There’s been some radio silence on the blog since the New Year began. I thought setting 2016 free would herald the great and wonderful 2017, but like many of you, I am discovering the sad reality that the change in date does not magically change the world. I don’t want to be the writer who complains, but I would be lying if this blog was all sweetness and light. I saw an article online the other day that said that our overall unhappiness is greatly contributed to by watching only the most perfect parts of others’ lives online. The fact is, everyone has bad patches, but most social media mavens only show the sunshiny parts, leaving the rest of us thinking that there is something wrong with us if we can’t achieve that level of perfection and happiness. Well, I am going to dispel that illusion. It’s only the Ides of March, and yet I am fully ready for another, more actual, holiday. 

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January

The first half of January was the bi-annual English Camp. Actually, these are pretty fun because for two weeks, I get a tiny class of kids who volunteered to be there, and I get to run the whole curriculum without the textbook or school goals. This winter, I did superhero camp. The kids got to choose superpowers (from a list), design their superhero costumes (paper dolls), and make their superhero names using a  handy 5 point chart I made up of titles, colors, powers, animals, and gender endings. I took pictures of them and added superpower effects, and made a video of them singing and introducing their superhero alter-egos (which I unfortunately cannot share with you because of my teacher confidentiality agreement). It was fun, it was all in English, and I only had to call the Korean teacher once when some boys decided to draw penises on their superhero paper dolls(*sigh). On the last day we made chocolate cake in paper cups in the microwave and had balloon races. Overall, it was a good start to the new year.

The second half of January was my 2 week winter vacation. I decided to go to the Malay Peninsula and do a whirlwind tour of Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand (but only the peninsular parts). I’m working my way through writing, editing and adding photos to the whole 12 day adventure which will go out to the blog and FB page soon, so I won’t try to summarize it here. Suffice it to say that the vacation may have foreshadowed more ominous things, since it too started out with so much promise and enjoyment, yet ended in a total emotional breakdown of epic proportions.

February

…was boring. So boring. I got back from my holiday wounded and limping (yes, literally) just in time to come back for the most useless time in the Korean school calendar. The kids all took their end of year exams before the winter break began on Jan. 1. Although my co-teachers had saved some material from the book to stretch out over the remaining few classes, the students were entirely uninterested. As subject teachers we had maybe 7 days of these lessons, although I had even less because the 6th graders did High School Musical marathons for the last few days. The Graduation ceremony was on the 17th and then there was another week of “spring break”, during which I got to sit in my office doing very little. I couldn’t do anything to plan for the lessons starting in March because no one knew what anyone would be doing!

I enjoyed my first year in Korea and working in the public school system. There were a few hiccups to be sure, but overall, it was probably the best (maybe second best) teaching gig I’ve had. Plus, there’s so much going on in Korea, I felt like I missed out on at least half the events last year. So, I decided to renew my contract here rather than seeking out a new country to work in and explore. But February brought me back to shades of Saudi Arabia. No answers, everything changing all the time, and a sense of hopeless isolation that brought on existential dread. With no students to brighten my day, and no future to plan for, the days at the office became a long, cold, gray stream of Dostoyevskian blah.

I decided to take advantage of the lack of students to visit a dentist and see about the slight occasional pain in one molar. I don’t love dentists, but I know ignoring problems in your teeth never makes them go away on their own, so off I went. Only to be told I needed a root canal and an inlay in two different teeth, and that the root canal would take 4-5 visits to the dentist to complete. Thus began my endless dentist torment.

On top of that, Korea flat up failed me in providing it’s normal endless stream of festivals and activities. There was one lone festival to celebrate the first full moon of the new lunar year, which was marked by the building of a massive bonfire on the beach where people could toss their complaints and woes of 2016 to be burned as well as their wishes and hopes for the next year to rise up to the heavens. I’m not sure how the gods/ancestors tell the difference, but it was a big beautiful fire on the beach and that was fun.

I had my first experiment with “crazy color” hair dye in Korea in February (probably inspired by the endless boredom and need for color in my life). I managed to negotiate a conversation in a beauty supply shop to get myself some bleach and a shade of purple that was pretty if somewhat pastel. I should have known better, but hair dyeing is a source of rebirth and stress relief for me, so I charged ahead. The end result was.. subtle. The lightest parts were indeed a pale purple-ish, but nearly everything else turned brown. Not even a pretty brown, just ashy. This led to my first experiment ordering from the infamous G-Market, a sort of Amazon/Ebay website for Korea. Although I had seen many Koreans around downtown (and even a few students at the school) with colors in their hair as ombre or even whole hair dyes, it seems that the only thing available in most shops are the very pastel colors, including a shade of green called “khaki”, which I can imagine no westerner ever saying, yes, please, let’s dye my hair khaki.

February also brought home the reality that most of the people I know, including my besties, were leaving Korea. International life is full of the tides of expats moving in and out with the job market. I think many seasoned expats avoid making close friends among the first years because of this very thing. But since I was a first year last year, that meant that most of my friend pool were other first years. I had thought they were going to stick around, but events conspired in such a way that meant I spent the end of February going to/throwing farewell events and helping my friend pack/get rid of stuff.

I spent the whole second half of February feeling somehow both bored and exhausted, telling myself over and over that things would get better in March when the students came back, when the festival season began again with cherry blossoms, and when the weather was finally nice enough for me to play Pokemon Go without wearing 3 layers of clothes and freezing my fingers solid.

March

As March drew near, I was finally given some slight insight into the shape of my new school year. I was to get a second school, splitting my time between two schools. Plus, it turns out no one in the whole city wants to teach at my main school, so in the complex bidding war that the Korean teachers engage in to switch schools every 3 years, someone who had the horrible misfortune of not getting any of their top 10 choices was to replace my wonderful and amazing first ever Korean co-teacher. Plus, she doesn’t speak much English and hasn’t taught English in a decade. Plus the new school isn’t just going to have me for a day or two, but one and a half days a week. Every Thursday I get to start at one school and move to another. Plus plus, that teacher has also never taught English before. Oh goody.

I had barely an opportunity to say hello to the new teacher at my main school and none at all to visit the second school. Despite the fact that classes would commence March 2, the new teachers avoided talking with me about lessons, or goals, or expectations. I began to get anxious, and reminded myself that newly arrived EPIK teachers wouldn’t meet their co-teachers until the new school year began, but I also had to wonder how many fresh off the boat foreign teachers would be paired with inexperienced Korean teachers. Was I getting extra newbies because of my experience or was it really random?

School finally started, but I found myself with a lot more nothing for a while while we waited for subject classes to start and while we waded through the first day of class orientation lessons to help the new students and teachers meet one another. Finally getting started I began to realize the daunting task ahead of me that involves balancing a crazy schedule and teaching 2 new teachers how to do the job. I mean, I guess I could just sit back and let them flail around until they work it out, but I can’t really let the students suffer like that, so this is me, doing my best to manage. It’s somehow harder than if I just had a class myself, because I have little to no influence over what happens in the classroom on the days I’m not with a given group of students (since I’m spread thin over 2 schools and 4 classes of 4 grades, I basically see each class 1 time a week, except for the 6th graders I see twice). I now understand why it is that so many Koreans can study English from the third grade and yet not be able to speak it.

Then at long last, a much anticipated event which I had spotted back in January finally arrived. A glorious yoga retreat at a spa resort in the mountains! What could be a better way to ease my stress and restore my resilience than such a wondrous weekend. The day before the retreat, I woke up with a cold… sore throat, stuffed sinuses, whole 9 yards. With little sleep and much mucus, I arose early Saturday and set off anyway, hoping that some meditation and spa therapy would at least help a little. And it might have, had not absolutely everything been a crazy misrepresentation, mistake, flake, or flat out disappointment. I haven’t even decided if I want to blog about this trip because it was so awful, I can’t find a way to spin it for the “life lesson” or “silver lining” even though that was the name of the organization that presented the event.

Amid the highlights were the totally not delivered as promised vegetarian Indian buffet (the vegetarians were served Korean food, and a tofu steak that had pork in it); the 4 hour/seven instructor yoga and meditation session that was missing one instructor and also completely failed to do things like adequately warm up the participants for challenging poses or to present alternate poses or instructions for beginners (many of whom had their first and possibly last exposure to yoga that weekend); and the 2 drunk male staff members (one shirtless) showing up in my hotel room at 2am waking me up and trying to touch me even after I asked them to go (still not sure why they were there in the first place).

Did I mention that during all this time, my tooth, the one that I’m getting this infernally long root canal done on, is in pain? The dentist has twice left me in pain for over a week with no medication, leaving me to struggle on through life with a dull throbbing ache in my left lower jaw and the total inability to chew anything on that side. Even now that the root canal is supposedly “over” (4 sessions later) and the process to install a crown can begin (minimum 3 sessions), my tooth hurts day and night and I have to wait to find out if it will be treated or not until my next appointment. But hey, my hair dye arrived, and it’s a smash hit.

And Holi Hai is coming, which is the Indian festival of colors where we all dance around and throw colored powder and paint on our white clothes while rocking out to Boli-rock or Indo-pop on the beach. I did it last year and it was awesome, so I was really excited to go again this year. And yet somehow, people are trying to ruin that too. Two factions of the local Indian expat community have started a turf war over the holiday and who gets to throw the party. They’re trashing each other on social media and trying to drag all of us as well as the local Korean government into their feud. I’m still planning to go, but I will have an escape plan in case they start physically fighting over the microphone or DJ station. I don’t know what they were trying to do, but all they’ve really succeeded in doing is demonstrating their total lack of Holi spirit. Festival of love, guys.

Next?

So there it is. My life is not lollipops and rainbows all the time, despite the fact that I am so amazingly lucky to be able to live abroad and travel to exotic destinations and meet new people and try new things. And I am amazingly lucky. And I do have gratitude for the opportunities in my life. I sometimes describe culture shock as living on a roller coaster, and by and large what I share with the world is the highs, but when you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s not because I’ve forgotten to write, it’s because I keep trying to live up to the maternal advice, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

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I release my sadness, woe and frustration. I do not want to carry it with me, so I give it a home here. I bid farewell to the winter within and without. I welcome the arrival of Spring and the rebirth of the year and it’s promise of new growth. I strive each day to find the beauty and wonder that keeps me going in the dark times. 

Happy Pi Day
Happy White Day (it’s about candy, not race)
Happy St. Patrick’s Day
Happy Holi Hai
Bless