24 July 2010

Just hold on, 'cause I'm comin'...

In case you were wondering...

Yes, I am still going to Korea.

I had a moment of panic about the contract I'd signed, which, fortunately, turned out to be more like a letter of intent than a contract. So I backed out, and signed a new contract, and no longer have the same niggling doubts.

Doubts, yes. I still have those. And some of them even niggle. But they're not the same doubts.

Not entirely, anyway.

This is the school at which I will be teaching. You may notice that it is an elementary school. Those of you who know my feelings about elementary school children (they're short, they'd make good snacks, etc.) will do best to hold your tongues. I'm sure it will be fine. It isn't that I've never worked with young children before; I have. I tend to prefer older ones, because their senses of humor are more developed and they can carry on decent conversations. Since these are two skills I personally need to work on, I find working with teens and pre-teens most beneficial to me. But since I don't understand much Korean (The Rosetta Stone copy I've borrowed for the library will come in super-handy if anyone shows me four cars and asks me to identify the yellow one. I'm really hoping there's a game show where that's the only skill I'll need), I'm guessing seven-year-olds might be more on my level conversationally and humor-wise. I anticipate a lot of slapstick.

This is the city in which I will be living. You may notice that the page is in Korean. This is the English page. I include the Korean one because it looks far more exciting than the English one. Just look at the man in the left-hand corner. He's clearly excited. And I find it an infectious excitement too. I'm sort of thinking Yong-in rocks right now. I can't really tell you much about Yong-in, because I don't know much about it. I expect I'll learn about it when I'm there. I've gone to the trouble of hunting down a vegetarian restaurant near the school, and it's on transit-lines to Seoul, so I'm pretty sure I'll be able to survive. Also, the Seoul area has two baseball teams, the Doosan Bears and the LG Twins. I think I'll root for the Bears because bears are more adorable than twins. I really can't ask for much more than this.

In the meantime, I've been scurrying about gathering paperwork and having the appropriate officials sign, notarize, and stamp said paperwork to ensure that I didn't just do something like, say, print out my M.Ed from my computer (It isn't a bad idea really. I'd have saved tens of thousands of dollars. Too late though). This involved a lot of going into Manhattan and standing in line, which, in turn, meant a lot of playing sudoku on my phone (I find that the average wait in line for official business takes me two games of sudoku on the most difficult level. Keep in mind that I am not particularly good at sudoku).

Anyway. The paperwork is done, and sent off, received and is in the process of being processed. Sometime in the next two weeks I visit the Korean consulate so that he/she can see that I'm not too obviously flawed. And then, in the last week of August... I fly away.

2 comments:

  1. I apologize for the boring-ness of this post. I was just posting because I worried that maybe everyone thought I'd chickened out and that all I was doing was spending my time reading in parks, floating in pools, and gazing at the Statue of Liberty from the cafeteria in IKEA. Please note that I am doing those things, but that I didn't chicken out.

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  2. haha! so is your school in seowon? seowon's supposed to be great! i'm nearly positive my best bud here taught in seowon last year. good work on the transit line to seoul as well... it makes it so much easier to get back and forth if you don't have to deal with bus tickets :) fun fun! good luck!

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