am start three days a week. Now, I know what you are thinking ‘.. nine o’clock… doesn’t know she’s born… give anything to have that kind of a lie in… here in the real world, etc’ but remember that I have been starting work at 3pm for the last nineteen weeks that I have been in Korea. Which means that, literally overnight, my working day will be brought forward six hours. For you 9-5ers that would be the same as you having to start work at 3am tomorrow. Sucks!
The hours kept here by most English teachers are slightly unconventional to say the least. The other week I worked out that as long as I got to bed at 8am I would still be able to get six hours sleep in before work. The latest that I have gone to bed on a school night was 7.30am. It is not unusual to find groups of us having dinner in a late night barbecue restaurant at around 3am. It is certainly a night out of the ordinary if we make it to the bar before midnight.
While all that is fun and exciting it has not been all sunshine and roses for me in the hermit kingdom since I got back. Korean working life is very different from what I remember being the norm back in my dim and distant past when I last worked in a Western country. Sucking up to the boss can be one of the most important skills that an employee can cultivate. Unfortunately I missed all the classes on brown-nosing while I was at university (I was probably sitting in the square making daisy chains at the time) which has led to a four month feud with my director as she stands there with her arse stuck right out and I refuse to kiss it. Add to this unpleasant picture a Korean teacher who considers the best way to make herself look good is to slag off her foreign colleague and you have a job that can be hard to get out of bed in the morning for- even when I don’t have to do so until 2pm. Whether or not things are resolved, I have been pretty down for the last 2 weeks.
Fear not, my friends, I have snapped out of it and grown quite philosophical about whether my sojourn here will be cut short in a month or so or will last all the way to the end. My friends here have been very supportive- offering advice, money, a place to sleep if it all goes wrong and a couple of very good shoulders to cry on. I guess that it is friendships like these that have kept me out of England for nearly five years now. The relationships created on the road are so different from those we have at home in ways that I can’t really describe. The ease of meeting people and the social life that I enjoy are part of the seductive nature of travelling for me- along with the old ‘seeing new places and having new experiences’ thing, of course. I do wonder if I will ever be able to readjust to ‘normal’ life again.
One thing that I do know that if I ever do move back to London I am going to need a lot of help and patient friends around me! Like I have now!
Sorry that I don’t really have anything to say about life in Korea right now- I am socialising a lot, needless to say, but figure that you don’t need to know all about that. I had a reminder of my days in Mokpo last week when I came home from work to find that the water had been cut off for reasons unknown. It came back on 12 hours later so that wasn’t too bad. The beach just gets better and better the hotter that it gets. It is monsoon season here at the moment so alternatively very wet and very humid- what a great combination! Think that I am going to have my first experience of an English Camp this weekend-going away on the Friday and back on the Saturday. I am sure that it will be a complete nightmare- 40 of our kids but around 600 altogether- but I am getting paid for it and there will be other foreigners there. Wish me luck! Then I have the whole week off after that though I am not going anywhere because of all the trouble that I have been having with the school. Probably down to Mokpo and then over to Seoul for a massive clubbing couple of nights!
If anyone has made it to the end of the mail do send me all your news as my inbox has been pretty quiet recently- poor me!
Love
H
xx
The hours kept here by most English teachers are slightly unconventional to say the least. The other week I worked out that as long as I got to bed at 8am I would still be able to get six hours sleep in before work. The latest that I have gone to bed on a school night was 7.30am. It is not unusual to find groups of us having dinner in a late night barbecue restaurant at around 3am. It is certainly a night out of the ordinary if we make it to the bar before midnight.
While all that is fun and exciting it has not been all sunshine and roses for me in the hermit kingdom since I got back. Korean working life is very different from what I remember being the norm back in my dim and distant past when I last worked in a Western country. Sucking up to the boss can be one of the most important skills that an employee can cultivate. Unfortunately I missed all the classes on brown-nosing while I was at university (I was probably sitting in the square making daisy chains at the time) which has led to a four month feud with my director as she stands there with her arse stuck right out and I refuse to kiss it. Add to this unpleasant picture a Korean teacher who considers the best way to make herself look good is to slag off her foreign colleague and you have a job that can be hard to get out of bed in the morning for- even when I don’t have to do so until 2pm. Whether or not things are resolved, I have been pretty down for the last 2 weeks.
Fear not, my friends, I have snapped out of it and grown quite philosophical about whether my sojourn here will be cut short in a month or so or will last all the way to the end. My friends here have been very supportive- offering advice, money, a place to sleep if it all goes wrong and a couple of very good shoulders to cry on. I guess that it is friendships like these that have kept me out of England for nearly five years now. The relationships created on the road are so different from those we have at home in ways that I can’t really describe. The ease of meeting people and the social life that I enjoy are part of the seductive nature of travelling for me- along with the old ‘seeing new places and having new experiences’ thing, of course. I do wonder if I will ever be able to readjust to ‘normal’ life again.
One thing that I do know that if I ever do move back to London I am going to need a lot of help and patient friends around me! Like I have now!
Sorry that I don’t really have anything to say about life in Korea right now- I am socialising a lot, needless to say, but figure that you don’t need to know all about that. I had a reminder of my days in Mokpo last week when I came home from work to find that the water had been cut off for reasons unknown. It came back on 12 hours later so that wasn’t too bad. The beach just gets better and better the hotter that it gets. It is monsoon season here at the moment so alternatively very wet and very humid- what a great combination! Think that I am going to have my first experience of an English Camp this weekend-going away on the Friday and back on the Saturday. I am sure that it will be a complete nightmare- 40 of our kids but around 600 altogether
If anyone has made it to the end of the mail do send me all your news as my inbox has been pretty quiet recently- poor me!
Love
H
xx
posted by Helen @ 10:52 AM
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