Orient ation
My year teaching English in Korea began yesterday with the easiest international jet lag day I’ve had so far. Granted, the other days included dragging my baggage through a Dutch shopping mall and throwing a punch at Brian Davis after walking up Montmartre in the rain, but still.
I got in to Incheon Airport, just outside Seoul, around 5am local time. Right off the jetaway, there was a mobbish set of lines leading up to four Korean men in surgical masks checking everyone’s temperature and collecting our Do-You-Have-Swine-Flu questionnaires. They are terrified of swine flu here. Someone might tell them it’s really not any worse than regular flu, and that those classic strains kill people all the time, but then Koreans might start walking around with gas masks and body suits and just shoot us when walk off the plane.
After the flu checkpoint, I met up with Miriam, a veteran ex-pat English teacher who I met in the TSA baggage drop-off line, and we headed over to the airport meeting place for all the Seoul public school teachers. A handful of people from our flight were already there, and we hung out, talked about where we were from, and tried to remember each other’s names. Quickly I realized the week-long program orientation was going to like the beginning of a study abroad program with a slightly bigger age range. Except this time around there will not be a bar in my dorm building.
There is a dorm building, though, but it only has a Domino’s. After four hours or so hanging around in the airport we got into buses, which took us to Suwon, a suburb south of the capital. I use the term suburb loosely, as can see at least fifteen high rises from my window. The orientation is on a university campus, and there are a surprising amount of rules. We are not allowed to leave. We have been told guards will chase us down. There is a boy’s dorm and a girl’s dorm, and they chain the doors of each closed at 9pm. This fairly direct implication that we are large-sized summer campers apparently comes from the orientation turning into a completely epic boozefest a few years ago. That was it, we thought. Then we were given thermometers and sheets of paper to record and in turn in our temperatures on a nightly basis. Ahh, a swine flu prevention quarantine, of course.
We settled in to our new, nice and comfortably generic dorm rooms and went on a tour of Hwaseong Fortress, an elaborate wall surrounding the old part of the city. Our group was led by an adorable older Korean man trying to speak to fifty of us with a crappy amp, wind blowing into his microphone, and lack of enunciation. So it took me until I looked at Wikipedia to find out that a king built the wall to honor his father, who “had been murdered by being locked alive inside a rice chest”. Still, it was a good way to get to know each other after giving up trying to understand, and the walk was neither uphill nor in the rain.
Later, at dinner, I faced the major test of whether or not I would like living in Korea: eating kimchi for the first time. The side dish present at 110% of Korean meals, its pickled and seasoned vegetables, most often cabbage. That description didn’t serve to wet my appetite, nor did anyone saying that its an acquired taste. After my first bite, I agreed with the acquired part, but I was ready to get on board.
After dinner, those of us who had not somehow collapsed in a coma congregated inbetween the gender segregated buildings, for lack of a common room, and headed in a few hours later on threat of being locked out. I may have fallen asleep before I hit the pillow. No shopping mall had been traversed. No punch had been thrown at Brian Davis. For someone without swine flu, it was a good jet lag day.
