Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Welcome to my humble abode!

As of this afternoon, I will have been back in Korea for one week. It has been a crazy week, full of unpacking, job orientation, trying to learn new bus routes, and adjusting to a new time zone. Thankfully, the jet lag has been really really easy to handle this time around. I suppose it's making up for how terrible it was in the States.

Things are going well with the new job so far. I'm trying to finish learning the online system, in all of its multi-faceted glory, and writing a syllabus for a storytelling class I'm teaching, but other than that, I'm ready for classes to start on Friday.

I don't know that I'd say I'm settled in to my new apartment yet, because things are still really new, and I'm still trying to figure out which light switch does what, and which way to turn the faucets to change the water temperature, and all of that stuff... But I'm at least unpacked, which is a glorious thing! So, without further ado, here is a video tour of my new apartment! Sorry it's a little twist during the first part. I am filming on my iPhone, and I can't ever tell what direction things are going to go once they're done!


I can go up to the rooftop as well. My landlord uses it for storage, so it is rather crowded, but there are a few places to sit. The view is lovely from up there. 



All in all, I think I'm going to quite enjoy living here!

Monday, August 29, 2011

The Korean Internet

Oh, the Korean internet... Sometimes I feel like I can use it pretty well, and sometimes I'm certain that it is out to get me. I (generally) don't have any trouble with the internet. I use a wide variety of online resources in my teaching, as well as all of the other social networking, blogging, and emailing that is part of my life. 

Generally, the internet in Korea is quite nice. It's quite fast (unless you're trying to load a YouTube movie, for some reason), it is readily available at any number of the ubiquitous coffee shops that are scattered around the city. I can use data on my phone even when I'm underground on the subway. These things are all quite lovely. But they aren't really the Korean internet. 

You see, the Korean internet (aside from being in Korean) requires the use of Internet Explorer. Most websites simply refuse to load in any other browser. Internet Explorer is not my friend. We haven't been friends for at least 6 years. I'm a pretty devoted user of Chrome, although I sometimes dabble with Opera. So I often get irrationally angry with Internet Explorer when I have to use the Korean internet. 

Then there is the security. Don't get me wrong, the security is good. For my online banking, I have the usual user name and password, but there is also a digital certificate that I have to download so I can only do banking on certain computers that are registered with my bank. I can check my account balance using just the username, password and digital certificate. But if I want to transfer money, it is a completely different issue. In addition to those three things, I have to go through a three step confirmation process, and I have to enter specific numbers off of this little plastic card they gave me. This basically means that I have to have my wallet with me at all times when I transfer money. And I have several extra cards making said wallet very bulky.

I'm taking over the internet contract for the apartment that I moved into. Supposedly, you can go to the internet provider's website and transfer the account online. The Korean man who previously lived here tried to get everything ready. He called customer service, and was told that it was no problem to transfer to a foreigner. The Korean internet has a lot to do with the national ID numbers that everyone has here. Some Korean websites won't let me even register because my ID number marks me as a foreigner. Some websites let you register, but there are problems with your name.

You see, Korean names are three syllables long. All of them. And in Korean, each syllable represents one "character" made up of different letters. Western names can have a lot of syllables. My name has eight syllables. It has 21 letters, which is each counted as a "character" in the web registration systems. I can't shorten my name, or leave out my middle name, or even use my initials, because my name and ID number must exactly match what the government has on file. So even though I could use my ID number on this website, my name was too long, but one letter. I've always liked the fact that my first name was spelled with an h. But it would have made life much simpler in Korea if I were Sara instead of Sarah ;) We tried for almost three hours to figure out how to transfer the internet contract to my name. Eventually, the Korean internet even defeated the Korean man, and we gave up. I have to go to an internet store later this week to try to sort it out. 

Last night, I was trying to schedule the appointment to extend my visa for another year. I had to register with two different websites, both of which caused problems. I was eventually able to figure everything out, and schedule my appointment, but it took me far longer than it should have. When I finished, I had a headache and went straight to bed. 

Granted, at least some of these problems are my own fault, because I'm not anywhere near fluent in Korean. I also don't entirely understand the concept of the Korean internet, which seems to be more filled with homepages (think geo cities) and blogs that are really paid advertisements... Perhaps if I did, I'd have less trouble with the Korean internet. 

Given all of this history, perhaps you will understand how scared I was when I was told that SSWU does a great deal of things through their online portal. That I'd be expected to upload student assignments to their special education portal, do all of my attendance and grade keeping online, assign and monitor online homework, upload and download documents from a central drive for all the English teachers, and use the professor's portal to communicate with my students. Especially since all of these websites are in Korean. 

I went into the office today, even though I don't actually have to be there until Friday, to try to figure out how all of this worked, and see if I could succeed at my job without losing my sanity. I am happy to report that things went very well. Not only was I able to create class profiles, print attendance sheets and student lists, upload my syllabus, send textbook information to students, and print my syllabi for the first day of classes, I was even able to help some of the other new teachers figure it out too! This was a most unexpected blessing of the day, because I really did expect to be frustrated and leave the office with a headache. 

I still don't understand the Korean internet. I still chafe under the forced Internet Explorer usage. But at least I can upload a syllabus!

The story behind the haircut

So a lot of people have been asking about my recent haircut... When I left Korea, my hair was quite long. It was just an inch or two away from hitting my waist. I loved my long hair, and I was quite excited, because it was getting close to my goal length!! I usually wore it up, so I don't really have any pictures that show the length.

I am naturally a medium ash blonde color, but I've often dyed my hair various colors. In Korea, I dyed it a nice dark auburn color. I've dyed it this color several times before, and then gone back to the blonde color. It's a bit of a process to get from dark back to light, but it's quite possible.

When I was in America, I decided that I was going to go back to my blonde, and stay there this time since my hair was getting so long. I decided to spend the money to go to a nice salon in Indianapolis so that it would get done properly. Only that didn't exactly happen.

The lady who did my hair was really sweet and nice, but I don't think she quite knew what to do with my hair. It's super thick, and it was quite long. I spent over three hours in the salon, and by the time we finished, my entire scalp hurt like crazy, a good 5 inches of the ends of my hair had been ripped and torn, and my hair was barely any lighter than when I came in. It was also a lot more red than it was before, and the color wasn't very even. Needless to say, I wasn't very happy about it.

I gave my hair as much time as I could to recover from what it had been through, and the day before I came back to Korea, I drove three hours to where I grew up to see another stylist that I knew and trusted. I should have gone to her in the first place, but I was trying to avoid the drive down there. She'd never seen anything quite like my hair. We went through 7 individual color processes, each involving multiple types of dye, and none of it was able to remove the red and even out the color.

Neither of us could think of anything to do, so in the end, we had to cut all of my hair off. We were able to get that part a lighter color, and she sent me back to Korea with three different kinds of dye to continue to work to bring it back to its natural color... But my hair is quite short now. It's above my shoulders.

Thankfully, it grows quite fast, and in another three years or so, I should be back down to waist length hair. But still.... It's annoying, because short hair requires significantly more effort to care for than long hair does, and I still miss my long hair. ::sigh:: I guess I can't have too much of a pity party, because I did bring it on myself. The lesson we can learn from this is don't dye your hair about 9 shades darker than your natural color and expect to escape the consequences!!

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Indiana Weather

Indiana is famous for it's unpredictable weather this time of year. Through most of spring and summer, the weather can do crazy, crazy things. Of course, it's tornado season right now, so you always have to keep that in mind too.

I was recently driving from Evansville to Lafayette. As I was driving, I noticed that the sky was starting to look a little bit strange up ahead. When it is good conditions for hail, the sky turns a slightly green color. I called my dad to have him look at the radar so I knew if I should pull over or not. I was in my mom's soft top convertible, so hail would have been bad news. There were reports of hail, so I pulled off to the side of a road, under an overpass to wait it out. While I was sitting there, I got a prime example of the vagaries of Indiana weather.



This is what the sky looked like on the right side of the car. It was fairly dark and a little menacing. 




At the same time, this is what the view was on the left side of the road. It was a perfectly lovely sunset. 

I'm happy to report that I didn't encounter any hail storms on my journey, and I made it safely to Lafayette. I was definitely glad to be done with the trip though!



This is what the weather was like the day before, as I was driving down to Evansville. 



I'd forgotten that skies could be so blue. I'm not sure if it is because the sky really doesn't usually get this blue in Seoul, or if I just don't really notice the sky because of all the buildings in the way. But it was a beautiful day for a drive!

Thursday, August 11, 2011

It's only a small world if you're a disney character...

for the rest of us, it is quite large and it takes a rather long time to fly around it. However, I successfully made the trip, and I'm now in America.

Maybe the trip wasn't really as long as it felt this time. Maybe it was just because of the moving insanity and finishing up everything at KBU in the two days before I took off. All I know is this trip was significantly harder than the other times I've flown this route over the past year.

I was rather annoyed in the Incheon airport. I went through security and immigration, and they were both organized, efficient and fast. I love the Incheon airport in that regard. I had about an hour to kill, so I went to a Paris Baguette near my gate and ordered a black tea latte. I also picked up a bottle of water. I drank the tea, but I hadn't opened the water bottle yet. Boarding time came, and I handed the flight attendant my ticket, she scanned it, and I walked down the boarding hallway thing. Only it wasn't a normal boarding hallway thing. It was a set of stairs leading to another hallway, and we had to go through a second round of security. The security agents opened every carry on bag and looked inside of it. They also took away my bottle of water. My sealed bottle of water that I'd purchased from the airport, past security clearance. I don't understand what the purpose of this second security check was, but it was frustrating.

The flight itself was relatively uneventful. We flew from Seoul to Tokyo first.I sat next to a Korean man who was very interested in American politics. We had a rather lengthy discussion about the debt ceiling, the differences between Republics and Democrats, and what the general opinion was about President Obama. As we were landing, he asked for my email address. I gave him one, but it wasn't my personal email. I'm not entirely sure that I want to continue this particular friendship.

Even though the flight was only about two hours long, they actually gave us food and drinks. I was expecting a dixie cup full of ice with a few sips of juice and a tiny bag of pretzels. They actually gave us the full can of whatever we were drinking, and they gave us sandwiches. The tuna didn't excite me very much, but the ham and cheese was rather amazing! Especially after a year in the land with no good sandwiches.



I spent a few hours wandering around the Tokyo airport. I bought some Japanese snack food to bring back with me, but we haven't opened it yet. As a result, I now have some random Japanese currency floating around in my wallet. This is about as close as I got to Japan.



The flight from Tokyo to Chicago was very, very long. I had a pleasant seat companion for the trip. It was a girl who was a few years younger than me, who had spent the summer working with a news agency in Hong Kong. We spent some time talking, but she slept a lot. It is an unfortunate fact of my life that I can't sleep in a moving object. Bus, plane, car, roller coaster... It doesn't matter. I just can't sleep. Normally this isn't such a big deal. I use the time to catch up on all of the movies and music that I don't pay much attention to in normal life. 

Only this plane was really, really old. The screens in the seat backs were pretty tiny. They didn't have on demand movies or music. There were six channels, and each of them just looped a movie. This was fine for the first movie, but since the six movies aren't the same length, it gets a bit sketchy after that. There were only two movies that even remotely interested me. One of them was pretty good. I tried to watch the second one, but the sound cut out on every third word or so, so I quickly gave up.

I ended up watching the first movie two and a half times. I also spent a lot of time staring at the moving map. It was in English and Japanese, and it had both Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures. I tried to improve my temperature conversion and see if I could figure out any Japanese. I walked up and down aisles when I could. There was a lot of really bad turbulence on this flight. At one point, it got so bad that the pilot made the flight attendants stop service and go buckle themselves in. All in all, I was glad to be on solid ground again when we hit Chicago. 

Of course, no blog post about a very long flight would be complete without some food pictures. So without further ado, I give you the airline food.  



This was some sort of pasta. It was overcooked, so every time I tried to take a bite, the noodles would almost disintegrate on my fork. Trying to eat that in a bumpy plane was quite interesting...


They gave us a mid-flight snack. The pastry had some sort of unidentified fruit filling in it. I'm still not sure if it was peach or orange or apple ;)


I also had some sort of beef in some sort of sauce. It was pretty unremarkable. 

I was glad for the food service though. It kept me from going absolutely crazy on the flight and broke things up into nice little segments. 

I landed in Chicago around 2:30 pm, and I decided that it would be a brilliant idea to force myself to stay up late so I could get over jet lag faster. I did actually manage to stay up until almost midnight, and I slept through the whole night. However, I felt like death warmed over on Sunday. I spent pretty much the whole day lounging on the couch, silently moaning and clutching a bottle of Advil. Things have gotten a bit better since then, but it seems like the slightly gentler approach would be better to return to in the future. 

I've been doing lots of shopping and eating lots of good food in the past few days. I'm starting a smallish road trip across Indiana tomorrow, so maybe there will be something blog-worthy to come out of that. If not, I'm sure there will be adventures when I get back to Korea and start my new job and unpack my apartment. 


Wednesday, August 3, 2011

The End is the Beginning

Way back in the day when I was studying music history, I remember this little song. It is from the Medieval period, and it's called "Ma fin est mon commencement" which translates into "my end is my beginning". What made this song so unique was that it was a perfect mirror image, so it was like you listened to the first half of the song, then you listened to it backwards. It's a pretty cool little song -- check it out!


I kinda feel like that song right now. Things are winding down at KBU. I'm done teaching. My office is basically cleaned out. I have to make one more trip to drop off the keys to my apartment and print my plane ticket. It's been a rough year there. Hopefully we were able to help make things a little better, and it won't be that bad for the next group of people. Despite it all though, I did love my students.

KBU is a small school. I've had just over 10% of the total student body flow in and out of my classroom in the past year. Whenever I walk anywhere on campus, I see students that I know. Even the students I've never taught know me, and they generally try to speak some English. When I go to the cafeteria, there are students who will bring their lunch over and eat with me. I sometimes get texts or emails from students that are really sweet. I've definitely had a good group of kids this past year, and I will miss them a lot.

I'm moving to my new apartment in the morning, so I'm in the middle of packing and cleaning. I never thought I'd say it, but I've grown rather fond of my little shoebox apartment. It will be strange to come back from America to a new place. These four walls have seen a lot in the past year.

At the same time, I'm already gearing up for my new job when I get back. I've been getting a flurry of emails from my director, TAs and colleagues. I've had to learn how to navigate the online portal system that is entirely in Korean. I'm looking over textbooks and beginning to think about how I want to run my classroom.

I'm packing everything up, which reminds me of doing the exact same thing just about a year ago when I was preparing to come to Korea for the first time. It's so strange, because Korea is familiar now, and it's home. But when I come back, it will be to a new neighborhood and new job. I'll have to learn the finer points of public transportation all over again. I'll have to navigate a new set of office politics. Only it won't be as overwhelming as it was last year, because there is an underlying sense of familiarity to it.

So. In a few days, I'll fly back to America, and I'll spend time with friends and family, do a bit of road tripping, eat lots of good food and generally make merry. Then I'll get on a plane for a very long flight and come back to the Incheon International Airport. It will be a little bit of an end, and in all the same ways, it will be a little bit of a beginning.

Maybe I'll have more time to process the entirety of this year when I'm on the plane, or in America. Or maybe I won't. Because even though there are lots of ends and lots of beginnings, I'm still in the middle of this Korean adventure. But for now, I need to go finish packing so I can move to Haebangcheon in the morning.

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