3 months in Korea

We're back! We're better than ever! We're bigger than ever! The Badger in Korea Blog has been updated! With a newly found determination not to let this blog meet the fate that so many other ambitious travel blogs do, I bring you a three month blog extravaganza! Here, my friends, is my post about living on the Korean Peninsula for 3 months!

Ow. I just got whacked in the head by one of our wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men...

So I arrived here on August 30, 2011, and as we close this first week of December, I'll have been working and living in Korea for 3 months now. Not only that, but another major milestone is making it's way closer and closer to us: the end of the school year! That's right. On December 21, school's out baby!

Well, sort of.

For the students-yes. For teacher Mikeuh...No.

The academic year will finish up for students on Dec 21. After that, they'll have vacation from Dec 21 through February 6. They'll come back to school for 2 weeks to graduate from February 6 through February 16 and then from February 16 through March 1st they'll have a 2 week Spring Break. That's right- 46 days of Winter Break, 10 days of school (actually less than that because there is a weekend in there- so 8) and then 12 days of Spring Break before everybody moves up a grade and the new school year starts March 1. By that time I will have been in Korea for half a year.

So while that massive break sounds like an employee's dream come true- and actually for the rest of the teachers in my school it will be- unfortunately, I'll still be required to sit in an empty school as I am "contractually obligated" to be at work even when the entire rest of the students and teachers will be gone. You heard me right, folks. 8 hours a day of desk warming for the next 2 months. No classes...no students... no teachers. What does one do for eight hours in an empty school? Well, as the famous foreign English teacher saying goes here: "I thought I was on Facebook a lot in college... now I'm a F'in expert!"

I can't complain too much though. Some of my cohorts have it much worse off- actually having to teach several classes a week by themselves while the rest of the teachers take vacation. But either way you look at it, being in an empty, cold, dark building while everyone else is out having fun is not the greatest thing I've learned I will partake in since being here.

Fear not though... I have decided to give myself a bit of a true vacation. Yes.Thank you Bret Bielema and thank you Wisconsin Badgers! It's true. I will be making the pilgrimage to Pasadena to cheer on my beloved Badgers after a second consecutive Big Ten Championship and their second consecutive trip out to Southern California. Is it financially irresponsible? Incredibly. Is it stupid? Probably. Was it an impulse decision? I suppose... but put yourself in my shoes:

I was eating lunch in the teacher's lunch room Monday after watching the B1G championship game (which was awesome) at a bar with some other Wisconsin friends that Saturday. Had a great time and had fun being joyful with my fellow 'Sconsinites as we celebrated a trip to the Rose Bowl. But now it was Monday. Mondays suck just as much in Korea as they do in America in case you were wondering. As I sat alone at the end of the table starring into my bowl of stinky spongy fish byproduct squares soup, listening to Korean cackling all around me, thinking about the fading joy of the weekend and knowing I was not going to get the chance to see the Badgers play in the Rose Bowl I was about to have one of these moments:

Yeah... in my head I wanted to go that bad. I'm sure most of you know how big of a Badger nut I am as well! I've got a sort of unwritten rule that requires me to attend the Rose Bowl if Wisconsin is playing in it.

So instead of pulling a Celia meltdown, I looked up at everyone, decided I didn't care how much it was going to cost and said right then and there that I was going to go to the Rose Bowl. I excused myself from the table, picked up my lunch tray, and with a huge grin on my face strutted out the door. Two minutes later, I texted my buddies from the States: "Student tickets go on sale @ 9:00pm your time Sunday- that's in like 3 hours... GET ME A TICKET, I'M COMIN' TO THE ROSE BOWL!!!."

No buyer's remorse yet. Not even a little bit.

Ok folks, so now that you know more about my personal schedule than you probably wanted to, I'll get into some of the meatier topics of my time here and try to answer some questions that have been sent to me in the process. I think I'll set it up using one of my favorite card games: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

The Good

Korea has been a great experience for me.

To put it best, this experience has been one big case of tough love. It's been hard to live on a continent like Asia for an extended period of time, but it's also a great feeling knowing that I've been in a completely foreign place for 3 months, survived and persevered through challenges. I believe that from my experience here that I've become a much tougher individual. I've learned a great deal of self responsibility a great deal of initiative as well as a number of other 'life lessons' as they pertain to independent living. And let me remind you, going to Korea by yourself without the slightest clue what your doing is quite the crash course on independent living.

So while I've grown closer to good old #1, it's also been great to get to the point in the journey where I've met some great friends over here too. I was initially really lucky to come over here with a great group of fellow UofW students and we've had a great time on the weekends getting to know each other while exploring the ins and outs of Korea as a group. It's really an invaluable resource to have people over here who you can turn to for help, advice or even just a fun night out when you've had a long week of teaching. Brings your sanity back to let loose, be understood, speak English and communicate like a normal human being. I've also met some great people in Yangpyeong who have taught English here for a couple years and even a couple of people that happen to be from Wisconsin totally by chance. Who thought you'd meet another Packer fan in Yangpyeong, South Korea? We're everywhere I tell you! Again, it just improves the quality of life 100% when you've got friends in a strange place.

The kids at my school are really great kids. Most of them are really well behaved, the classes are a manageable size (around 25 in each class). I enjoy the different challenges of teaching different age levels- Kindergarten to 6th grade- but I have to admit, I'm a sucker for the babies. One of my favorite things to do when I'm bored in my office is to go outside during Kindergarten playtime, run over to the playground, stand with my arms and legs stretched out and just wait for the hoard of tiny Korean tots to charge over to me screaming my name and start jumping on, climbing and hugging me. Cracks me up every time. Korean Kindergarteners are quite possibly the 'cutest' entities on the planet. So tiny, such high voices, so touchy-feely. We're talkin' new born puppy sneezing cute. That, and they know I always give them candy.

Another great thing about being in the country for a while now is that you finally get to finding the places that you really like and need easily. You don't have to waste as much time guessing, asking like an idiot it broken Korean and English and exploring like you do in the beginning. Don't get me wrong, it's great to go exploring and be adventurous, but when you have to do it all the time for an entire month or two, it gets old reeeeal quickly. But now you just know where that great market is that sells the food you want to buy. You know exactly where to go to get a haircut when you want it. Side note- just got another haircut today from a place about 3 doors down the block. Dude is amazing and only charges 10,000 won (about $8). We're talkin' hot towels, free shampooing, scalp massage, crazy strait edge razor flying around and an all around really, really nice haircut. It's just nice to have a sense of stability and familiarity in a world surrounded by chaos and uncertainty.

The food (not counting school lunches) is really different and has been a great adventure to try. Lots of interactive dining and meals designed for groups to eat. A lot of really good produce-centered meals and overall much healthier than what I usually eat in the States. If you've never had Korean barbecue, it will be the first thing I will introduce to you when I get back. It's just a great way to have a meal and is really tasty too. We UW students often wonder why the concept of grilling meat at your own table and sharing a bunch of side dishes has not caught on in Madison. It's really good food and fun to eat. The street food they sell here is a late-night escapader's dream- cheap, fried and hot. And the open air markets everywhere are so full of energy, have so many people and offer so many cool sights sounds and products that you can spend an entire day walking around and have a great time. It's definitely my favorite part of Korea.Very authentic and still very traditional around my area at least.

The Bad

While I've been here for 3 months and have learned the ropes quite a bit, I still find plenty of cross-cultural challenges that hinder lots of different aspects of life here.

Language is a big problem. It's all swell and dandy to come to a country with the intention to learn the language, and quite frankly you should have that desire. But trying to learn the Korean language in 1 year is completely unrealistic. I realized that after being here for a week. Not only is it a completely different language family with different vowels, consonants and tones, but it is infused with different aspects such as how you speak to people that are older than you, how you speak to people that are of a different 'status' than you and so on and so forth. Now, it's not to say there aren't things in the language to learn that will help you immensely. For example, the Korean alphabet (Hanguel) is incredibly easy to learn and is actually laid out just like a western alphabet (each letter represents a sound to make). Knowing how to read Hanguel has helped me in many situations. Also, there is a lot of value in learning key phrases. "How are you?", "I would like ..." "How much does it cost?". But to try to grasp the grammar or become fluent in Korean would waste a lot of my time and would be next to useless. The consequence, of course, is that a language barrier is created and it makes life a whole lot more difficult. Trying to find things, trying to lesson plan with co-workers, not being given important information because it is assumed you just know like everyone else- all of these put a big obstacle in the way of every day life and it gets very exhausting working around it.

After the initial 'honeymoon' stage of being here, you also tend to start to get annoyed with lots of little cultural inconveniences. I personally don't like standing up, bowing my head and saying hello 1000 times a day whenever someone enters the room- even for a split second, but in Korea it's expected and if you don't do it, you're a weirdo. The food is good as I stated before, but some of it is just down-right unpleasant for me. Seaweed soup every day, fried minnows, rubbery squid tentacles, army soup, acorn jelly, cow parts, and my favorite treat so far: fish egg sack soup just don't sit well with me and unfortunately my school is REALLY into these kinds of things. Take a little peak at fish egg sack soup:

Mmmmm.... the veiny egg sack of some random fish. Tasty...!

The Ugly

Here's where I'll be honest with you: There are some things about Korea that are just plain bad for me. I hate to spend time dwelling on it, but it's been a prevalent part of the experience and hey... I said I was taking you along with me for the whole thing!

Alright, let me begin by saying that everyone's situation is Korea is different. Different people come for different reasons from all walks of life. I came here traveling for the first time in my life from the American Midwest knowing very little about what this was all about.  I wanted to travel, make some money, meet some new people and teach some kids. I've in fact done all of those things, but when you sit and think about those wonderful things, you tend to create a fantasy in your head and forget that there are challenges that come along with the experience. What I'm getting at: Korea is a very difficult place to live for foreigners. It's not like Europe or Africa or South America where you can find several commonalities in society and mesh them to your own. It's different than the rest of the world. Asia, and Korea in particular are just on a completely different page. Some of it is good, but a lot of it I've come to believe is just a poor match for westerners. For me there's a difference between culture shock and certain things about a culture that you personally don't believe in. Culture shock is not knowing a language or eating unfamiliar foods or learning new routines or changing the way you execute certain tasks. These differ from some of the fundamental problems that I, and many other people who come to this country find. As I've slowly found out, Korea is one of the most homogeneous, isolated cultures in the world. In fact, over the centuries it's been given the nickname "The Hermit Kingdom." (must have been the predecessor to "Dynamic Korea.") The place is a bubble. It's strange because it's technically an industrialized, modern country with internet, lots of ties to western culture etc. But for me, the reality is that Korea has tried very hard to imitate aspects of western society and in doing so have created a dysfunctional mess in a whole lot of places in it's modern society.

For example, if you think people are career and reputation driven in the U.S... come to modern day Korea and you will experience a whole new obsession with your career and the perception of the career that you have. Here you immediately notice that there is an overwhelming and observable train thought that basically says that you are less than successful unless your life follows the following path: You go to school as a child for 8 hours a day, go home eat dinner, only to be carted off to a private academy for more hours of intensive English class, come home again and do homework until at least 12:00am if you're lazy, later if you're not, go to bed for a few hours then get up and do it again. You then must take a series of extremely difficult and particular standardized tests at the end of high school so that you can get into a top university. You attend the top university, get perfect grades and graduate, do your 2 years of military service if you're a male and then get a career where you make a point to work 70 hour weeks and let everyone know about it so that you gain a reputation as a diligent person- even if it means sitting doing nothing at work for extra hours or spending the night in your office just so you can tell everyone that you did the next day. If you have done all of the previous successfully you have a good shot at being happy. That is the only way to be happy. Trust me, I've asked Koreans. Oh wait.. I forgot... you can't be happy unless you get married immediately after you get a career. I forgot. You are assumed to 'be miserable' if you are not married. Unsurprisingly this is not achievable by many individuals and many become overcome with a sense of failure, shame and unhappiness. The suicide rate here is through the roof- I believe one of the highest in the world- and for me personally, it is exhausting to be around all the time. I recently talked to a Korean guy who said his life was terrible and he is very unhappy because he was 26 and not married, he didn't get the specific job that his parents wanted him to get after graduating college and his English wasn't good enough. (I thought his English was quite good and he was employed as a university teacher in a nearby city.)

What I'm getting at here (and I apologize that it sounds like a bit of a bash, but I just think it's utterly ridiculous) is that a whole lot of Korean society is centered around personal perception.The more people ooo and ahhh over how crazily you push yourself to appear diligent, over-worked and career-driven, the higher your status becomes in your peer group.

Your status is the most important thing to you. In fact, they have a concept over here for it. You "gain or lose face" based on the things you do. With this comes the all important reputation and if you're really good at it, you get an ego where everyone can really admire you and start kissing your ass. It's everywhere and it's obnoxious to me. From the simplest things like I said before- If someone enters the room, everyone bolts out of their chair, puts on a big fake smile with a cheesy voice showers the person with superficial greetings and childish laughs. If you don't do this, you're doing something wrong. You're not part of the club of what everyone else is doing and your reputation has been tarnished. Or how about if  someone starts quickly cleaning the room for brownie points, all of the sudden everyone looks frantically around, jumps out of their chair and starts tidying up useless things or starts pretending to help clean while nervously watching to see that everyone notices them doing it too. It's the darndest thing, I'm telling you. Or how everyone spends spends ridiculous amounts of money on fancy western fashion (that doesn't make any sense) so that they look extra nice and put-together for co-workers to see at school. (Make sure to have your new clothes sent to the school so you can open them up and show everyone and tell about how much it cost and how big of a brand it is).

You want to do everything possible to fit in, to go with the flow, to conform. Concepts like sucking up, kissing ass, brown nosing or any other negative connotation to useless actions just don't seem to exist over here. It's Korean Confucianism on crazy American tabloid crack. Do all of this stuff and maybe you can be happy and fit in with the rest. Don't think critically. Don't ask questions. Don't disrupt the flow of society.

It's torture sometimes for westerners and especially American college grads who have just spent the last 4 years of their lives being taught to be creative and to think critically. It's  just completely opposite of the way we are taught to act as individuals in the West and for whatever reason it bugs the bejesus out of me. To be even more brutally honest it bugs me because I don't see it as either true Korean culture or true Western culture, but rather an adaptation of the worst parts of American culture into the Confucian ideals. It's taxing and a lot of people can't take the heat. The average stay for a foreign teachers over here is only about 4 months they say.

So, along with the obsession for societal status comes a whole slew of hierarchy in many different places- including a very prevalent spot in the school systems. Unnecessary hierarchy. Inefficient hierarchy. "Administration" here makes the U.S. Congress seem like a well-oiled machine. Everything has to go through the proper channels and trickle down. I can't ask a simple question about my schedule without first having to ask a co-teacher who will then consult the vice-principle, who will then consult the principle and relay the information back down. Usually the answer is nothing more than a vague "maybe." So as a consequence, stuff doesn't get done. People aren't on the same page. Things get attempted but backfire miserably all the time. The resources requested are not provided and so on and so forth. It boils my blood and drives me and countless other foreign English teachers crazy. And please be aware of that- this isn't just me. This has been a well-documented standard for English teachers over here for years. It's nuts!

So as you've seen, there have been some distinguished peaks and valleys to the whole thing so far. I've learned a lot things that I really like and a lot of things that I don't like. I realize that some of the things I've said are a bit brash and maybe some are a misconception on the account that I haven't been here long enough to "fully understand." But like I said, I feel like at this point I can tell the difference just from talking to several people who have been here for several years, between culture shock and some real, lasting fundamental problems that Korean society poses for us "foreigners" as they call us. Yes- we are not referred to as visitors or Americans or British or Australians... we are all lumped together and referred to as 'foreigners.' Non-Koreans. Complete with our own stereo types, special rules to follow at businesses and apparent inability to eat spicy Korean food. (Which isn't really that spicy). We also all sweat a lot and are too hairy. Fun times.

The Future

I'm sure I'll continue to learn and as I do things will roll much easier. The good will keep coming and so will the bad, but all I can say is this experience, for better or for worse, has been by far and away been the most intense ride I've gone on in life. And it's not even close.

Leave your comments!

Mike