Well I think it’s over. After three years, nine months, a dozen different jobs and a whole lot of good times, I have stepped on a plane and said goodbye to Korea. For good, I think.
To be honest, I’ve said it before, I’ve said goodbye to everyone, had parties and drunk shots in celebration of my departure, only to return a few months later. Maybe I’m just doing it for the attention. But this time it feels like it’s real. I have a job in Shanghai, China, a job which sounds appealing and will earn decent money in a country I have been curious about for a long time. And while I may visit Seoul to catch up with friends, I don’t think I’ll be calling Korea my home any more.
So to mark this momentous occasion, I’ve decided I’d write a short history of my time in Korea. Sure, you could go back through this blog and read it all in gory detail, but most likely you’d hear me crapping on about a whole bunch of philosophical stuff completely unrelated to my experiences in the land of Kim Chi. So let me recount the tale of my journey in abridged format, so that history may know what went on during my years away. I know you’ve always wondered, well wonder no more. The tale will be told.
Exactly when it entered my mind to go to Korea I’m still a little hazy about. I’m pretty sure it was after getting fed up with working in a call center, having finished my final subject in my Computer Science degree the previous year. I spent most of the time just hanging out, enjoying my first year of not studying in a decade and a half. It was refreshing, but something was burning inside me. I had been to Singapore in 2000 and that had whet my appetite for travel. However I really didn’t have enough money to be jet setting around the world. I had the choice to either just keep working and saving money each fortnight, or… what? I suppose that’s when I started to look for that one solution to my problem.
So, Google and ye may find I suppose. I came I Googled, I became employed. The promise of a pre-paid return air ticket, free accommodation and the prospect of being one of the tallest guys in a whole country really captivated me I guess. Within two weeks, I had booked my flight and was headed for Incheon Airport, Seoul.
When I arrived at the airport, I took out my instructions. “Catch a bus to Yeouido, then call this number..” As I was to find out, transportation in Seoul is as easy as pie. As I also found out, Seoul in January is DAMN COLD! Here was I, T-shirt, jeans and polyester jacket, standing in the main business district of Seoul, the air around me 2 degrees, with a slip of paper in my hand my only way of knowing where I was meant to go. The first month would be pretty much like that. “Here’s the address, go find it.” “Here’s your textbook, go teach it.” That’s pretty much how schools are run.
Mind you, it isn’t exactly rocket science. Teaching seemed like simply a matter of talking to the kids in class. After all, I didn’t know Korean to save my life and they barely knew any English, so really both the kids and I were stuck in a situation we weren’t totally comfortable with. If nothing else, I respect the fact that it never really was a problem, not speaking Korean. That’s a credit to Koreans’ ability to make you feel welcome, no matter how much you stand out.
Danielle, a teacher at my school had been there at least a year by the time I arrived. She was a fellow Aussie and helped me learn where all the good bars were. I remember my first night in Seoul, standing in a bar, foreigners everywhere, feeling like I’d stepped back home again. I knew that this wouldn’t really be so hard if I didn’t want it to be. Once you find something familiar, all that other strangeness becomes so much easier to deal with.
I think my first month or two was just a rush. I made a concerted effort to learn some Korean, and for those first two months I really took in a lot. But then, I started to get into the swing of things. Somewhere around the third or fourth month, Danielle left the academy and an American named Keith came to replace her. It was also his first venture into English teaching. Given my four months of experience and no other foreign teachers around to take the lead, I taught him everything I knew thus far about life in Seoul. As part of this introduction, I took him to a bar named Bricx. From then on, Keith would spend at least two nights in Bricx a week, possibly more and can still be found there, three years later.
Work became “just work”, days, weeks passed. We made it shorter by making Friday “Game Day” and sometime during the week we usually bought the kids ice-creams or snacks to make them work hard. There isn’t a whole lot of fun in teaching elementary level English, so Keith and I would play pranks on the Korean teachers, who usually took them in the worst possible way. There was Inju, who was like a queen of ice, rarely smiled, hated me from an argument I’d had with her in the second week and wanted nothing but to avoid all contact. Then there was Lee, who for the most part was pretty relaxed, though I’m still not sure she understood anything I said. Finally, there was Gina, who was like a Fraggle on speed. Drop a pencil and she’ll get flustered. Naturally then, she was by far the most fun to play pranks on. It passed the time quick. Between that and the 10-minute-run-to-the-store-for-an-ice-cream breaks, life was good.
Then I decided to quit. Keith reminds me that everything went downhill from here and I’m pretty sure he’s right in a professional sense. Somewhere I’d got it in my head that I could make great money as a model and actor, working in commercials, movies and tv shows. So, with three months left on my contract, I said goodbye to the academy that had been so good to me and embarked on this new career. This also meant I lost my groovy apartment, missed the bonus money I was due to get at the end of the contract, and that regular income.
Now, to be fair, I did have some part-time work as a teacher on the side, and a few modelling gigs came my way. I got to travel to Busan for a company video. I appeared on the promo vid for the KTX railway. I ushered at a release party for Volvo’s new car. I hung out with hot chicks a lot. It seemed like an awesome way to spend my time. However, I soon learned that without a visa, it was increasingly impossible to work regularly. I was soon back teaching again, working part-time. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One can earn a lot more money working part-time. Your typical academy salary was around 15 an hour, but here was I getting paid double that for more interesting work.
Part of my mistake was assuming that none of this illegal work would catch up with me. I worked a winter English camp in Daejeon. I taught at some schools. I worked another camp in the summer. And here is where the story takes a turn. For this summer camp, I actually applied for a visa, a C-4. So when immigration officials came to investigate the camp as they are sometimes want to do, I wasn’t at all worried. When they secluded all the teachers in one room, I was still not worried. When they made us get in their van with bars on the windows, I was slightly worried, but mostly indignant. I had a visa, there was no way I was coming out of this badly. When they told us to put on our prison robes, that’s when I started to worry. We had our photos taken and were ushered into a room full of Chinese and Pakistani migrant workers. The room was packed. We found a space next to the toilet, us four teachers and started to wonder just what the hell was happening.
A day later we got the story. Our visas were inaccurate. The address on the visa didn’t match the address for the camp. Huh? All I knew was you get a visa and then work. The officials didn’t see it that way. Furthermore, they had gone through the company’s history and found that I didn’t have a visa for the previous winter camp. I was double busted. The company paid our fines and we left the prison. Relieved to be out, I immediately said goodbye to my boss and cell-mates and headed to a foreign friends club camp that I’d heard about from one of the other teachers. With only the clothes on my back and the promise of attractive girls and a beach, I got on a bus with a bunch of people I didn’t even know and headed down to Donghae beach.
I pretty much managed to forget about my jail time. I must’ve because I finished the camp with a girlfriend. When I arrived back in Seoul, I had to physically write it all down in a blog entry just to record the strangeness of it all. After that, things were fine. However it had really given me a shock, the whole prison thing, so I decided to get a good, solid job with a visa. I applied for a public school, got the job. Additionally I got a night job for a small academy and picked up a few students to tutor on the weekends. I planned to work hard and save up money. Then my visa was rejected. That was rejection number one. Apparently the little bust was bad for my visa application, despite them advising me at the time that everything was fine. “Try again in a year” the unsmiling official said when I appealed the result.
So I worked illegally for another year, and this went by unnoticed. I never got caught, never put my name on anything. Then, a year later exactly, I set out to apply for a job again. This time I set my sights higher than a public school. I planned to work in a university.
I took a number of interviews for universities all around the place. The great thing about an interview at a university is that they pay you to come. So whether I got the job or not, I’ll end up with a nice little package to cover my “travel expenses” at the end of it. After a few of these failures, I finally succeeded at none other than a womens’ university in Seoul. I must’ve made a good impression, though I had been a bit doubtful as the old professor never smiled and kept reminding me that I couldn’t sleep with the students. I don’t know what kind of teachers they’d had before, but I suppose I can guess. I advised them that I had a girlfriend (which was partially true) and that besides I would never do that. It’s important when lying in an interview to look somewhat repulsed by the prospect of the very thing that seems like every guy’s dream. Maybe my few days of acting work helped because I got the confirmation email a few days later and promptly ran around my apartment screaming “woo hoo!” for the next few hours.
The benefits of a university job are twofold. First, there’s the higher caliber of students. For the most part, these are students who are older and who study English voluntarily, quite unlike the kids in academies who are forced to attend extra English, Math, Science, Music and a hundred other academies after school until 10pm at night. Second, universities give you holidays with pay. This one was going to give me six weeks a year, though it’s not unheard of for some universities to give twenty weeks of full-salaried vacation time per year. Not only that, but a 20-hour work week to boot. Hence my “woo-hoos”.
For the next couple of days I was high. This was a classic tale of boy comes to Korea, goes through some hard times, but finally makes good. You know, the story that your grandparents used to read to you as a kid? Ok, well maybe not that specific story, but you know how it goes. Shit happens, but in the end there has to be a silver lining. I had found mine, but with heaps and heaps of women involved, all who would hang off every English syllable I spoke. Sadly, that’s where the heartbreak begins. Go, get the tissues, I’ll wait.
It was a few days after the great news. I sat down at my computer only to see another email from the university. It read as follows:
Dear David,
We applied for your work visa last week. but we were notified by the immigration office that you have an illegal employment report in Korea. Thus, your work visa will not be issued by the Immigration office. The office also informed that you had tried to get your work visa last October, but it didn’t work well.
Anyway, we don’t think that we are able to hire a foreign teacher with no E2 Visa. We can’t help finding a new teacher who has a legal Visa.
We wish you good luck.
I sat there in a daze. One email had brought everything crashing down. It sucked, oh how hard it sucked. But I had to suck it up. Either I got on a plane and went back home or I did what I’d been doing for a whole year. I swallowed my pride, explained to everyone why I wouldn’t be working at the university filled with girls and started my illegal work activity once more.
It’s ironic really. Here am I, trying my best to work legally, yet getting rejected and being forced to work illegally because of my past illegal work. Maybe that’s not irony, just my arrogance. No-one was forcing me to stay in Korea and I was the one who worked illegally in the first place. No other country would tolerate it. But I really loved living in Korea and despite it all, I’d prefer to be there, amongst my friends and a culture I loved, than anywhere else. So I worked for yet another year.
Now what I haven’t touched on is all the things that happened in between. I did kind of jump from one rejection to another and that’s not exactly fair, because a lot did happen in there. For starters, I bought my first motorbike. At the time of purchase and test driving, I really didn’t know how to ride a motorbike. I had ridden one on a farm once. But here was I, testing a motorbike on the streets of Seoul. To make matters worse, it was at least 30 minutes from my house on the subway and I had no map. What I did have was a lighter wallet, my very own motorbike and a vague hunch as to the direction I should take. It took a while, but I did end up getting home, just on dusk.
From this point on, my love affair with motorbikes was born. I’m not into the bikes so much as I’m into riding them. I don’t really care a great deal about their model and make, just so long as they’ve got a reasonable amount of power and make a loud sound. My first bike had neither, but the feeling of wind in my hair and the knowledge that at any time I could go flying through the streets of Seoul, only stopping to fill the tank every 300 kilometers, well, that was awesome. That bike and I went almost everywhere together. It made my legs seem almost redundant. For those who don’t know, Seoul traffic can be pretty hectic. Take a car somewhere and expect to move one meter every minute. But on my bike I was invincible. Jams? No problem. Traffic lights? For suckers. Sidewalks? Extremely ridable. There was no place I couldn’t go, no more convenient place to park than right outside the place I was going. Me and my bike were an item.
Until winter. The cold came quite suddenly. Here was I riding through the night one week, T-shirt and shorts all the way. Then, suddenly my hands were turning blue and I thought my extremities were going to freeze off. I tried to wrap up, to withstand the onslaught of the winter cold, but it was no good. By mid-November it was almost impossible to deal with and by mid-December the bike sat motionless outside my house, buried under a mountain of snow. I would sell that bike and buy another, but nothing could compare to those first few months of motorbike heaven.
Another thing I didn’t mention was all the holidays I took. When you’re working on a tourist visa, you have but three months to get all the work you can in before it’s time to do a visa run to some other neighboring country. I naturally used this as a perfect excuse to get away and discover some other places in Asia. I went to Thailand, The Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Japan. I saw lots of cool stuff and had a lot of good times. If not for lack of funds, I would have stayed there a good deal longer. But I had to work to save more money for the next trip and the next and the next. Not a great long-term plan, but it worked for me.
A year passed like this. Keith and I started The Unshow, the best show in the history of internet TV shows. I bounced around, teaching at little academies in the shadow of huge mountains, worked camps, taught at a girl’s high school. That last part was probably the best job I’ve ever had. I’d arrive every day on my motorbike and have dozens of girls waving out the window “Hello David!”. My classes were easy, all the students paid attention, squealed when I entered the classroom and groaned when I left. Other classes got jealous and requested that I teach them as well. I was given freedom to teach the way I thought they should learn, so classes were interesting and fun. If I had the chance, I’d go back to that school in a heartbeat.
But I felt like I needed some time in Australia. It had been a year since my last visit back home and it was coming up to my little brother’s 18th birthday. I had missed so much of his life thus far, what with my travels and university, so I felt like there was no way I could possibly miss this occasion and not regret it the rest of my life. So back to Australia I went, almost certain that I’d have to choose another country and put Korea out of my mind. It wasn’t healthy. I was hanging on to a country that seemingly didn’t want me. So why did I keep chatting to people online telling them how much I wanted to come back? A month or two later and I had another job lined up in Korea and a plane ticket in my hand.
I worked at a camp, did some teaching here and there and was ready to give the E2 visa a try once more. I submitted the paperwork to my new school and waited. And waited. When I asked my school how it was going, they said “oh we’ll do that soon.” So I waited some more. I didn’t work, because my contract was due to start a little later. Still no visa. Eventually I confronted the school. There was no visa coming. Nor was there a job to work for. I was getting screwed over and I immediately applied for the Wall Street Institute.
WSI is a well-known international English school for businessmen and women, housewives and university students. It’s a professional environment and they offer an attractive salary and perks. Students are motivated and keen, teaching them is a breeze. I got the job, applied for the visa. A week later, my heart was broken by those immigration bastards again. I suppose it was ultimately my fault and I should have given up the first time, but at each appeal they would say “another year” and I’d hope that finally enough time would have passed to erase my history. Not so.
And so here I am, back in Australia, feeling kind of homesick for my 2nd home, even as I sit in my original home. I miss the streets of Seoul, the bustle, the cars everywhere, the awesome subway, morning Dunkin Donuts runs, partying hard in Hongdae and Itaewon, Pita Time, motel rooms, orange-flooded midnight streets, walking to the Kim Bap Nara in the wee hours of the morning and ordering don cass, crazy ajoshis, kids staring at my whiteness, playing darts in Seoul Pub, egg and cheese Sally, shopping at 3am in Dongdaemun, driving on the right, galbi wrapped up with kim chi in a lettuce leaf, hanging with my korean ‘brother’ and talking about life until morning, cheap taxis, high-speed internet, being told my Korean is good when it sooo isn’t, my adorable student Hae Ri, Korean people and how they act the same wherever you go, making strange videos with Keith, my boys, my girls, and waking up any time and stepping out into a city that never seems to really sleep. It’s all a dream now. Whether I will dream it again sometime is still unsure.
What I do know for sure is that I’m two weeks away from going to China, I have a ticket in my hand and a cool job to look forward to. China is infinitely bigger than Korea, with more people, bigger cities, cheaper food and cheaper beer. That in itself is a great start. And who knows, maybe one day I’ll be writing this very same blog entry and talking about how much I miss dumpling noodle soups, Chinese checkers and hairy armpits. Doubt it, but hell I never thought Kim Chi would be in that list either.
The fact is, you learn something new about yourself every time you put yourself in a new situation. I’m a different person now than the person I was in university, who was a different person to the guy who came out of high school. Every change generates new changes, allowing us to grow and experience the best that this world has to offer. It’s a buzz each and every time, which grows into an addiction. Which is why I’m excited to go to China and do it all over again.
Plus, one day China will rule the world and so I want to at least speak the language of my future overlords.
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