Tomorrow morning I will teach my last class ever in Gohan. After that I have two weeks in the English village, and then I’m done.

On my last day of regular classes at Gohan Elementary School the kids in grades 4, 5, and 6 made me some really awesome cards. Presenting the cards to me with their big puppydog eyes, they sure knew how to make a guy feel guilty for abandoning them!

I’ve scanned in the best of the cards which I now present to you in decreasing order of age, i.e. increasing order of cuteness.

Sixth Grade

A lot of the sixth grade letters were folded in fascinating ways. Here are two folds I liked.

The English on this one might be sweet, but the Korean says “China seems good for you, don’t come back.” I guess not everyone loves me.

Sixth grade, you see, is about 1.5 the size of the other classes, and all of them act very much like I would have at that age with a foreign teacher who wouldn’t punish me. My “coteacher” liked to show up 25 minutes late each time, rendering that class all but a waste of everyone’s time. Hence the exasperated stick figure of me.

The sixth grade girls have come up with their own creepy character.

Several other cards had it too. Some kind of magic gay pincushion?

Front.

Back. This girl always conspired to sit next to me at lunch time, so I think she really means it.

Yes, I hope to study many things in China.

It wouldn’t be a secret if I told you the secret he’s keeping, now would it?

Fifth Grade

Inside.

Outside

3D pop-up magic.

At least he didn’t draw a Vista GUI.

Tears?

Scary bird/clown tears?

The monkey’s evil shadow is about to make it’s move.

But “This” was right!

I’m labeled the smaller one.

Fourth Grade

Guess who that’s a picture of.

That looks a lot like the KangwonLand jester mascot.

The yellow’s a bit hard to read. The important part is the picture’s labeled “<-- Mr. Abam face".

A suppressed left-hander perhaps?

This is a card true to my heart. Unlike the other neatly cut and folded cards, this one has ripped edges and no folds. In other words, just the kind of card I would have made in 4th grade. And I still draw like he does. (I think that’s supposed to be my shaved head and not my exposed brain…)

I will miss you all too.

Nine days ago High1, the ski resort down the street, had it’s “Grand Open,” as they call such things here. It looks very promising, although up to Thursday, the last day I went, they only had two runs and two lifts open. The place is all brand new and very, well, shiny.

Here are some quick stats from the site (in case you didn’t go and read the Korean yourself): within its 5 square kilometers are 18 runs that, stretched end-to-end, make 21km. Raising you a maximum of 681 meters are 3 gondolas, 5 lifts, 11 conveyor belts(!), and 1 T-bar. They have two big lodge/condo complexes, descriptively called “Valley” and “Mountain” (I’m not translating, they’re named in English).

Valley.

The “High1 Country Club”, which was until but two weeks ago called the “KangwonLand Golftel”, is as well connected by gondola.


Gondola cables down to the KangwonLand Golftel cum High1 C.C.

The KangwonLand casino and hotel is just down from the Mountain lodge, but is not actually connected by any sort of cable-based transport.


KangwonLand Hotel and Casino

Topping it all off, they have two reservoirs to supply their 691 snow machines. And, last but not least, a rotating restaurant at the very top of it all, of which I neglected to get a close up picture. It can be seen from afar, unfinished back in October, here.

Check out this silly little flash-based slope map and notice that the lift names are a bit of a multiple choice “which one does not belong”… however, since that is more cartoony than useful, I have digitally remastered this picture of a faded, outdoor hiking trail map which includes the ski resort on it.


(This took me longer than I want to admit, but really it was an excuse to start learning how to use The Gimp which I must say is one of the more impressive free programs out there…)

As I type this very moment it is beautifully snowing like crazy, yet I am not snowboarding! Why, might you ask? Well, opening week was free, so not having my season pass yet was no problem. It is no long opening week and no longer free, and since I really should have a season pass, I don’t want to pay! I bought a season pass in September. Later, I learned that Gohan Elementary School is starting a ski team (ski team in name but everyone on the team will snowboard). I though it sounded like great fun to help coach, and so offered. Not asking to be paid, they were perfectly happy to take me on as assistant coach, and offered me a free season pass. At first I thought that this was very nice, but having already paid for one it was a missed opportunity, until the ticket office told me I could transfer the one I bought to my friend Mike, which I proceeded to do. Unfortunately I am now at the mercy of Koreans to do something involving large groups of people, namely provide all the passes for team and staff of the school. This is apparently a bad thing, and the reason why neither I nor the ski team yet have our passes!

Bah.


These kids should be just about ready if the Winter Olympics come to Gangwon Province in 2014.

[UPDATE 7/5/07: Korea lost their bid to Russia. Sucks.]

There are lots of pics from my first snowboarding visit to High1 here, as well as some pictures of last week’s demonstration class in this little town six hours away and our little tour of a piece of the near-by DMZ – which is another blog post entirely and these damnable things take me too long to write!

Late yesterday morning, as I was stuck in the office of Gohan Boys’ Middle School (my regular morning classes having been canceled) some big, fluffy snowflakes started falling from the cold clouds above.

By lunchtime it was turning into quite the storm, altough everything down in the valley bottom was still melting on contact.

Later, when the clouds cleared a bit, you could see the trees, higher up the mountains, were holding onto plenty of shiny white crystals.

It started snowing again later, and kept at it during the night.

I was not surprised to see that the snow managed to have some staying power when I woke up (after sleeping in a bit – today’s morning classes having also been canceled, this time for a sports day…).

What a way to wake up: with one white world…

Bottom floor’s mine.

I call this playground my front yard.

While this thin sheet of snow will probably melt with today’s shining sun, and is no big deal in most minds, just remember: I have a ski resort 500 meters from my doorstep. And so I share my excitement with you.

Dear global climate change, bring on the blizzards!

p.s. Check out the rest of my most recent pictures here. I’ve even started adding picture descriptions. I know. Whoa.

Having just recieved mail at Gohan Boys’ Middle School, it was made pretty clear to me that theirs was the address I had been given. Seeing as how I do work there, to have given some of you that address is not the end of the world. Mail will get to me. Still, I’m only there once a week, whereas I’m at Gohan Elementary everyday. Here is a new, better address, for your records, if you should have records, and if you should care:

Adam Skory
고한초등학교
233-812 강원도 정선군 고한읍 고한12리

Adam Skory
Gohan Chodeunghakkyo
233-812, Gangwon-do, Jeongseon-gun,
Gohan-eup, Gohan 12 ri
South Korea

For the convenience of everyone, but especially for the sake of those of you whom Bill Gates has deemed unworthy of Korean fonts (if up there, under the first instance of “Adam Skory” is a bunch of gobble-dee-gook [no slur intended!] rather than pretty Hangul characters, that means you) I have made an image of it. All you need to do is click on the image and then print, glue, copy, tape, or whatever it to the big box of presents you’re sending me!

I tracked down my house and various places of work on Google Earth, instead of doing something more useful like studying Korean, going to the gym, preparing lessons for next week, going to the market, or cleaning.

As you can see (you may want to click on the picture to see it full-size), I apparently live right at the edge of the part of Korea worth seeing in detail. Kallae Elementary School, where I teach on Wednesdays, is about a ten minute walk from the edge of the high-res world into my low-res world. My house, on the Gohan Elementary school-grounds, is another twenty minutes west from Kallae on foot. Finding my house was a matter of inputing the coordinates I measured from my GPS one day. With that as a reference point, and this place being small and squoze into such a narrow valley, it wasn’t too hard to figure out which of the bigger white blobs corresponded to which buildings. The various brand-new ski resort buildings aren’t on here, which shouldn’t be too surprising.

Looks like I’m quite close to the ocean, eh? Well, I’m about 35 miles away as the magpie flies but even by car it’s at least little over an hour’s drive. These are some very crazy curvy roads. By bus or train you’re looking at more like two hours. From here express buses pretty much only go to Seoul. Any other destination and it’s a local bus or nothing. Trains, in these parts anyway, are just slow in general – although cheaper, more comfortable, and providing of better scenery.

Speaking of birds flying, the Supervisor of Foreign Language Instruction of the Gangwon Provincial Office of Education (whew! be glad I only gave you his probably somewhat shortened English title) has promised that at our next English teacher gathering we will get a chance to visist that yellow line near the horizon (probably from a safe distance, unfortunately). There we will see some migratory birds doing what probably pretty much everyone else coming from where they’re coming from wishes they could do. And those folk probably wouldn’t be so bird-brained as to return in the spring. He also told us to work here many years and that we shouldn’t worry about getting nuked.

While I’m off doing more useful things and not getting nuked in the process, you should download Google Earth. Then you should click here. (If Google Earth doesn’t open automatically, try saving the linked file and then opening it with Google Earth.)

Rainy Saturday all holed up in my little residence here at Gohan Elementary School. With the TV on. I’ve never been much of a TV watcher, but ever since they hooked up my cable I keep finding my thumb drifting toward that remote. The provision of cable and a TV on which to watch it is stipulated in my contract. This surprised me at first – I would certainly have preferred they provide internet, which I’m still waiting to get hooked up on my own 100 won coin – but I now realize that, at least in my case, cable TV has actually been very soothing. TV kills the silence of living alone, something that is quite new to me. Sure I’ve spent plenty of time by my lonesome, having traveled to many a far-flung spot all my by self. Here now I’m finding out how different moving alone is from staying alone. The part that kills me is not loneliness. The only time I’ve felt lonely, in fact, was my first night here and most of the following day. It was a very intense loneliness brought on by the abrupt transition from the high-drive socializing of a bunch of fast friend peers all lumped together with 10 free evenings at EPIK orientation to a silent night in an empty house in a strange little mountain town. Fortunately, having uprooted myself to strange places before, I was able to identify the reasons for how I felt and knew it would go away. What didn’t go away was the silence. The silence really kills me, it piles up on top of itself, traps and suffocates my brain. Background noise is like a pacemaker for my thoughts, occupying the part of my brain that bounces off the walls if not restrained. TV does occupy more of my brain than I would often like, but at least for now the sound of human voices, even ones I can’t hardly understand, is truly wonderful, if a little bit terribly guiltily so.
Cable TV here has a number of highlights I would like to share with you. Moving up through the numerous channels, you first pass a whole lot of local news channels. While I can sort of guess the news topics from visual cues and the few and far between words I understand, the newsworthiness is often entirely lost to me. They seem to interview a disproportionate number of old ladies who look very disapproving of whatever it is they are talking about, to show a large number of panning shots of quotidian life, particularly of ubiquitous apartment buildings and farm houses, and to sprinkle in a surprising amount of undercover-cam footage with blurred-out faces of people pretty much sitting around chatting very unexcitedly and, I must say, entirely unsisnisterly about something that I can only take on faith to be appropriately nefarious.
Next, there’s lots of talkshowish programs, with plenty of cute font, brightly colored captions bouncing around the screen, highlighting the more amusing statements they’re saying. After that there are pretty much 24/7 at least a few soap operas set in ancient times East Asia, some Korean, some Chinese with subtitles. Among these, the only thing making any of the programs unique to my untrained eye is the wide range of production quality; some of the Chinese ones I’m pretty sure borrowed their costumes from a high school drama class.
Further into the channels come educational programs of teachers lecturing about a wide variety of topics. These are very exciting. Every couple of minutes they even go so far as to change from the predominant shot of chalkboard and hand with piece of chalk writing on chalkboard to show the teacher’s face for at least a few seconds. I have one of these programs on right now. We are learning high school algebra. The teacher has clean fingernails and holds that chalk very well. Unfortunately he uses roman letters for variables, which I find a little disappointing.
After that there are a number of sports channels, showing local and international sporting events.
Following that there are some channels that show a lot of American movies, couple-year-old primetime network series, and a few wonderfully horrible old-school shows (such as the A-team; I don’t know how people took themselves seriously back then!), presenting a surprisingly satisfying selection of programming in English.
Finally come the best channels of all. Second best is the 24/7 Go channel, channel 73. My personal favorites, though, are channels 77 and 78, the live video game channels. Here one can’t help but become engrossed in the epic battle between slightly rotund, sweaty Korean teen-aged boys trying to destroy each other’s avatars or demondroid armies or whatever through the medium of networked personal computers, complete with corporate sponsorship and attractive commentators.
Aside from the above programming, I find the advertisements rather fascinating as well. About half of all advertisements, pitching most any product, are all the same: a cute, mid-to-late-twenties Korean girl against a clean, stylish background, speaking in a sing-songy half-whisper, with some fancy-font words floating by and almost always a very quick little jingle at the very end. Seriously, those are all the same, whether it’s green tea, home lones, or toilets. Also, there are a few great ads on of just the sort made fun of in Lost In Translation, particularly good is one showing Pierce Brosnan in a suit. It just zooms around him for a while, and at the very end, he says, simply and slowly, “The Suit.”
Gladly I don’t need to wear “The Suit” myself at work. I do, however, have to wear a collared shirt and non-jeans. I actually haven’t been explicitly told not to wear jeans, but I plan to wait until I’ve thoroughly ingratiated myself before asking. I have been explicitly told not to wear flip-flops, yet at the same time it is required at the elementary schools to take your shoes off at the door and change into slippers. I bought my own pair of slippers to take with me after spending all Wednesday with half my foot hanging off of the biggest extra pair they had. I’m glad no students noticed this, as I’m sure they would not have let me hear the end of it. This I am sure of because of all the other things they don’t let me hear the end of. Of foremost interest are the presence of hair on my face, the relative lack of it on my head, and the size and shape of my nose. Whether despite or because of such exotic features, the majority of my younger female students have been assuring me that I am “very handsome,” even a few male students and teachers have echoed that. In fact, last Saturday, when I was meeting people at some schools before starting work, several teachers happily said to me “good imajee [image]!” My co-teacher in charge of helping me out, Mr. Heo, explained that they were pleased that they got the most tall, anglo-saxon looking of the new teachers coming to the county. Clearly my English is thus the most authentic, right? Anyway, the girls’ middle school is probably the best place to teach; perhaps it’s just the novelty, but they were glued to my every word. And while for now I just let the rockstarstatus amuse me, I very quickly grew tired of the one girl who decided to stalk me through the hallways all day long. At one point she saw me talking to some other girls at the other end of the hallway, I suppose found this unacceptable, and literally sprinted over and tried her best to edge the other girls away. I think I need to practice the Korean for “Thank you, I’m very flattered. Please do be so kind as to relay your positive impressions of me to any sisters or cousins you might have who are about ten years older than you are.”
At the boys’ schools, don’t get this kind of attention, which can certainly be a relief. Still, the boys seem to like me too, and I have had absolutely no discipline problems at all, something other teachers are already complaining about on our EPIK 2006 email list. I am keeping in mind that the lack of misbehavior might, like the girls’ attentions, fade as quickly as my novelty. They do still use the “love stick” in schools here!
I teach at two elementary schools, the boys’ middle school, the boys’ high school, the girls’ middle school, the girls’ high school, and once it’s completed, at the “Jeongseon English Experience Center,” a brand-new facility for role-playing English practice, about 30km away. That is 7 schools, depending on how you count – since the boys’ high school and middle school are connected, as are the girls’ schools. In total I have 24.5 class hours. My contract limits me to 18 class-hours, so this means (should mean – I’ll be looking very carefully at my paycheck!) 6.5 hours’ overtime each week. They call these “special classes,” and never asked me if I wanted to do them. According to my contract they should have. I suppose I could complain, but at W20,000/hr (about US$21/hr) overtime, the added income is enough for me to try and put up with it. What I’m worried about is how much work it will prove to be, outside of class, to prepare material for 10 different grades, as well as the English Experience Center. But, as with everything, time will tell.
For now, I’m more worried about being able to teach effectively and cheerfully, with a loud enough voice, come Monday. Since about Thursday, I’ve had a sore throat, very unpleasant nasal congestion, and fatigue. Seriously I’m pretty sure it’s SARS, but I’m telling myself it’s a bad cold, brought on by the stress of getting adjusted during my first week. I was thinking of leaving town this weekend, possibly even going to Seoul to buy some things I want, particularly an electronic Korean-English dictionary and some Korean grammar books, but instead I’m just resting, writing this freaking novel (hey, you’re still reading it, aren’t you?), and watching TV.

Epilogue: On the way to the internet cafe, USB flashdrive with this post in my pocket, I was harangued by some middle school girls. They were very concerned that I am unshaven, and truly shocked that I should be wearing flip-flops with no socks! They must have been very concerned for my naked feet because they proceeded to follow me down the street and giggle rabidly. Don’t worry ladies, my toes can handle it!

English Program in Korea, or EPIK, has essentially two roles, so far as I can tell. The first is to be a recruiting company. They advertise around the world, giving an impression of a standardized, nationally run program. They then process applicants and pay airfare to Korea. Upon arrival, EPIK takes on its second role, which is the brief training of the new teachers. It is at this mandatory, ten day orientation that it becomes very clear that EPIK is not at all a nationally run program. To be fair, when signing the contract it is made quite explicit that said contract is between the teacher (in my case, me) and the Office of Education to which said teacher is going (in my case, Gangwon-do). But the true extent of the decentralization of the program is made quite clear when you’re at orientation for a whole week before you can meet with your provincial coordinator and actually have a chance at finding out more about where you’re going than just which province it’s in. Only later to discover that all this coordinator knew was which county you’re going to and that he was blatantly wrong about which town in that county. The experience I speak of is of course my own, and the culmination of it happened Friday as I was riding in the car of my co-teacher, who had come to meet me at the Gangwon-do Education Center, and was driving me to my new home. He was telling me details of a town with a name that was most decidedly not the Jeongseon I was expecting. I remember like it was yesterday (or, at least like it was 5 days ago) that the Gangwon-do coordinator told me I was going to, specifically, Jeongseon town, not just a broad assignment to Jeognseon county. But loandbehold there I was, riding along with some town named Gohan looming large enough in the conversation that I had no choice but to reckon that thereto I must be going. And hereto I have come, to find out that while Gohan loomed large in that conversation, it does everything else pretty small indeed.
But before I tell you what little more I can about where I am, I want to say a few more things about how I got here. I’ll spare you too many details about the flight over and such, except to mention the part where the weight of my shoes, which I had strapped to the outside of my backpack, pulled open the zipper and caused everything to fall out, including, most unfortunately, my external hard drive and my laptop. The external hard drive appears to be broken, as does the hard drive inside my laptop (although the rest of the latop is OK). I made a back up of the internal drive onto the external drive that very morning, but, when all my data was in one proverbial basket and that basket very unproverbially came open, I now find myself thoroughly fuct. I have low hopes of finding anyone who can fix a Mac around here. Somehow, having uprooted myself to the other side of the world, losing all that data feels like just another thing I’ve had to give up to come here, and so does not bum me out as much as I think it would have back home. What does bum me out is not having a fully functional computer of my own.
Technological tragedies aside, I arrived at Incheon International an hour early, found the EPIK counter. They bought all the already arrived teachers dinner and then we loaded our stuff onto a truck and ourselves onto a bus – or a “limojin” as they seem to be called around here – the last of four buses to collect teachers from the airport over the previous two days. A very nice three hour nap later and I arrived at about 12:30 pm at the Korea National University of Education. , outside of the city of Cheongju. We all registered, got a guidebook, a map of the Cheongju area, a map of our province, a textbooky thing to go with the many lectures to come, and our very own stainless steel EPIK mug. I lugged my gear to my dorm room on the third floor, waking up my roommate, Patrick from Newcastle, took a shower, passed out.
The following ten days were a mixed bag indeed. We were tightly scheduled between classes and three cafeteria meals, which evenings thankfully freeish. Freeish because we were required to sign out and back in should we be leaving campus, with a curfew of 11:00 pm. Luckily the curfew was not strictly enforced! Most of our lectures turned out, in my opinion, to be fairly well-intentioned but useless. Our lecturers were some EPIK staff, some local Korean teachers, and some veteran EPIK teachers. I liked the lectures that were very on-topic and that gave a lot of good, practical advice and ideas to use in the classroom. Unfortunately, many of the rest of the lectures became dominated by the same people asking the same questions over and over and over again. All of these questions were legitimate things to be worried about, like visa issues, tax issues, housing, transportation, etc., but it was obvious to me very early in the program which of these questions I could get an answer to at that point and which I could not. The former I quickly resolved, and the latter I just gave up on, knowing I’d find out when I got wherever I was going.
Because of so much wasted time I think the EPIK office is wasting a lot of money on having so long of an orientation, all the material given to us, the food, the housing and the field trips must cost them a lot of money. On the practical side, I’d love to have all the good lectures over five days, and have them give to money saved to each teacher as a nice bonus. On the personal side, orientation went by damned fast. It hasn’t been long since I graduated and I sure haven’t forgotten how to turn my brain off during bad lectures. Outside of the lectures, I actually had a good time. It’s easy to make fast friends with people who have a similar background and who are all similarly in a strange country embarking on a very similar sort of adventure. A day and a half in Seoul and plenty of nights out and I’d say orientation was well made the best of. I was getting very anxious to move on to the next step, but now that I have so much to do to get my life here in order, on top of the responsibilities of a real job, I’m missing this past care-free week and a half.
Now here I am, feeling rather alone, in this tiny town of Gohan, Jeongseon county, Gangwon province, Republic of Korea. Just that I’m in this town at all was one surprise, but there’ve been others. For one, due to a current housing shortage, they’ve put in me in an official residence at one of the elementary schools I will be working at. My commute on Fridays will be unbeatable! I tried my best to expect the very minimum housing promised in the contract, and so I was extremely happy to see my new place. I’ve got two rooms, a small kitchen, a bathroom. Brand new appliances: TV (big). , microwave, a minifridge and a full-sized refrigerator (?!).
, and a washing machine (the buttons on which I spent about 15 minutes deciphering and labeling in English with sticky notes this morning). .
An enormous new dresser,
and a brand-new queen sized bed (I guess they expect me to find a girlfriend). No cookware as yet, and while no was cookware ever promised, it sounds like they’re going to be buying me some soon.
My good fortune in housing is due to another good fortune; the local housing shortage is due to the large number of construction workers who are building a ski resort right outside of town. The local economy used to be entirely coal-mining, I have been told. Around ten to twenty years ago all the mines closed, and everyone left. My co-teacher explained that this is why they have a two elementary schools, two middle schools, and two high schools with very small numbers of students and in such a small town. A while back, in an attempt to revive the local economy, the government gave a special exemption and allowed for the construction of the only casino in Korea in which Korean nationals are allowed to gamble. This casino is called Kangwon Land and it’s only a few miles up in the mountains from Gohan. I have yet to check it out, but from what I’ve read it’s quite big, and they have branched out to include a large resort and a golf course. Kangwon Land is currently branching further to include a ski resort, slated to open this December. From the the girls’ high school and middle school, which I visited yesterday and which is higher up on a hill, it’s possible to see some of the ski runs and ski lifts. Needless to say, what with the turn-off up to the resort literally across the street from the elementary school that is my new home, I think this should be a pretty good winter! . But, this isn’t even the end of the good surprises. Local teachers are allowed to use some of the facilities at the Kangwon Land staff housing complex, just a few minutes walk from my home. I’ve been granted access to the gym and the swimming pool, and plan to check them out soon. I have, however, not been granted access to their internet room, apparently the previous English teacher, one Mr. Parker, abused that privilege and has set a poor precedent for all gringos.
While the director at the Kangwon Land employee housing might not trust me, everyone else has been really nice to me so far. Just on my way to this internet cafe I stopped for some noodles. I got to talking to a guy working there, in his small English and my teensyweensy Korean. He was wearing a Burton snowboards shirt, so I asked if he snowbaorded. Turns out he’s a snowboard instructor and now I have a snowboarding buddy. I think he said he could get me a discount on a season pass to the new resort. On top of that, after lunch, they refused to let me pay! Next, I was a little confused trying to find this internet cafe again – I had a card with some minutes left I wanted to use up. I asked someone, and they forced me into their car and drove me here. Finally, just now the guy next to me noticed I was almost out of time as he was finishing up playing some Starcraft, and he gave me his card with 28 minutes left on it. I’m getting worried that there’s some awful conspiracy to be nice to me!