Super-Badass Train Will Connect Seoul to Busan in 90 Minutes

From the Korea Times, a new train is being tested with a top speed of 430km/hour (267miles/hour)(!!!).  For my North Carolina readers, of which there are at least two, that’s Asheville to Raleigh in one hour.  Fuck. Yes.

The super-badass looking HEMU-400X is coming to Korea if it passes government testing.

The story says government testing will be thorough due to unforeseen problems with Korea’s current high-speed train, the KTX.  From the article:

In particular, the latest “KTX-Sancheon,’’ which was built through the country’s own technologies, suffered various mishaps including derailment and stoppages although there were no casualties.

The KTX currently tops out at 300km/hour (186m/hour). That’s not too shabby on its own, though I’d sure hate to be on one of those derailments!

Speaking of derailments, the high-fallutin’ US plan to introduce high-speed trains appears to have fallen off the tracks without ever moving forward.  Guess I might have to sign up for a car-share program if I don’t want to blow my savings when I get back from Korea.

It’s only Wednesday morning and Daniel already needs a weekend

After taking the Easter weekend to relax with family and friends, it’s been nonstop action for me as I prepare to leave for Korea on Thursday morning.

I began packing my bags on Monday. As I looked at the bed, piled with clothes and various indispensible electronic devices, I felt a little depressed. Will I really need all this stuff? Can’t I just buy new stuff once I’m in Korea? Will my bags even hold it all? I can’t answer the first two questions for sure, but it turns out that my bags will easily hold it all. In related news, I’m now a huge advocate for compression bags.

Later that night I received something like eight phone calls as my recruiter at Adventure Teaching tried to sort out a flight itinerary. They decided I should leave Thursday morning on a 7:35 flight to LAX.

Tuesday I drove to three hours to Atlanta for an interview with the Korean consulate. It was a group interview with four people including myself. As we sat in the waiting room, waiting on the fourth person to arrive, one lady said she’d been busily preparing for the interview. She’d heard that we might be expected to know things about Korean culture, history and current events. I spent the next several minutes vainly trying to recall the country’s president (it’s Lee Myung-bak).

It turned out that the interview wasn’t much of an interview. It was mostly stony silence punctuated by occasional questions and politely given answers. Our interviewer, a tall, stern-faced Korean man, flipped through each of our files and asked for clarification on certain items. He looked at a university transcript and asked one girl how she felt about her GPA. “Not good,” was her reply. When he came to me, he looked at my resume and then asked why I was going to Korea – grad school gave me some solid additions. “I’ve been partially employed for eight months,” seemed to be the simplest answer.

After the interview and a great Cuban meal for dinner, I walked back to my hostel and met a Belorussian-Canadian who’d just returned from Korea only weeks earlier. He offered to teach me the Korean alphabet. “It was designed to be quickly taught to illiterate peasants,” he said, “so I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” An &hour later I could read, write and properly pronounce every letter. This is important because I can now confirm that I’m at least as smart as a medieval Korean peasant.

Now it’s Wednesday morning and I’m dipping doughnuts in my coffee, waiting for the time when I can pick up my passport from the consulate. After that, it’s back home to get my bags, then I drive an hour to my mom’s house where I’m staying the night. Tomorrow morning, she’ll deliver me to CLT at the ungodly hour of 5:30 a.m. When I arrive in Seoul, the local time will be 6:32 p.m., Friday. The flight across the Pacific takes a whopping 13 hours, the longest I’ll ever have endured. Given my track record with successfully sleeping in flight, I expect to go more than 24 hours without hitting a REM cycle. I can’t wait!

-Daniel Daugherty

In which Daniel lands a job

At long last, one of us has a job in Korea. Jen’s still waiting for a position, but I received an offer shortly after my first interview, with Avalon English School. If all the paperwork goes through smoothly, I’ll be headed to Korea in a little less than a month.

I wasn’t sure about my phone interview. It was conducted while I was on the road, right after wolfing down some ribs at the landmark barbecue restaurant Rendezvous in Memphis. I took the call and headed outside to an alley. My interviewer sounded like a disinterested American female, but I was told many interviewers will sound this way and it’s best to maintain enthusiasm despite their lack of it. She didn’t even say her first name. Combine this with the noisy alley and I felt an increasing lack of confidence.

I had little time to prepare for it, too. The night before hitting the road to visit Jen’s father in Arkansas, I received a call from Adventure Teaching and had to head out to a wifi hotspot around midnight so I could download the contract details. This is normal because Korea’s 14 hours ahead and it was daytime. What I wasn’t expecting was an essay prompt – 500 words on one of nine provided topics. I went with “Is torture ever justified?” and stayed up late arguing against Dick Cheney’s favorite talking points, then woke up early to go out and email it before we got on the road. At the end of the interview I asked about my essay and was told it hadn’t been received yet.

After that, I went back into the restaurant and hogged a fresh pitcher of beer, regretting my lack of preparation and overall poor form. Also, pitchers are good for crying into – I like to share the salty taste of my lamentations with others.

Almost a week later, back from Arkansas, I received an email with a job offer and a contract attached. The details are pretty standard for English teachers: Provided apartment, roughly $2,000 monthly salary, health insurance, airfare to and from Korea reimbursed by the employer, and severance pay. I read that Avalon is a particularly desirable private school to work for, so I signed the last page, scanned and emailed it back. Now I’m just waiting to find out exactly when I leave.

Street view of Bundang

I was told the job would put me in Bundang, a city with very recent history. It was planned by Korean officials and the project wasn’t completed until 1996! From the city’s Wikipedia page:

The local government announced on April 27, 1989, that it would undertake construction of a futuristic and environmentally conscious city with a population of 450,000 people.

While I strongly believe in organic city growth and mixed zoning, I can definitely get behind environmentally friendly policies. That means I don’t have to own a car – a post for another day – and can expect clean air and water. Also, Wikipedia says “futuristic.” I’m keeping my fingers crossed for jet packs.

Bundang Central Park

I’ll post more information as it comes. Sorry it took me so long to get this post up. In the meantime, be on the lookout for news about Jen. Adventure Teaching is trying to get her a job “in or around” Bundang.

-Daniel Daugherty

Street view of Bundang

Am I mentally preparing or just worrying too much?

If you read the post I wrote following last week’s telephone interview with Adventure Teaching, you know I was pretty excited. As our interviewer explained each step of the visa process, April began to feel a lot closer than June. Now it feels scary-close to January.

I wrote the first draft of this post around 3 a.m., after a lengthy period of lying awake in bed, trying to imagine what problems I might encounter in my job as a teacher. My fears stem mostly from my inexperience as a teacher and my near-total lack of knowledge about contemporary Korean culture. Hoping to allay them I then thought about the two adult conversational classes I taught in Prague, with the result that I’m now even more nervous.

When I went to Prague, I’d already spent a fair amount of time in Europe and had a fair idea of what my life might be like there. Sure, Czech has its own brand of cultural idiosyncrasies and much starker linguistic differences – made more imposing by a larger alphabet – but (post-)Christianized Europe tends to maintain a certain level of cultural homogeneity.

Thanks to the ongoing Americanization/globalization of world cultures (your side of that slash depends on who you read), there was also some level of shared culture among my students and I – they liked “The Simpsons” and American pop music, most had traveled abroad to major international tourist destinations like the Canary Islands and Israel, and they followed NHL hockey. While I expect a similar familiarity with movies and music, the indigenous culture will be completely new to me.

In Prague I had little trouble learning students’ names because they tended to be Czech-ified versions of Christian names used throughout Europe, like Jan (John), Petr (Peter) and Aleŝ (Alex). The names I found difficult to remember were those with – from my perspective – more alien origins, like Rotislav (Funny how I can remember it now!). How quickly will I be able to learn an entire group of foreign names based on another language and cultural history? I’m bad enough at remembering the names of fellow Americans!

This brings me to issues of class size. I am pretty sure I’ll be teaching in a private language institution, so I can expect classes to be smaller than in public schools. Even so, having to remember more than four or five foreign names sounds like a tall order. My short-term memory span would give goldfish a reason to pity me.

When it comes to teaching experience, my threadbare resumé could use some padding. What little experience I possess came from highly informal conversational classes, with groups of five or fewer students who helped determine the course materials and emphasis (Our crazy system of 12 tenses dominated most lessons). I have no idea what students and school administrators in Korea expect of their teachers and classroom settings, but the things I’ve read about Korean culture and public behavior sound anything but informal.

My last concern magnifies the others, but I think it’s realistic not to expect much downtime between my arrival in the country and my first day of work. Public schools provide some basic training before you start. They know how many of the people they hire will be inexperienced. I haven’t even been shown a contract yet, so I have no idea how or if private schools address this or their immediate expectations of me.

With so much uncertainty swirling around my brain, I decided some small amount of preparation would be prudent and thought up this simple lesson activity while lying in bed. At least I’d be able to learn something from my students, though I wonder if it sounds a bit desperate.

Activity:
Teacher writes on the board: “Think about the best English teacher you’ve had. Without saying their names, what qualities made he or she such an effective teacher? Now think about the worst English teacher you’ve ever had. Without saying their names, what qualities made them ineffective teachers?”

Give students time to write their responses, then go around the room and have each student read his or her response aloud, asking direct questions to elicit more details and get them thinking in English on the fly.

If you’re an ESL/TEFL teacher, what tricks have you used to learn students’ names? Or you were/are an ESL student, what would be your response to my blackboard question?

-Daniel Daugherty

Phone interview wrap-up

Jen and I just had a phone interview with someone from Adventure Teaching and we’re both feeling really positive.  It sounds like things will go much better than our time in Prague.

The interviewer was able to allay some of our concerns , one of the biggest being private schools.  Jen and I have both heard horror stories about companies not honoring contracts or giving employees terrible terms.  The mother of someone I knew growing up and who just arrived in Korea a few months ago recently intimated that her son gets no holidays!

The interviewer said public schools are generally more desirable work environments but that Adventure Teaching is pro-active in reviewing contract terms and maintains an on-going relationship with teachers once they arrive in their chosen destination.  Sorry to sound like a mouthpiece for this recruiting company, but after our Prague experience, we’re very glad to know there will be somebody backing us up.

Now we need to bear down and start getting documentation together for our visas.  I’ve never been so excited about dealing with government red tape!  I’m sure we’ll have more posts about the visa process once we get underway.

-Daniel Daugherty