My School and Apartment, Part II: My Apartment

Hello! As promised, here is the second half of my two-part mega-post. Again, sorry these are coming so slowly, but the combination of a) my laziness, b) lamentable writing skills, and c) OCD to make my posts not look like a pile of crap makes for little motivation.

My Apartment

When I first arrived at my school, two of my co-teachers accompanied me to a nearby real estate office (there's seriously one every two or three blocks in Seoul) and signed a one-year contract on an apartment, that day.

With this teaching program, the Korean government subsidizes rent (but not utilities), and it's up to the school to find a place for the guest English teacher to stay.

Apparently, my school didn't know they were going to receive another (yes, another) guest English teacher until pretty late, so they didn't have an apartment ready for me. The one we signed for that day turned out to be fairly old and dirty... so much so that one of my co-teachers felt sorry for me and took it upon herself to find a different place. So, she somehow wiggled out of the first contract, and after about two weeks or so of living in a dirty, old apartment with few amenities, I moved to a brand-spanking new place with built-in clothing cabinets, shelves, a desk, and building-wide internet. It's so brand-spanking new, in fact, that they weren't even finished building the complex when I moved in; they just finished installing everything one or two weeks ago. Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures of my old place, but here are some of my current place.

Built-in "closet" space, desk, and shelves: rare commodities.

This is basically my entire apartment. It's a one-room office-tel (Korean-English portmanteau word for "office-hotel") with a very small kitchen and bathroom. You will see just how small in a bit. That picture was taken from the entrance, directly in front of which is the bathroom. Here's a picture of the kitchen, entrance, and the door to the bathroom, as seen from the center of the room:

There's my reflection in the cabinet! And my underwear in the washer...

Now for the bathroom. Get ready for some culture shock, folks. Rae used to tell me about Korean office-tel bathrooms when we were in America, but I had completely forgotten about them until arriving here. So now that I slathered on a little bit of suspense-sauce, please focus your attention to the following:

The bathroom entrance...

Toiletries of a sundry variety.

The can.

Hm? Looks like a normal bathroom. But wait, why is there no shower? Why is there a drain in the center of the floor?? Why is the floor tiled like the bottom of a shower stall??? Could it be??? The bathroom is the shower stall??? Yes. Yes, it is.

Damn you, faucet-redirector.

This is pretty standard for a small, one-room apartment in Korea. The entire bathroom is also a shower room, and everything gets wet while you take a shower. In some larger office-tels, the bathroom will be a little larger, and the shower area will have a glass divider separating it from the rest of the bathroom (like a more normal bathroom). But even then, the shower is not designed to be self-contained, so one should expect the entire bathroom floor to be wet after showering. Hence those plastic green-blue bathroom slippers in the leftmost picture above. It's a little hard to get used to, and I haven't yet decided if I should leave the shower head affixed to the wall or if I should hold it in my hand while showering. I've tried both ways, and the former is a lot more convenient, but also results in more water leaking out of the bathroom. Another small annoyance is how the shower is connected to the faucet; sometimes, I forget to redirect the water flow from the shower head back to the faucet...

Overall, my apartment is rather nice, I'd say. As far as apartments in Seoul go, it's pretty standard, and it has some nice amenities (like the built-in desk/shelves/cabinets and the building-wide internet). Plus, it's brand-new. There are some downsides, but they aren't that major and I'm too lazy to list them. Anyway, I definitely can't complain, considering my rent is subsidized. Also, my place is literally a five-minute walk to my school; this is super nice.

Welp, that's about it, I guess. These pictures were taken when I first moved in and my apartment was a lot more sparsely equipped. Now, I have a nice coat tree, various pots and pans, a microwave, rice cooker, and a comically large laundry drying rack. I will probably post more up-to-date pictures later on, as well as pictures of the outside of my building and the surrounding area.

Until then, stay happy and healthy. Peace out.

My School and Apartment, Part I: My School

Hello, friends, family, former bosses, and... other people? Sorry I've been so lazy. I've finally reached a point in Final Fantasy II (for my iPod touch) where I decided that writing this entry might be more fun than dungeon crawling and trying to determine what to do next from disconnected plot events and frustratingly terse dialogue. So, let's get right to it.

My School

At the end of orientation, we were told the schools to which we were assigned; I was placed at Gongyeon Elementary School in northeast Seoul, where I teach mainly fifth and sixth graders.

In Korea, elementary school consists of grades one through six. English is part of the core curriculum, and EPIK is the government program that puts at least one native English speaker in every public school in the country.

View Larger Map

Ye olde, dusty hallway.

More dusty hallway action.

Like many schools in Korea, Gongyeon is old and dusty. The halls are cold in the winter and purportedly hot in the summer, because there is no building-wide central A/C. (Each room has its own individual unit, though, so temperature-induced discomfort is limited only to hallway travel.) Bathroom stalls mostly feature "squatters" (or what I like to call "floor urinals"); and there's only one, large roll of toilet paper available for the whole bathroom. You just have to take a whole wad of TP before you enter a stall and hope it's enough. Also, there was no running hot water until this year. It sounds like a dump, but it's a comfortable and lively dump.

The school consists of a large, (horizontally mirrored) L-shaped building with a shorter wing jutting out of the top of the "L." (Zoom in a few times in the map above to see what I mean.) This structure lines the perimeter of an expansive, dusty field, where kids play soccer during their breaks; indeed, the most likely cause of the school's dustiness. There is no cafeteria, so everyday, food is transported in carts from the kitchens to each class's homeroom classroom and dished out to students and teachers alike in metal trays. Lunches are healthy, yummy, and crazily cheap (more on this later).

Back.

Front.

The pictures to the right show the front and back entrances to the school, both located on the long, center portion of the complex. In the lefthand picture, you can see the Great Dusty Field and the shorter, west wing in the background. Everyone enters and exits school from the back.

Although the school lacks the feel and amenities of a modern building (many examples of which I mentioned earlier), the one thing on which it does not skimp is presentation-related technology in the classrooms. Every classroom is outfitted with a desktop workstation (albeit a fairly low-spec one) that is connected to a projector or large, flatscreen LCD TV. And in the "English Zone," the projector screen is a touch-screen that syncs with the desktop computer.

The "English Zone" is what they call a special classroom dedicated to studying English. With some exceptions, Korean students mostly stay in their homeroom classrooms, and the teachers are the ones who must move around between classes. Because one classroom is used for many subjects, a given subject teacher cannot dedicate the room (with subject-specific decor, for example) strictly to his or her needs. Therefore, many schools have an "English Zone," where students must go to for English class.

Here is the (by far) atypical classroom entrance to our English Zone:
The vestibule (yes, it has one; and yes, I just used the word "vestibule"):

And the inside:

Far more modern, fancy-pantsy, and colorful than traditional classrooms... but still very, very dusty.

So there you have it. A brief intro to my school. Coming soon is part two of my two-part series, "My School and Apartment, Part II: My Apartment." Now back to Final Fantasy II... I'm almost done with that trash.

Teaching Orientation

I am in the midst of my week-long orientation here with fellow EPIK applicants/teachers. Many semi-interesting people from all manner of English-speaking country.

We're at the National Institute for International Education, only for orientation. We don't know yet where we will be placed permanently.


View Larger Map

More to come later, once I move to my actual place.

Yoshi's-Life-in-Korea Eve

This is the night before I leave for Korea. I'm in Japan. My flight is at 9:30 AM. It lasts about three hours.

I just realized I messed up my taxes.