Incheon

For those of you who were wondering, I did in fact pass my training. The final presentations had everyone on edge but nearly all passed. Around four o clock I set off for my school in Incheon with my two co-workers, Jim and Jim. We were all really excited to finally be settled in to our own place but when we got to the school we were informed that the three teachers who we were replacing were not leaving until the next day and we would be put up in a hotel for the night. So our new branch manager, who sort of reminds me of a bad guy from an old kung-fu movie, took us to our lodgeings for the night. As soon as we saw one of the rooms we immeadiatly knew that this was not a normal hotel. The dimmed lights, hanging bathrobes, and large circular bed were all very good clues, but the biggest one came in the form of of a vending machine within the room that sold various...off color oddities. I slept in my sleeping bag that night.
The next morning we packed up our stuff and left the love motel for good. We went to our local institute and had an informal orientation. We then hopped on a bus to meet one of our fellow instructors who vollunteered to show us around. We met Tracy and she showed us to our places. They were pretty nice, and we were all releived to finally have a place of our own.
My first classes are tomorrow night. We were told to expect anything from the kids, but once we got the hang of it it would be an easy job... hopefully.

Jason

Training Week

People who I have managed to converse with back home usually ask me how I like Seol pretty quickly in the conversation. To be honest though, I really haven't had much free time to roam the city and get into trouble. What I can tell you is that the city is huge, there are many tall cool looking buildings, McDonalds delivers, and it is probably one of the few places in the world where you have a better chance of getting run over on the side walk than on the street.
Training consists of us memorizing numerous methodologies and class structures in a very small amount of time. You get wake up at like 4 am cause you're still jet lagged, lie in bed for a bit, eat and or prepare more for your mock presentations, leave for training, leave training around 3, scarf down some dumplings on the way home, and than work until you fall asleep. The last part is kind of hard cause as I said you are still jet lagged. My room mate is actually asleep right now as I right this using his computer.
While not true for all people in training, most seem to be on edge and stressed. Some of the trainers are not the most friendly people in the world and will be quite blunt with their critics so I've been told. My trainers have been quite encouraging and constructive with their criticism and I have yet to have one of my mock lessons be ripped to shreds (knock on wood). People have failed, which worries me, but if I keep things up I should be fine. Hopefully next time I write it will be from my apartment in Incheon.

Jason

P.S. No ninja attacks yet, for all those who were wondering (Ben).

Arrival

After flying for almost a solid day I finally arrived in Incheon/Seol Airport. My new friend Allison (who I met in San Francisco) and I pulled worked our way through the air port and immigration without much trouble. We than pulled out our list of papers to see what our next task should be. We came to our first obstical: using a pay phone. We found them without much trouble but trying to work one was another story. There were instructions written next to the phone both in English and Korean but no matter how hard we tried and no matter what combination of numbers we put in we just couldn't make it work. So after about 20 min and picking up one more member of our crew, some random guy finally took pity on us and just called the numbers for us. We could now move on to the next leg of our journey.
Getting to the hotel wasn't much of a problem but it did take a little longer than I would have liked. We had about an hour bus ride to a Taxi pick up spot and than had to wait for about another hour to grab the right cab that would pick us up. Not very eventful.
The second I encountered was when I got to my room in the hotel. I met my roomate (Nick, who is also from Boston) For about 20 minutes we could only figure out how to turn on only one bedside light in our room. There were plenty of switches but no other way of turning them on. So we wandered around in the dark a bit until I noticed a place to put my room key card on the wall that had some korean writing on it and below it said: put room key card here. I didn't know what it would do but i decided to give it a shot and the lights came on.
The third obstical was where I sort of had an epiphany. Even though most instruction are written in Korean and English, the mere fact that there is a block of letters that you can't read, above the english ones that you can read, and the fact that you're in a strange place, makes you second guess everything you do, even simple things like turning on a light. So in a sense just being in a foreign land automatically makes you stupider. Or rather, just being in a foreign land makes me stupider. The third obstical was in fact, learning how to flush the toilet. This toilet had a lot of buttons on it. I mean a lot of buttons. I'm pretty sure on one the english word "massage" was there. How you get a massage on a toilet I will never want to find out. But after staring at the toilet for about a half hour, my roommate and I decided to give up and just tell the front desk that our toilet wouldn't flush. A man prompletly came up and showed us that the flusher was exactly where you would expect it would be hidden behind all the buttons. We laughed, felt stupid, and said thank you.
The first day wasn't too eventful. We mostly just slept and studied for our training which begins tomorrow. It should be interesting. I'll keep things up to date as often as I can.

Jason