Working in Korea
I am in my second week of working in Korea and it is my first real week of actually teaching. Since I am still figuring things out this will be a short post. I’ll have information about orientation, my first day, first week, etc. etc. in the coming weeks!
I really recommend going with Korean Horizons over Korvia. I went with Korvia and while they were perfectly helpful they have very little experience working with the GOE program. I was the only person from Korvia, I’m fairly certain my recruiter got scammed by my driver, and I didn’t get any “free” stuff. Not even my hotel room. I’ll have a post talking about which recruiter to choose soon, but my PSA remains. Go with Korean Horizons.
I have been placed in Changwon!
Although Changwon was not even listed as one of my 4 requested places, I am actually very happy with this placement. Although not in such a gorgeous area as Namhae, Changwon makes up for it by being very well connected. I can take a bus or train to Busan in under an hour. I plan on visiting Busan on a daytrip this Saturday!
I have two schools. Both of them are elementary, and I generally am teaching the 6th grade students. This means I get paid an extra 100,000 won a month, however both of my schools are fairly far from my apartment. This means that on average I will be paying _____ a month in transport costs. But that’s alright! I’m still making more money and I would have had to travel to one of them either way.
There is, so far, a shocking amount of downtime. I will really need to work hard to come up with more portable hobbies while I am basically sitting around doing nothing. Honestly, this is going to be the hardest part of the job for me, clearly. I do not handle boredom well. Thus, I am writing this post, learning Italian, and Korean, and hopefully I will get to writing my book soon. However, this could very well be the slowest computer known to man that I am currently typing upon. So far as I can tell it is nearly 10 years old. In computer years, this thing is well over a 1000 years old. I am also the only one in the office with a computer this old. Depending on its mood it can take up to 5 minutes to load a page. Yikes.
But that’s my first check-in! Working in Korea already has its ups and downs (not least of which were my near immediate cravings for chocolate and cheese which this country lacks) but I think it will work out.
If you are curious about how I got here, check out my past posts!
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