Orientation Week in Korea

I arrived to Seoul almost an hour later than expected, I chose the slowest customs line and my bags seemed to take forever to come out, I didn’t have wifi and didn’t know if the orientation group would still be at the airport, I accepted that I’d be on my own taking a bus to Gwangju, our orientation destination for the next week. But I wasn’t! They were still there waiting for me, the last to come. In the end it took an hour or more for the luggage truck to arrive and then for the buses to come so I wouldn’t have missed them anyway. After a 14 hour plane ride the journey continued another 4 hours to our destination, the Shingyang Park hotel in Gwangju.

For the next week the Shingyang Park hotel was our orientation bubble, a contained Korea surrounded by foreigners in the same situation and an unchanging hotel staff.  Served three meals a day it was almost like we were on vacation, a vacation in which we had class from 9-5 and if we wanted to make breakfast we had to be up even earlier; thanks to jet lag it was never missed. The first couple of nights I barely slept and was wide awake at 5:30 in the morning and crashing after the first two hours of orientation. To say it was hard would be an understatement, my body was physically and mentally drained and that tired eyeball pressure never left.

The orientation while tiring was an awesome experience, I wish the program in Spain had something similar because In Spain you show up and they throw you out with very little guidance and with no idea what to expect and do. Here, over 7 days they guided  us through teaching methodology, what to expect, class management,  demos, and intricacies and curiosities you may face in the work place. We even had a short 8 minute lesson presentation, which I thought was pointless because teaching to a bunch of your peers is a lot different than teaching in a classroom among kids, but  I can see it’s usefulness for those who may have never taught before. We even had a poorly misguided cultural excursion day where we drove an hour and a half to spend the day in doors (one of the only days where it wasn’t monsooning) making our lunch, a typical Korean dish; we also made  paper and we decorated a stationary thing with paper. All of this nonsense for a cultural excursion trip when the city we were in, not more than two minutes away had a preserved traditional Hanok village we all wanted to see. Later that evening we did go for Korean BBQ! so that did make up for it. Aside from this blemish the program was incredibly well run. It provided a conducive environment to meet new people and make friends with those people. Friends that I can now visit and do things with in a country where only two weeks ago I knew nobody.

Orientation ended last Monday with a ceremony and lunch with the co-teachers from each of our schools. We entered one by one and we went to the front of the room and introduced ourselves in Korean to the crowd of Koreans who had come to pick up their native teacher. I thought I had mine down pretty good and had it memorized, but as soon as I got up there words came out, just not the right ones and everything I had memorized I forgot and had to read off the card I prepared, but even then my pronunciation faltered.  I’m sure at that point my co-teacher begrudgingly raised her hand to signal who it is I would go to (we didn’t know at that point), resigned to be stuck with a foreigner who couldn’t at the very least read basic Korean off a card. Luckily during an unmentioned award ceremony I made up for it by winning an award for my enthusiastic and positive disposition during the program, something I was surprised to receive. Afterwards we had lunch with the impending realization that the bubble was about to pop; we were heading to the unknown in a Korea that had yet to be seen.

Coming up, my first week and experiences in Korea.