Sounds like a sweet deal, and it is, but I still have to do some work. My contract, and the contract of everyone else in my program, stipulates that we get only seven days of vacation over winter break, officially speaking. We are required to do English camps, which aren't like sleepover camps, thank god, but just a few days of special classes for smaller groups of kids. Both of my camps were during the first week of January. Monday and Tuesday at my school, 20 advanced students, and one other foreign teacher. It was super easy. My second camp was at the elementary school right across the street from my school. It ran the rest of the week. There were about 80 students and three other foreign teachers, and we finished by 1pm everyday. Plus for both camps I got paid for the materials I prepared which was a nice and unexpected bonus. The camp at the elementary school was great because I have never worked with younger kids before and they were really enthusiastic and funny, and were better at English than I had anticipated. The other foreign teachers at that camp were nice too. There was one guy, Andrew, who struck me immediately as a religion enthusiast.
I figured I was being overly and unfairly judgmental based on his protruding, balding, forehead, his blatant lack of social skills, and his bulging eyes that seemed to always be unblinkingly staring at you with The Word until we had the following conversation during a break period the first day:
"So, Ethan, what brings you to Korea?"
"Oh, I don't know. I like traveling and I figured this would be a good way to have a good job and do some traveling. Basically, 'Why not?' And yourself?"
"Missionary work." As he bulges his eyes at me, probably trying to read my soul.
"Oh really?"
"Yeah, I was in China before, but it was difficult. I didn't find very many Christians..."
I interrupt, "Well isn't that the point?"
"Well yes, but..." Blah, blah, blah. Then he quickly mentioned how he felt he didn't connect with the other foreigners around him as his eyes bulged and he told me about one particularly sinful scene: "And there was one party I was at where I actually saw marijuana being used!"
I nearly laughed in his face at this but managed to hold it together. On the last day he asked if he could have my phone number, I think he felt there was some holy connection between us. I told him I was an atheist and would really enjoy discussing religion sometime. I think this surprised him. Either way, I haven't gotten a call from him yet. And now that I think about it, he looks quite similar to Jeffrey Lewis.
That was the extent of my English camps. I had only one week of camps, both within five minutes from my apartment, and I got them over with nearly as soon as vacation began. I know other teachers in Daegu who were not as lucky as I was, and in fact, I don't know any who were. The weekend before the camps I was snowboarding, as I previously wrote about. That trip was actually Thursday to Saturday, which left me Sunday free. I took a trip to Busan, Korea's second largest city, which is on the coast about an hour away. I met some friends in the morning to do some bouldering in a new area. We spent a bunch of time wandering around, exploring potential climbs. Busan is much warmer despite the fact that it isn't too far from Daegu, so it was nice climbing outside for a change from the gym I go to twice a week.
The weekend following my camps I went on an overnight trip with a small group of teachers, students, and parents from my school. One teacher had asked if I was interested in doing this trip before school ended, and I was hesitant at first, because he speaks almost no English so I wasn't exactly sure what he was inviting me to, or what my responsibilities would be, if any. It turned out it was just a day hike - take a bus two hours north Saturday afternoon, chill in a motel by the mountain, and then up and down Sunday, hit a spa, and come home Sunday evening. This sounded all well and good. In reality, I sat around most of Saturday evening while the food was being cooked in a freezing common area - that's one interesting thing about Korea: they save a ton on energy usage by heating only classrooms or, in this case, bedrooms, but hallways and the like remain unheated. Anyway, we ate and then I stood around while everyone spoke Korean. That night I slept on the floor in a room with four other teachers. Sleeping on the floor can be uncomfortable as it is, but throw in snoring and the realization of a hike in the cold the next morning and it suuuucks. I put on my iPod to try and relax myself into sleep, but halfway through Dark Side of the Moon I knew it wasn't going to help at all. I managed to get a few hours at some point, some how.
The next day we were up bright and early, and I was ready to go right away, but it took about two hours to get everyone up, eat, and get organized. The hike took about 3 hours up and wasn't too bad at the beginning. It was only very cold but the sun was coming out and we were still low enough to be sheltered from the wind. As we got higher up, it got worse and the sun didn't make a damn bit of difference, and the wind was absolutely deadly. There were patches of snow here and there, and some people opted for crampons at these spots. By the time I made it to the top, my toes were freezing, my hands were freezing, and I had spent most of the hike wishing I wasn't doing the hike. The view was okay, and there was an observatory located nearby, but it wasn't open to the public so I couldn't go in to defrost. I was one of the first ones up there, and one of the first ones down.
Later on, when everyone had come back down, we chowed some food and headed to the men's side of a spa - or public bath - where we all stripped down naked with a bunch of other strangers and sat around in hot tubs and saunas. This was my second time in a place like this, and it is of course very strange to us Western folk who have all sorts of hang-ups about being naked. I'm learning not to really care though, and it makes you think our reservations the first time you go in and realize you are probably the only person out of dozens there that think its strange that everyone is naked. These places are super relaxing and cheap and after spending all day on a frozen mountain it was great. I didn't get too many questioning looks about my tattoos, which, from what I am told, many people here think only convicts have.
The following two weeks, I had no camps, and my vacation wasn't scheduled until the very end of January. I still had some work to do though, two conversation classes per day at my school (that I was getting extra pay for!). Other than those classes I didn't have to be in at school, which, again, is more than I can say for some other foreign teachers, because according to our contracts we only have those seven official vacation days, so some people have to sit at a desk and do nothing all vacation if they don't have any camps scheduled. I still came in early and stayed late, using the time to plan out my next semester's lessons and so on. Regardless, compared to a normal school day, I still came in late and left early, so all was good. The classes themselves were okay. The levels of the students were very different, so if I was helping the really low-level kids, I was ignoring the high-level kids, and vice versa. Either way, I got the classes done with, picked up some extra cash, and got a lot of work done ahead of time for next semester.
The weekend in between my two weeks of conversation classes, I went up to Seoul for the first time since my eight-day orientation program in late August. I took the bullet train up and went to visit Seoul Tower before I met up with a friend of mine from that orientation, Eddie, in Itaewon for dinner. Itaewon is an area of Seoul that has a ton of foreign restaurants and clubs, and is apparently close to an American military base. As such, I saw more Westerners than I had seen since I left the states practically. We had Mexican food with a Korean friend of his (of limited-English abilities) at a restaurant where some soldiers were conducting some sort of event where they would go up on stage and congratulate each other for jobs well done. Maybe a going away thing, who knows. From there we went to Hongdae, a really jumpin area with a ton of bars and clubs, and not quite as Westernized as Itaewon. After a few drinks and watching people slip on the ice, we dropped Eddie's friend off at the subway (with a bit of convincing, he was set up with her by a friend and she didn't want to go home alone) and waited for his girlfriend, with whom we went out for a bit more before barely catching the last bus to Incheon, a sprawling city just outside of Seoul where Eddie lives.
One of the main points of my visit was a poker game that was organized for Saturday evening. We relaxed all day Saturday, taking a walk and watching a movie, until it was game time. The first game we got a little crazy and played Texas Hold 'Em with jokers wild with seven people with a 2,000 won buy in just for the hell of it. The real game was with eight people and no shenanigans with the jokers. I got third place which meant I got my 10,000 won buy-in back, which was good enough for me. Eddie took the 50,000 first-place pot, breaking a losing streak he had going. Then it was off to a different part of the city for a rock show, cheap beer, darts, pool, video games, street food, meeting random Koreans and going to a norae bang with them, and then witnessing a low-powered but long-running fight between a couple groups of Korean guys and girls in their early 20's maybe. The next day I forgot my iPod at Eddie's and headed back to Seoul to catch a slow train back to Daegu, reading a bit, but mostly sleeping. I always end up sleeping during bus or train or plane trips, I don't know why, its just become my traveling routine.
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