Week 1: Round-Up

This first week has been a blitz of assessed teaching (nerve-wracking) and semi-intense pedagogical instruction (classroom management, learning styles, "CCQs", etc). Each assessed teaching segment is followed by a written self-evaluation and a group evaluation by your other teacher-trainees as well as the tutor. In addition to the written self-evaluation I have to do for Monday, I also have a "language awareness" (read as: grammar blitz) task and a general sort of "week in review" self-evaluation to get ready as well. Oh man, I missed homework!

But I took a well-deserved break today and had my first San Jose walkabout with Jaime, another CELTee. I arrived in San Jose the day before the course started, so I didn't have any time to nose around the area and get acquainted with it.



My digs! Not pictured is my own private bathroom to the left of the nightstand, and my little tiny desk. It's a small room, but the price is right and I have an amazing living room and balcony for when I want to do my work. (I am a introverted anti-social weirdo, though, so I do spend a lot of time working in here.)












My walk to school every day.




Mostly, Jaime and I spent today shopping in the downtown area, combing the little tourist-y stalls as well as the nicer shops.



This little guy was just hanging out behind his grandma's stall (I ended up buying too expensive pants from her, but they are awesome pants that need a photo unto themselves), being adorable.



Of course after a long day shopping, we deserved some dessert.



A GOOEY CARAMEL CENTER WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN—

Next Saturday I have to observe a class, so weekend meanderings will again be limited to San Jose. Hopefully, I'll be able to get out and about the area a little bit more after that.

CELTA, ce-riously.

Day 2 of CELTA involves the first (of many) assessed lessons. My lesson segment yesterday went well enough; today felt overwhelming and scattered, mostly because I am rubbish at dealing with handouts and papers and keeping things consistently organized.

I immediately flashed on teacher training at Sherlock and being observed and generally wanting to vomit. Some things never change! You'd think years of piano recitals and school concerts and tour guiding would have cured me of performance anxiety, but no.

Bonus points for the power going out midway through the day and not coming back on until half an hour before the lesson.

"Oh, there it goes," our tutor said nonchalantly. "If it's not on in time for the lesson, we'll just skip the break and go straight through so we finish before it gets too dark."

As if this stuff happened all the time. Which, apparently, it does. Pura vida!

Landed!

I have arrived safely in Costa Rica! Pictures of my digs and the surroundings forthcoming, as soon as I get a chance to do a San Jose walkabout (this weekend, if the rainy season doesn't have other plans).

The CELTA course is working out well so far (but doesn't everything work out well on the first day!). I think most of my buddies still in Korea and still reading this (right? right?) are TEFL-cert'd otherwise, but just in case I'll probably be writing/freaking out about it in here.

CELTA seems like a lot of work on the face of it (and it probably will be!), and I spent much of my flight over—when I wasn't sleeping—freaking out about the first day and having to teach a lesson on my first day. The tutors here (and presumably elsewhere, but I can only speak for Costa Rica) do a good job of easing you into the group and into the teaching: doing ice-breakers, giving you suggestions for class activities. By the time lunch was over, I was ready to start teaching. First, though, was a lesson in Bahasa Indonesia, wherein we all remembered how much it sucks to not understand the language you're being taught.

(Apparently that sample lesson is usually in Swedish, but yours truly and probably also the Dutch woman in the course would have had an unfair advantage.)

The practice courses are, from the volunteer students' perspective, two-hour long English blitzes with four different teachers. From our perspective, they are miniature twenty-minute lessons with the rest of the time devoted to observing and evaluating the other three teachers. Fortunately, the other people in my group are very nice (and multinational! A Dutch woman, an English gentleman, and another woman from Costa Rica), and everyone has less teaching experience than I do so I don't feel like a total bumbling fool.

The students are all adults (the "A" in CELTA stands for "Adults"; teaching children is "CELTYL," for "Young Learners"), some my age, some with children, some might even have grand children. They all speak much better English than any of my students in Korea, which was a pleasant surprise. (Not that I didn't enjoy teaching my students because of their low skill level. If I didn't like them, it was for other, unrelated reasons.)

All in all, this looks to be a solid experience so far. Bring on the workload. ;)

Things I Didn't Realize I Missed in Korea

1. 24 Hour Grocery Stores

Granted, the Buy the Way in the first floor of my apartment building carried everything I ever needed in a pinch, but sometimes I need the kind of therapy that only a giant warehouse of foodstuffs can provide. And sometimes I need it at midnight.

2. Looking Like A Total Schlub

Sometimes part of that therapy involves leaving the house in "loungewear" and uncombed hair. Bonus points for wearing a jjimjilbang t-shirt. (They have fast become my favorite autumnal "sit around and do nothing at home" shirts, on account of the surprisingly substantial material. They're so warm!)

3. Driving

Again, another essential part of this therapy is motoring myself there. Walking is nice, sure, but sometimes it's cold and sometimes I'm lazy and sometimes I feel like moving faster than I can go under my own power.

Just some thoughts on my way to some food retail therapy. ^^

Jet-Setting: Costa Rica

As of 2.15 this afternoon, I was accepted into the International House Costa Rica franchise of Cambridge's TESOL program.

In plainer words: I'M GOING TO COSTA RICA FOR A MONTH!

This beats the crap out of my original plan of finishing a CELTA program in NYC, both in terms of price and in terms of pure awesome. An official TEFL certificate will be an edge back in Korea; one from Cambridge doubly-so (CELTA is one of the most-respected programs in the TEFL business). I will be too busy to travel around Costa Rica during the course, so I'm taking an extra week at the end of the course to properly see the country. Stay tuned for wacky Central American traveling antics!

Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis

Meet me at the fair~!





This has precious little to do with Korea, except that I'M SURE THOSE OF YOU STILL IN KOREA WANT DETAILED WRITE-UPS ABOUT MY TRAVELS IN THE US, YES? YES!

I went to St. Louis to visit one of my "top tier" friends (of whom there are only two in the whole world), Noah. He transferred out of Hamilton after our sophomore year, so I haven't been in the same area code as him since 2006. That means we need planes, trains, and automobiles to see each other.


We make a neat set of opposites, n'est-ce pas?

(The reason this visit gets a write-up, while my weekend jaunt to visit my token Korean friend in DC does not, is that Jong-min does not seem as enthusiastic as Noah to photo-document our time together. I think Jong-min might be embarrassed about the trainwreck white girl he's added to his life. =P)

My flight to St. Louis was longer and more arduous than it needed to be, thanks to a combination of mistakes on both my part and the airline's, suffice it to say that my trip to St. Louis started at 8.30 PM at the STL airport in a poofy, over-the-top prom dress, pearls, and the most makeup I'll wear for the next three months, waiting for my ride from Noah. For that night was Metro Prom.

Sadly, I missed the metro part of the prom, but our prom getup got us free entry into a piano bar called Big Bang, where we sang around with the requests for an hour or so. The crowd started picking up soon after, so we fled for a nearby diner (a common theme in any of my visits to/from friends).

UNFORTUNATELY NO PICTURES OF THAT NIGHT EXIST. ;_;

The next day we made an abortive attempt to visit The Arch and the City Museum, but dead batteries and a private party rained on that parade. However, we did make a successful excursion out of Blueberry Hill (Chuck Berry's piano bar), the St. Louis Walk of Fame (notables: Chuck Berry, Yogi Berra, Vincent Price), a sweet old movie theater, a store full of spices, another store full of bottle-your-own-whatever (we left with two bottles of whisky), and a restaurant with the best milkshakes I've ever had. Five dollar milkshakes, even.

Things start picking up in my memory post the purchase of some new batteries for my camera. We walked from Noah's house to a movie theater/bowling alley/bar called Moolah to see The Social Network. En route we made a couple whisky stops.

The first was a pizza place/bar called pi. As in the irrational number. We went there for lunch later and I have to say, their pies are tremendous. Look them up if ever you go. The whisky list is also impressive:



(I don't know what connection the Rittenhouse Rye has to the Rittenhouse Square of Philadelphia fame, if any. I didn't get to try any, either; they were out.)

The second place had once been a speakeasy, but since converted to a proper bar. You can still go downstairs to drink in a super-atmospheric basement area. AND GUESS WHAT THEY HAD:



WHY ONLY THE WORLD'S BEST SINGLE MALT OF 2009. Probably my favorite non-Islay malt.

We also met a lawyer/countertop salesman? I don't know how that combination works out, but apparently he gets to travel to China multiple times a year for whatever it is that he does. And he can afford expensive bottle of port and nice cigars.

The next day we started with a hearty American breakfast at:



This is what I miss about America whenever I'm not there:



This time I had fresh batteries, so I got in some obligatory shots of The Arch.



And The City Museum was also open for us, which was awesome and probably the highlight of my whole trip.



A couple of things. First, note the metal spire type thing you can see on the roof. You can climb up into that:



Which is terrifying! But the view is awesome.



Also note the school bus. You can go in it.




Afterwards, Noah had to go in to work for a couple hours, so I slept in Forest park for a while. We picked up some ingredients for whatever meat-based dish he had planned for dinner (which was tasty), made dinner, and drank some St. Louis microbrew.

My flight home suffered from massive, massive delays (oh flying! you were just not happening for me that weekend), so I killed a couple hours in the airport reading some David Mack I had picked up in a comic book store on Saturday. I also emailed CELTA at International House Costa Rica from my phone to see what the turnaround on my application would be. A couple days after I got back, I'd find out that they'd want a phone interview.

St. Louis was too short, unfortunately; there was a lot more I could have seen, and more time could have been spent with Noah before I go back to Korea. Hopefully I can make it back for a longer visit some day!

Self-Reflection: Black Out Korea.

There are a few huge blogs in the expat-in-Korea blogging community. I don't use the word "blogosphere" because I don't believe in neologisms. Also, it sounds stupid.

The biggest two are probably Ask a Korean! and Ask the Expat!. Others like The Grand Narrative, Gusts of Popular Feeling and Kiss my Kimchi spring to mind as well. My friend Breda (Annyeong!) was even ranked as one of the top Korean expat blogs by Go Overseas. So there's a lot of content on the Internet being generated about Korea, by foreigners currently living in Korea.

Somewhere up there you also have Black Out Korea, a blog devoted entirely to pictures of passed-out drunk people in the ROK.



I will admit, on a base level, it is kind of funny. Even to someone like me, with a sense of humor more cerebral than slapstick. Because once in a while, after all the shots of passed-out party-goers in Hongdae, you get utterly weird stuff like this:



which just transcends funny and becomes pure, sublimated surreality.

Early on in life, we all learn the important difference between laughing with and laughing at at someone. And usually when you're enjoying the results of someone's drunken shenanigans, it's the laughing at kind of laughing. This is the same kind of humor that drives pages like People of WalMart, LameBook, and Regretsy. Those sites all have their own thorny ethics to deal with, but they are also all people poking at other people within their own culture. (Cue the appropriate Seinfeld reference about "joke-telling immunity." Bonus points for Bryan Cranston prior to Breaking Bad or Malcolm in the Middle.)

When you get cross-cultural haw-haws, though, then it gets weird. Are you enjoying it from a position of privilege? Is there some underlying cultural thing going on of which you're (willfully) ignorant? Are you using humor to distance yourself from responsibility? Would this be just as funny intra-culturally? Did I just make up a new word? Anyway, here's the stated purpose of Black Out Korea:

Black Out Korea is a site devoted to the often hilarious situations in Korea that involve full grown adults blacked out in public, sometimes from 60 hour workweeks, but mostly because of Soju.

I've been to quite a few countries, but never seen this phenomenon like I've seen here in the ROK. So send in your best pics!

(As an aside, I do remember the blurb, in the version I initially read, talking about how South Korea is a country where adults typically get "utterly shithammered" or some such. I presume that the author has changed it as the blog has grown, and so I present you with the current version.)

Black Out Korea does not necessarily discriminate, either; you do find the odd assortment of blacked-out foreigners among the photos.



Note, though, that instances of the "waegook" tag are not as frequent as many of the others.

I'm inclined to distance myself from that kind of humor/attitude about Korea (at least I am now, not sure what year-ago-self would say). First of all, the laughing at style of comedy doesn't normally appeal to me, anyway. Nor does the slapstick, physical kind of comedy.

On a deeper level, to me it also belies a lack of respect for Korea, in a way. Not only on the "hah hah, he's passed out drunk, what a Korean" level, but in a more abstract sense. I think a not-insignificant portion of foreigners come to Korea and think of it as "College 2: Electric Boogaloo" and see it as less a country with citizens who are just as autonomous as themselves, and more of a giant playground with few rules and cheap booze. "We can party all we want, someone else will be there to clean up after us and take care of us."

I mean, it's one thing for your friend to get stupid-drunk and then pass out in a club. By all means, prank away and photo-document as much as you like. But a random stranger? Who has no chance to consent to this or establish a layer of rapport such that they would be okay with you doing this? Who doesn't have a way to contact you if they want the photo taken down? Also note that faces are almost never blurred in the photos; if they are, they're of foreigners.

This, coupled with America's military presence in Korea both historically and currently, suggests an unequal power balance and no interest to fix it. I think a lot of the submissions to Black Out Korea spring from that mindset, and that makes me uneasy. Mine, however, is certainly not the only take on it.

Your thoughts?