Monday, September 29, 2008
A month under my belt...
So, I realized that I mentioned the school system a few blogs back and I haven't gone into more detail yet. Maybe it's not the most thrilling topic in the world, but it is interesting.
Ok, their schools are loosely based on our own. We installed quite a few American systems here after the Korean war.......actually, first let me give you a very brief, albeit moderately inaccurate history of this country.
There were many "Ages" that Korea has gone through. It was split in 3, it was unified, it was invaded by Japan, it was invaded by China, it was invaded by Japan, it was invaded by Japan, etc. You get the picture. Before World War 2, Japan controlled all of Korea, and they weren't nice about it. Forcefully occupied is a better term perhaps. In the older generations today, there still exists an underlying, but heated resentment of Japan. Many people have grandmothers or great-grandmothers who were forced into horrible indignities during those years of Japanese control.
After World War 2, we made the same deal for Korea with the Soviet Union that we did in Germany; we each would get half. (i would love to learn more about that deal-making process. can you imagine us giving half of another country to a third country?)
So, South Korea and North Korea go their seperate ways. North Korea went on to be....North Korea, and South Korea became our much littler brother. We built a base here. We helped them modernize and sent them down our oh-so-famous path to democracy.
A couple decades passed and Japan had gone from being an enemy of the United States to one of it's most fervent emulators. They began to prosper and gain wealth/power. Korea recognized this and perhaps became more than a little jealous. By the 70's/80's, the prime directive of the Korean government was to push and push hard. They would become an economic factor in the world by sheer will if they had to.
South Korea isn't blessed with natural resources like we are, so they had to turn to what they had; people and lots of them. "Human Resources" is more than just a business major here. The "Human Resources" ARE the people, all of them, and even today that is how much of this country views itself. They ask a whole lot of themselves and for the most part they deliver.
I wanted to give that little overview, because these are exactly the reasons that I am here today. South Korea wants to be a power like America, and part of that plan is to speak our language. Not learning a second language just for fun or for a "transcript frosting" like we do, but for the betterment of the entire country. It really is a national imperitive. There are tens of thousands of English teachers from all over the world here, and they are all paid much better than Korea's own teachers(many times a sensitive subject in certain schools as you can imagine, since not all foreign English teachers here have a teaching degree or stellar GPAs).
Korean students go to kindergarten, then 1st through 12th grade just as we do. Their school year may be a little longer than us, but not too much. They have holidays and vacation days just like us. The biggest difference is what happens AFTER school. Approximately 80% of the students go to an Academy after stopping at home for a brief supper. Academies, or Hagwons as they are called here are private schools. They operate out of office space in pretty much every building in this city. They can be general or can specialize in subjects, like math, science, Korean, various musical intruments, chess, certain sports, or...you guessed it....English.
The students go to the Academies from about 6:00 to 10:00, some go less, some go more. Many go to Academies on Saturday, and some even on Sunday. Some go on Vacation days, and all students go to summer/winter "camps" during the off months of the school year. When they do get home at night, they start their homework/studying. Most of my middle schoolers don't get to sleep until about 1 or 2 in the morning. It is an understanding between parents, schools, and students that education is THE most important thing during those years of your life.
What about FUN you say?? When do the kids get to be kids?? Oddly enough, in school. They are allowed to be much more rambunctious and wild in school than students are in most American schools. They do their work, but the volume and energy level in school here is MUCH higher than I am used to.
The greatest outlet for their pent up energy is clear however.
Video games
Any spare second in the day is spent playing games. The PC rooms that I mentioned before are constantly filled with students blowing off steam. They're dark, inexpensive, and seem to directly inject digital images into the cerebellums of these kids. Some of the girls will listen to sugarpop music with their friends. Some boys will play a little basketball or soccer. 99.9% will play games. At home I get 47 channels that I don't understand, and 3 of them are video game channels, not where they TALK about video games, not where you get to PLAY video games, but channels where you simply WATCH other people play video games.
Sounds thrilling, doesn't it. Contact your local cable provider.
I could go into the testing process or the universities, but I won't. I think that's enough of a civics lesson for one blog.
So anyways, now it's a little easier for me to understand why some people in the world think Americans are spoiled or overconfidant, because.......we kind of are. Not that we don't work hard or don't deserve all that we have. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is this:
There are literally hundreds of millions of people all over the world working their asses off to hopefully, someday have what we have right now. Let's not waste the opportunities that are in front of us.
laters!
~tony
Ok, their schools are loosely based on our own. We installed quite a few American systems here after the Korean war.......actually, first let me give you a very brief, albeit moderately inaccurate history of this country.
There were many "Ages" that Korea has gone through. It was split in 3, it was unified, it was invaded by Japan, it was invaded by China, it was invaded by Japan, it was invaded by Japan, etc. You get the picture. Before World War 2, Japan controlled all of Korea, and they weren't nice about it. Forcefully occupied is a better term perhaps. In the older generations today, there still exists an underlying, but heated resentment of Japan. Many people have grandmothers or great-grandmothers who were forced into horrible indignities during those years of Japanese control.
After World War 2, we made the same deal for Korea with the Soviet Union that we did in Germany; we each would get half. (i would love to learn more about that deal-making process. can you imagine us giving half of another country to a third country?)
So, South Korea and North Korea go their seperate ways. North Korea went on to be....North Korea, and South Korea became our much littler brother. We built a base here. We helped them modernize and sent them down our oh-so-famous path to democracy.
A couple decades passed and Japan had gone from being an enemy of the United States to one of it's most fervent emulators. They began to prosper and gain wealth/power. Korea recognized this and perhaps became more than a little jealous. By the 70's/80's, the prime directive of the Korean government was to push and push hard. They would become an economic factor in the world by sheer will if they had to.
South Korea isn't blessed with natural resources like we are, so they had to turn to what they had; people and lots of them. "Human Resources" is more than just a business major here. The "Human Resources" ARE the people, all of them, and even today that is how much of this country views itself. They ask a whole lot of themselves and for the most part they deliver.
I wanted to give that little overview, because these are exactly the reasons that I am here today. South Korea wants to be a power like America, and part of that plan is to speak our language. Not learning a second language just for fun or for a "transcript frosting" like we do, but for the betterment of the entire country. It really is a national imperitive. There are tens of thousands of English teachers from all over the world here, and they are all paid much better than Korea's own teachers(many times a sensitive subject in certain schools as you can imagine, since not all foreign English teachers here have a teaching degree or stellar GPAs).
Korean students go to kindergarten, then 1st through 12th grade just as we do. Their school year may be a little longer than us, but not too much. They have holidays and vacation days just like us. The biggest difference is what happens AFTER school. Approximately 80% of the students go to an Academy after stopping at home for a brief supper. Academies, or Hagwons as they are called here are private schools. They operate out of office space in pretty much every building in this city. They can be general or can specialize in subjects, like math, science, Korean, various musical intruments, chess, certain sports, or...you guessed it....English.
The students go to the Academies from about 6:00 to 10:00, some go less, some go more. Many go to Academies on Saturday, and some even on Sunday. Some go on Vacation days, and all students go to summer/winter "camps" during the off months of the school year. When they do get home at night, they start their homework/studying. Most of my middle schoolers don't get to sleep until about 1 or 2 in the morning. It is an understanding between parents, schools, and students that education is THE most important thing during those years of your life.
What about FUN you say?? When do the kids get to be kids?? Oddly enough, in school. They are allowed to be much more rambunctious and wild in school than students are in most American schools. They do their work, but the volume and energy level in school here is MUCH higher than I am used to.
The greatest outlet for their pent up energy is clear however.
Video games
Any spare second in the day is spent playing games. The PC rooms that I mentioned before are constantly filled with students blowing off steam. They're dark, inexpensive, and seem to directly inject digital images into the cerebellums of these kids. Some of the girls will listen to sugarpop music with their friends. Some boys will play a little basketball or soccer. 99.9% will play games. At home I get 47 channels that I don't understand, and 3 of them are video game channels, not where they TALK about video games, not where you get to PLAY video games, but channels where you simply WATCH other people play video games.
Sounds thrilling, doesn't it. Contact your local cable provider.
I could go into the testing process or the universities, but I won't. I think that's enough of a civics lesson for one blog.
So anyways, now it's a little easier for me to understand why some people in the world think Americans are spoiled or overconfidant, because.......we kind of are. Not that we don't work hard or don't deserve all that we have. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is this:
There are literally hundreds of millions of people all over the world working their asses off to hopefully, someday have what we have right now. Let's not waste the opportunities that are in front of us.
laters!
~tony
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Sorry....
...I've been so busy with my first true week of school, I haven't had time to do much else. Bloggin is not a way of life for me yet.
I've been doing my immigration run this week. Lots of running after school to health checks, and various appointments to get my alien registration card which I need to get my home internet and a phone. (I'm using some business's wireless signal right now, which is nice but who knows how long it will last)
Well, people at school actually try to talk to me now. I really do need to speed up the "learning Korean" process. Life is so much easier when you can understand what people around you are saying. I did have the guts to venture into a restaurant by myself last night. Ok, maybe it was an Italian restaurant, but still! The menu looked like.....TGIFridays I guess. I think that many "American" style bars and restaurants are kind of modelled after Fridays. It must've been the first American chain to come here. The Cajun Fried Chicken Salad and Junebug really give it away. I had a good (expensive) dinner and tried to get to know the bartender. I figure that it can never hurt to know a bartender, though I don't know if I could pronounce his name again. Kim Tson Chung or something like that. I can read many of the words now, but hearing them spoken is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
The importance of bridging the language barrier can be best illustrated by a story from my second night here in Seoul. The sickening terror that I felt that night has subsided, so I think I can talk about it now.
Okay.
So, the old teacher that I met the first day had told me that there was an Emart(Walmart clone) just down the street. I don't know what "just down the street" means to you, but to me it means....just down the street! I had me own address written in my pocket, and I felt confidant that I could take a quick cab ride to pick up a garbage can and be back in a jif.
Hailing a cab is easy here. You don't hail it at all, you just look at the cars driving by for a sec and a cabbie pulls over for you. Most cab rides are less than $5, in fact many don't even go above $2, so they are a nice way to get around. I jump in the cab and ask for Emart. The cabbies don't speak english, but they know landmarks or big stores. The cab drives off, and keeps driving....well past my definition of "just down the street". I nervously asked if we were going to emart, and he just repeated emart and pointed up ahead. After another turn(??) I was not liking the situation.
We finally get there, I pay my $3.30, and jump out. Emart is not worth wasting keystrokes over, so fast forward.....
I exit with my garbage can and a few other little things. I find the line of cabs pointing in the right direction and get in one. I show him my address and......nothing......he has no idea where it is. I get out. I try the next one and same story. This is where I start REALLY getting nervous. I wonder if I can walk and retrace my trip here, but I'm really not sure where the turns were, and it would be a really long walk anyways. I do have a phone, the one that the old teacher gave me, but I can't use it to call out. It only takes incoming calls. (another reason for me to get my own cell) And who would I call anyways? My mom in Detroit Lakes, MN, USA??? After standing on the sidewalk for ten minutes pondering my options, I try another cab. He also didn't know where it was, but I guessed my only option was to try to retrace, so I figured I could do so in a cab directing him where to turn. He said he could go to the district that I lived in, so I just prayed that I either remembered the turns correctly or we passed something that I recognized. Neither one happened.
He turned before I asked him to, and when I asked him to go back, he pointed ahead and said Officetel. (the name of the kind of apartment I live in) He turns again, pulls over, and says "Officetel". This is not my apartment. I have no idea where we are. I try to explain that I don't live here and show him my address again. No good. He seems to be empathetic for a moment, but soon shooes me out of his cab and drives away.
The good news is that I didn't have to pay him for dropping me off in a random place in a city of 20 million people holding a garbage can. It's 10:00 at night, do you know where your home is?
I hadn't seen any westerners around since I got here, so I had no hope of finding an English speaker. All I could do was walk in what I guessed was the right direction and hope to run into a police officer. I figured that they at least wouldn't leave stranded me on a corner somewhere. The streets SEEMED safe, but this was my second night in town, what the hell did I know????
Long story short, okay, it's too late to be short, but still.
3 blocks later I see a store that I think I've been to. I have. 25 minutes later I'm in my own shower cleaning the "freak-out" off of me and preparing for bed.
The lesson boys and girls??? Never leave the safety and security of your own, warm home. Outside is evil. Agoraphobia is the way to go, man. Call Dominos once in a while and you're good!!
toodles from the eastern hemisphere!!
~tony
I've been doing my immigration run this week. Lots of running after school to health checks, and various appointments to get my alien registration card which I need to get my home internet and a phone. (I'm using some business's wireless signal right now, which is nice but who knows how long it will last)
Well, people at school actually try to talk to me now. I really do need to speed up the "learning Korean" process. Life is so much easier when you can understand what people around you are saying. I did have the guts to venture into a restaurant by myself last night. Ok, maybe it was an Italian restaurant, but still! The menu looked like.....TGIFridays I guess. I think that many "American" style bars and restaurants are kind of modelled after Fridays. It must've been the first American chain to come here. The Cajun Fried Chicken Salad and Junebug really give it away. I had a good (expensive) dinner and tried to get to know the bartender. I figure that it can never hurt to know a bartender, though I don't know if I could pronounce his name again. Kim Tson Chung or something like that. I can read many of the words now, but hearing them spoken is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
The importance of bridging the language barrier can be best illustrated by a story from my second night here in Seoul. The sickening terror that I felt that night has subsided, so I think I can talk about it now.
Okay.
So, the old teacher that I met the first day had told me that there was an Emart(Walmart clone) just down the street. I don't know what "just down the street" means to you, but to me it means....just down the street! I had me own address written in my pocket, and I felt confidant that I could take a quick cab ride to pick up a garbage can and be back in a jif.
Hailing a cab is easy here. You don't hail it at all, you just look at the cars driving by for a sec and a cabbie pulls over for you. Most cab rides are less than $5, in fact many don't even go above $2, so they are a nice way to get around. I jump in the cab and ask for Emart. The cabbies don't speak english, but they know landmarks or big stores. The cab drives off, and keeps driving....well past my definition of "just down the street". I nervously asked if we were going to emart, and he just repeated emart and pointed up ahead. After another turn(??) I was not liking the situation.
We finally get there, I pay my $3.30, and jump out. Emart is not worth wasting keystrokes over, so fast forward.....
I exit with my garbage can and a few other little things. I find the line of cabs pointing in the right direction and get in one. I show him my address and......nothing......he has no idea where it is. I get out. I try the next one and same story. This is where I start REALLY getting nervous. I wonder if I can walk and retrace my trip here, but I'm really not sure where the turns were, and it would be a really long walk anyways. I do have a phone, the one that the old teacher gave me, but I can't use it to call out. It only takes incoming calls. (another reason for me to get my own cell) And who would I call anyways? My mom in Detroit Lakes, MN, USA??? After standing on the sidewalk for ten minutes pondering my options, I try another cab. He also didn't know where it was, but I guessed my only option was to try to retrace, so I figured I could do so in a cab directing him where to turn. He said he could go to the district that I lived in, so I just prayed that I either remembered the turns correctly or we passed something that I recognized. Neither one happened.
He turned before I asked him to, and when I asked him to go back, he pointed ahead and said Officetel. (the name of the kind of apartment I live in) He turns again, pulls over, and says "Officetel". This is not my apartment. I have no idea where we are. I try to explain that I don't live here and show him my address again. No good. He seems to be empathetic for a moment, but soon shooes me out of his cab and drives away.
The good news is that I didn't have to pay him for dropping me off in a random place in a city of 20 million people holding a garbage can. It's 10:00 at night, do you know where your home is?
I hadn't seen any westerners around since I got here, so I had no hope of finding an English speaker. All I could do was walk in what I guessed was the right direction and hope to run into a police officer. I figured that they at least wouldn't leave stranded me on a corner somewhere. The streets SEEMED safe, but this was my second night in town, what the hell did I know????
Long story short, okay, it's too late to be short, but still.
3 blocks later I see a store that I think I've been to. I have. 25 minutes later I'm in my own shower cleaning the "freak-out" off of me and preparing for bed.
The lesson boys and girls??? Never leave the safety and security of your own, warm home. Outside is evil. Agoraphobia is the way to go, man. Call Dominos once in a while and you're good!!
toodles from the eastern hemisphere!!
~tony
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Where shall we start?
The food?
I can't say much yet. I need to improve my "restaurant Korean" before I can get too far. The Korean food that I have had so far is not too bad. There are three staples; soup, rice, and kimchi, which is cabbage in a spicy red sauce. Aside from that you could find a wide variety of things on your plate. I've had a great yellow curry dish, spicy pork, sweet-n-sour pork, a few good beef dishes and many other odd side dishes. I don't really know the names of anything yet, so that's as helpful as I can be. I did have the best jello I've ever had today; apple flavored with pineapple inside!!! Sorry Grandma, no offense.
My neighborhood?
Not too bad. There's a 7/11, another small convenience store, three Korean restaurants/bars, a sandwich shop, a French bakery, an Italian restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a school supply store, a pharmacy, a seafood restaurant, and an oyster bar just below my apartment building. I could probably walk to another 30-40 food options within 4 minutes. Not to mention the "sidewalk" produce. All over town farmers pull over their trucks and carts to the side of the busy city streets. They tape up a price list on a piece of paper and sell anything from green onions to watermelon, peaches to squash (the peaches are GIGANTIC). I could easily do the majority of my grocery shopping literally ON my walk home from work each day. Many of these street vendors cook and sell food as well, though I haven't been so daring yet. I did try a couple dessert-type goodies though. One that looked like doughnut holes but was very chewy and somehow tasted exactly like kettle corn. The other was a warm bread in the shape of a tiny cob of corn that was filled with custard. Strange yummy goodness!
I'm back to food again aren't I?
Ok, the 'hood. There are also churches everywhere and they all have little neon crosses at the top of their spires like they're on the Vegas strip. I ran across one as I was wandering that was humongoid!!! (I know, not a word) It was a modren style, but had a massive stained glass front and numerous towering neon crosses. It is now one of my landmarks. I know that to get to the Nowon subway station, I need to take a left at God. The majority of the country is Protestant Christian, though like all other buildings I'm walking by, I haven't dared to enter one yet.
Many people have asked about safety here. Are the streets safe? Well, I don't think any city can boast to being crime-free, but it is amazingly tame for one of the 5 biggest cities in the world. Little kids are out wandering and playing on the sidewalks until 10/11 at night. And by little kids I don't mean 14 year olds. I'm talking kids of 6 or 7, riding their bikes and playing in the park by themselves well after dark. Of course differing parenting styles may have a bit to do with it. Not everyone in the world believes that their children are literally made of glass like we do, tracking their every move via GPS or never letting them leave our sight. I think it has to do with a greater feeling of security. The news media doesn't hide anything, but at the same time it doesn't scare the hell out of the citizens every night, playing up a rare crime until it manages to instill fear in every human being. In general it seems like people work too hard to commit crime here, teens included. No talk of curfews. Students only have time to sleep and learn, and free time for adults involves a lot of drinking themselves silly with Soju, the local liquor, and passing out at home. This is a safe city. I'm not too worried about crime, so don't you be either!
And then there are the schools......I've already described my own, but I'll touch on the others another time. Suffice to say there's a reason why kids from some Asian countries are so smart.
Take care and much love all!!!! And have a Summit EPA for me!
~tony
I can't say much yet. I need to improve my "restaurant Korean" before I can get too far. The Korean food that I have had so far is not too bad. There are three staples; soup, rice, and kimchi, which is cabbage in a spicy red sauce. Aside from that you could find a wide variety of things on your plate. I've had a great yellow curry dish, spicy pork, sweet-n-sour pork, a few good beef dishes and many other odd side dishes. I don't really know the names of anything yet, so that's as helpful as I can be. I did have the best jello I've ever had today; apple flavored with pineapple inside!!! Sorry Grandma, no offense.
My neighborhood?
Not too bad. There's a 7/11, another small convenience store, three Korean restaurants/bars, a sandwich shop, a French bakery, an Italian restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a school supply store, a pharmacy, a seafood restaurant, and an oyster bar just below my apartment building. I could probably walk to another 30-40 food options within 4 minutes. Not to mention the "sidewalk" produce. All over town farmers pull over their trucks and carts to the side of the busy city streets. They tape up a price list on a piece of paper and sell anything from green onions to watermelon, peaches to squash (the peaches are GIGANTIC). I could easily do the majority of my grocery shopping literally ON my walk home from work each day. Many of these street vendors cook and sell food as well, though I haven't been so daring yet. I did try a couple dessert-type goodies though. One that looked like doughnut holes but was very chewy and somehow tasted exactly like kettle corn. The other was a warm bread in the shape of a tiny cob of corn that was filled with custard. Strange yummy goodness!
I'm back to food again aren't I?
Ok, the 'hood. There are also churches everywhere and they all have little neon crosses at the top of their spires like they're on the Vegas strip. I ran across one as I was wandering that was humongoid!!! (I know, not a word) It was a modren style, but had a massive stained glass front and numerous towering neon crosses. It is now one of my landmarks. I know that to get to the Nowon subway station, I need to take a left at God. The majority of the country is Protestant Christian, though like all other buildings I'm walking by, I haven't dared to enter one yet.
Many people have asked about safety here. Are the streets safe? Well, I don't think any city can boast to being crime-free, but it is amazingly tame for one of the 5 biggest cities in the world. Little kids are out wandering and playing on the sidewalks until 10/11 at night. And by little kids I don't mean 14 year olds. I'm talking kids of 6 or 7, riding their bikes and playing in the park by themselves well after dark. Of course differing parenting styles may have a bit to do with it. Not everyone in the world believes that their children are literally made of glass like we do, tracking their every move via GPS or never letting them leave our sight. I think it has to do with a greater feeling of security. The news media doesn't hide anything, but at the same time it doesn't scare the hell out of the citizens every night, playing up a rare crime until it manages to instill fear in every human being. In general it seems like people work too hard to commit crime here, teens included. No talk of curfews. Students only have time to sleep and learn, and free time for adults involves a lot of drinking themselves silly with Soju, the local liquor, and passing out at home. This is a safe city. I'm not too worried about crime, so don't you be either!
And then there are the schools......I've already described my own, but I'll touch on the others another time. Suffice to say there's a reason why kids from some Asian countries are so smart.
Take care and much love all!!!! And have a Summit EPA for me!
~tony
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