It’s the end of an era. Maybe that’s overstating it slightly, but it’s pretty big news for me. My mom comes to Korea soon, we will go to Hong Kong and travel around Korea for a few weeks. After she leaves…I’m off on my next great adventure.

These last few weeks in Korea are crazy hectic. I miss having that last week sans work (a la peace corps) so that i can get all of my pre-departure errands taken care of. Here, your visa officially expires on your last contract day, and they work you right to the last day. Luckily, I am getting half days at least. I got new glasses, getting two root canals & crowns, have all of my paperwork updated.  Now to pack up all my stuff and get rid of what I’m not taking.  It’s much harder to do this here than in the Philippines, there seems to be some sort of stigma with used items here- so there’s no bevvy of teachers anxiously awaiting my open house sale/give away.

So I solved the mystery about the weird “ass steamers” at the gym. According to this website it’s a sort of medicinal treatment.  This has been bothering me for months now, trying to figure out what exactly is going on with the occasional instance when I walk into the gym locker room to find a woman sitting on a weird bench with a hole in it, with a pot of herbs in water steaming below, a plastic tarp-like thing around her body and a shower cap on head.

“Sometimes there are alternative medicine therapies available which may look very strange to western eyes. There is a mugwort treatment therapy called SSuk Jim, in which a lady will sit on a special wooden chair with a hole on the seat. An ajuma boils a concotion of herbs in a clay pot (mugwort, green tea and some others which don’t have an English translation). The medicinal vapor comes up from the hole in the chair treating gynecological disorders such as menstrual irregularity and cystitis.”

That said, I still suspect that it may also be a facial (of sorts) for your butt.

This video is the product of my students during our winter English camp.  I explained the concept, showed them a few examples of comic music videos and then helped them plan and execute it.  The song was 100% their idea, I blame Mamma Mia! Most of the kids had a great time with it, except for two girls that seemed to think that would look stupid- so they tried to play it cool, but instead…looked stupid.

So, enjoy my kids’ work!

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I made a short video tour of my very small, “efficiency-lite” apartment in Korea.  This is not a standard apartment, some things are nicer than average and some things are subpar.  In my building, I live on the top floor- which has the nicest view but also the smallest apartments.  My friends live below and have double or triple the space.  That’s the breaks, I guess.  If nothing else, having limited space keeps me from buying a lot of garbage I don’t need because I know that there’s no place to put it.

Anyway, enjoy the tour!

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wordpress video - wordpress plugin for integrated video on video blogs, and video tools

About 3 1/2 months ago I came home to Detroit from my 2-year Peace Corps service in the Philippines.  In the months leading up to my service, I had planned to transfer to PC China and serve another 2 years, and then go to graduate school.  In the end, I wasn’t able to transfer to China and I had to do a little revision in my plans.

I want to go to graduate school to study social work and, eventually, continue doing development work.  However, at the time that I finished my PC service, I hadn’t prepared to go straight into school.  I needed to save up a bit of money to pay on my student loans, to start paying for graduate school and I needed time to make the appropriate preparations for going back to school.

Back in 2004, I took a TEFL course with the idea that it might someday be useful to me in terms of finding a teaching job abroad.  Some people may not know this, but there is a very large world-wide market for teaching English- particularly in Asia.  I narrowed my job search down to Japan and Korea, and, after talking to people who’ve taught in both places, I decided to try and get a year-long job contract teaching in South Korea.

My reasons for choosing Korea aren’t so much that I’m interested in Korea and Korean culture, but that it’s really the must lucrative and easy-to-navigate system that I found.  Teaching in Japan used to have this title, but times, they are a changin’.

In Korea:

• The pay is the same or maybe higher than in Japan.
• The cost of living in Korea is much lower than in Japan.
• It’s easier finding a job in Korea- some people find that private schools in Japan are more discriminating toward people of size, color and/or an older age.
• The perks are better.  Round-trip airfare and paid apartments are pretty much standard in contracts- in Japan, I saw a lot of variation in these things.

Anyway, I don’t want to make this a comparison of places to teach.  I want to make this a record of starting anew in a new place.

So now I’m off to the city of Daejeon, where I’m going to teach English in a public middle school.  I will update more about what it’s like  living and working in Korea.