Drift Reality > South Korea > July 2000

I arrived in Seoul last night after sitting on one plane (from New York to Taiwan) for 16 hours and sitting on another (Taiwan to Seoul) for three hours. I was taken to the Outback Steak House by the school supervisor who picked me up and I ate hot wings and drank beer in a desperate attempt to forget the torture of the past twenty hours. I was mildly surprised to find that I would be going to the school at 10 AM the next day for orientation.

"Orientation" turned out to be sitting in on two classes, and then proceeding to teach five classes in the evening. I taught four in one stretch and was on my feet for four straight hours, attempting to teach English to students of various ages who understood very little.

Though they did not speak much English, they managed to speak quite a bit of Korean to one another and giggle while pointing at me, at other times they would shriek like Banshees and I would stifle an urge to practice Taekwondo with them.

Anyway, I'm sorry if I'm coming off as a bit, umm. . .cantankerous, but I am functioning on six hours of sleep in the past two days and I'm jet lagged and my throat is sore from talking for hours on end. Well, I have eight classes to teach tomorrow so I think that this baptism by fire will be for the best.

I am positive that if anything, I will come out of this year with the patience of the Dalai Lama, and the endurance of a stallion. The good news is that I'm fortunate enough to get my own apartment, which is great, though it is a twenty-minute commute by subway.

I have been talking endlessly to everyone that speaks English and I am confident that it is only a matter of weeks before I have a comfortable grasp of everything. The school is actually quite good and there are some great students.

The head of the school is a very honest man who is a graduate of NYU and we had a good chat today. I'm looking for a good Taekwondo studio but it seems like there is one on every block so I'm not worried about finding a good one that has English-speaking instructors. Apparently, it's much more intense here so I should earn my black belt in half a year or so.

Click here to see a short film on Taekwondo in Korea.

The people are extremely friendly and everything is cheap cheap cheap so it shouldn't be a problem saving money (even me). There are a few great kids my age who are also teachers and they have helped to make me feel very comfortable.

There are some very startling things about Korea that I will disclose at a later date, but in many ways, their culture is just alien to me. For one, they have these machines in the arcade where you step on large foot sized buttons in synch to various Korean pop toons. The end result is a room full of Koreans jumping up and down in front of arcade booths with crazy pop music blaring in the background.

Click here to see the dancing machines.

Also, everyone here smokes but I have been doing a good job abstaining. Apparently, there is something called the "yellow wind" or something that is when metallic dust from the South comes in for a couple of months. I think that this will do a sufficient amount of damage to my lungs so I can avoid smoking. Well, the best news is that in two days I have a three-day vacation (a rarity here), and I will have about five days in total to adjust and to move into my apartment. I will write again then.