This is my blog about my experience living and teaching English on Jeju Island, Korea. I am working at two elementary schools: Jungang Elementary School and Samsung Elementary School. I teach at Samsung on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Jungang on Wednesdays and Fridays. I alternate schools every other Monday.
All together, I have 8 different co-teachers and am doing my best to adapt to each teachers style of running their classes. Some of them run their classes with an iron fist, pulling students over their chairs by the ear and flicking or knuckle-punching their foreheads, while other teachers rely more on the rewards system to get the desired behavior.
The students are very cute and classes are going well for the most part. I have found the exercises and activities in the textbooks to be quite fun and at an appropriate ability level for the students. This was very different from my experience teaching English in Okinawa, Japan, where the textbooks were boring to the point of being unusable. I would say, however, that the reason may in the simple fact that elementary students are more fun than their older peers.
I live at a "dorm" on the campus of Jeju Foreign Language High School, which is really an apartment building with no mailboxes. I think the reason they call it a dorm is because it is on school property and we have to go to the office in the school to pick up our mail.
Other than the mail things, the apartments are quite spacious for single roommers, complete with bathroom, kitchen, and computer. Oh, there is one big problem though: the damn mosquitos. Living in the middle of farms and fields seems to create a certain visciousness in the local mosquito strain. I have resorted to keeping my door closed at all times, and shutting the door quickly when entering and leaving my apartment. Even so, I have lost countless hours of sleep by being woken up by mosquitos bitting my and buzzing in my ears.
Last night, however, there was a different rude awakening that affected the whole building....namely, a really drunk Korean man. After entering our building (there are no locks at the front door of apartment buildings) he ran up to someone's girlfriend and punched the wall next to her head, yelling something in Korean. I was in my bed watching some Korean soap opera when I realized the yelling I heard outside was not the usual drunken blabber. "I am gonna fuckin' kill you you motherfucker! You disrespect my girl again and you're dead! I'll fuckin' kill you!!"
I threw on some clothes and ran outside to try and calm things down. When I got there, I found one of the people in my building yelling at a really really drunk 50 year old Korean man. As it turned out, this was the the guy whose girlfriend was semi-attacked, and the drunk guy that did the semi-attacking. I tried to hold the pissed off foreigner back and two other guys were doing their best to get the drunk guy to go home. The one thing about living in the middle of nowhere is that if there is someone who is really drunk outside your place, there is a 100% chance that he lives not too far away.
After things finally seemed to cool down a bit and everyone went their seperate ways, I got back in bed thinking about how happy I was that it was only 10:30. Usually this kind of drunkeness doesn't happen until after 12 am at the earliest. About ten minutes later, I heard someone ringing the videocom at my front door. I got out of bed to find my next door neighbor in his pajamas looking out his front door, and no one else around...that drunk bastard again.
I went downstairs and out front to help him on his way home once again and heard yelling from inside the building. The little bugger had gone ringing the bells of everyone on the second floor and was making his rounds on the third. By this time i am sure there were several people who wanted to put a quick end to the situation and get some sleep. A quick uppercut to the jaw would have been easily justifiable in any place in the US. Now that I think about it, if we were in Texas, we probably could have legally shot him and maybe received some sort of civic award for it.
To make a long story (and night) short, the police were finally called and the drunk guy turned buddy buddy all of a sudden. Walking arm-and-arm with one of the foreigners trying to get the guy away from our building, the Korean guy started saying things in English like, "my priend"...Korean has no sound for "F". The police told us to go back inside and I thought that I would finally be able to get some shuteye.
Coming back into my apartment I saw the bottle of 21 year old Glenlivet I have been waiting for some special occasion to open. I emptied what was left of my ice tray into a glass, poured myself a finger, and hopped back in bed. Man did it taste good!
A half-hour later I heard the guy yelling outside the building once again but decided to leave it to the cops this time.
Anyways, welcome to my blog....
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