I'm writing from one of the thousand or so PC cafes that litter the landscape of the city where I live here. You seriously cannot go a block without seeing one...they're everywhere, but here people use them mostly to play World of Warcraft or whatever...I'm gonna try to use this one to record my thoughts on an incredible week.
Well, I left Raleigh Friday morning, and, well...the flight was hell. I was dreading the actual flight more than the transition from home to here, the struggles with a new job and with meeting new people, and with all the other shit that comes up when you move...and I was justified in that dread. It was absolutely horrible. The first leg of the flight up to Detroit was ok, I was a little cramped but the AC worked and I had a window seat so I could deal. And when I got to the airport there I didn't have any trouble moving around, getting something to eat, and boarding my next flight like I feared I might. But then the real shit began.
The middle portion of my trip was scheduled to last 14 hours, and to the credit of Northwest Airlines it and all of my other connecting flights were on time...but efficient or not 14 hours in a hot, smelly tube with ~400 or other pissed off and tired people is not going to be fun. For starters, my seat sucked, it was a B which means it was on the port side of the plane in the middle of two other seats. To my right was an incoherent, drunk, and sleepy Japanese man and to my left was a taciturn and immovable woman who also slept most of the trip, often with her feet propped up on mine. I didn't really bring anything to read and what I had I couldn't get into, so for most of the flight I either a)stared straight ahead into space and tried to avoid thoughts of suicide or b)watched the in-flight movies, which were - The Mask of Zorro, Yours, Mine, and Ours, and some other shitty movie. Now, you might be asking, why not just get hammered and go to sleep? I had every intention of doing so, and the guy with whom I'd spoken before I left for Korea, who was/is a fellow teacher at my school, assured me that international flights served booze for free. But for NW...this doesn't apply, and I sure as shit wasn't going to pay 5$/can for some crappy Japanese beer. And to top it off I've never been able to sleep just laying on my back, and since I was between two other people I couldn't lean to one side or the other, and for 14 hours I didn't get a single second of sleep.
By the time we touched down in Tokyo I was dead, but the excitement of being so far away from home in such a (relatively) exotic locale revived me, somewhat, and I was successfully able to navigate through the Tokyo airport and board the last portion of my flight.
The last portion was far and away the best, I slept for most of my trip, the food and beverages didn't suck, and I was comfortable. So when we touched down in Incheon I was feeling pretty good.
Of course, I still didn't know if the bags I'd checked back in Raleigh had traveled with me all the way to Korea, I didn't really know how I was going to get through customs and immigration, and all I knew about who I was meeting at the airport was that his name was Jae Sung and that he'd find me, not the other way around.
Well, my bags came through, thank God, and though passing through immigration and customs was time consuming, it wasn't too much of a hassle. But then I was directed to this sort of loading zone outside of the customs area, where all the other Koreans were heading, and so toting three pretty heavy bags I lumbered outside into a flood of people.
Obviously I didn't know a s(e)oul. There were plenty of folks holding signs which read things like "Jason Chan" or "Michael Wilson" or whatever but there weren't any with my name on it. After I'd traipsed up and down the line of people I paused for a moment to get my bearings, and just a second or two later I met my first cabbie. I didn't know who he was at first, and he was very helpful, and I thought he might be Jason, but it soon became clear he didn't know who I was and he wasn't from the school. I know now that he just wanted to give me a ride to Bucheon, where I'd be living, b/c Americans are apparently the only ones who tip out here and of course he could use the fare...but at the time I thought he and all the succeeding cabbies that accosted me there had more sinister intentions...Lee's joking comment about the "white slave trade" didn't seem quite as amusing anymore.
But eventually I met Jason. I was again skeptical and asked a lot of annoying questions, I'm sure, but after he pulled out my itinerary and introduced himself so I could understand through the accent I knew he was the guy, and we left.
The trip to the hotel where I'd be staying that night was fairly short and peaceful, the only harrowing moments were the coupla times Jason tried to go the wrong way down one way streets (I kept the comments floating through my head about a nation filled with Asian drivers to myself). Jason told me everything I needed to know about my situation and he told me that since the girl who had been using my room wasn't leaving until the next day that he'd be putting me up in a hotel for the night.
And what a hotel! It's probably the nicest I've stayed in, and certainly is the nicest I've stayed in by myself (I stayed in one in Atlantic City with LBJ a while back that was really cool). The mattress was as hard as a rock, but I slept fine...after staying up an hour or so to watch the shitty porn on Channel 2. The engrish in the brochure was a fun icebreaker, too, let me quote:
"Morning furnitures in your room is not allowed." WTF is morning furniture?
"Please keep away our child from playing in labby." And so on...
The next morning Jason picked me up and drove me across the street, basically, to my new apartment building. The teacher who was vacating, Jen, was still there and cleaning up when we arrived...to be honest she didn't exactly finish the job, and my apartment is still pretty dirty, but hell, I'm used to living in my own filth so why not someone else's? That day, that day...let's see, that was Sunday, yeah, Sunday night I met Joey, the guy I'd spoken with over the phone.
He and his girlfriend/boss Sophia (that's her Korean name - she's my boss too, btw) took me out to this OK spaghetti place in a mall somewhere and then to a bar near her apartment. They were both pretty cool people and they put me at ease.
The next day, Monday, after a fairly sleepless night due to jetlag, I went in for 'training.' I used the quotations b/c, well, it seems like at SLP they don't really understand that it's best if you train the teachers to do their job before you force them to teach. On Monday morning one of my new co-workers, James, this middle-aged guy from Canada who's been here for 10 years and at SLP for 8, walked me through the SLP manual. I honestly don't remember much of what we discussed, I was so out of it...but it didn't matter b/c by that afternoon I was teaching my first class.
When Julia, my boss' boss, came to me that day and asked if I could cover a class that afternoon I was surprisingly non-plussed. I'm still not sure I can describe it, but maybe I just have had a 'fuck it' attitude about this whole experience...what I mean is, my thinking is something like "Fuck it, I've come this far, how much harder can it be?" And it really wasn't that hard and in fact my first class that afternoon went really well. I just wish they could all be like that one...
Gosh, there's so much more to post about this past week but it's gonna have to wait. With the promise of more to come, I bid my fair readers adieu...
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