Shout "Korea! Korea! Korea!" while listening to Pavement's "Cut Your Hair"
...Dear god, what have I done?
Leaving tomorrow morning. Too nervous to write properly. Too nervous to write in anything but self-consciously clipped sentences. Have made no progress learning Korean. Haven't got past the alphabet, and only half the characters in that.
It will be three months exactly since I got back. An interesting three months... an interesting year, one which seems to want to become the strangest of my life.
People generally ask me two questions. The first is, are you excited? Which leads to me discussing my confusion over my particular physiological expression of the differences between excitement and nervousness, which is my evasive way of saying that I am terrified. I think people are only looking for a simple "yes" (or perhaps, yes!"). So, yes!
I feel quite a bit less nervous than I did three months ago, although I sure wish it was Bree meeting me at Incheon Airport rather than the beaurocrats of the South Korean government TaLK program (Teach And Learn in Korea is the acronym; the strange capitalisation I cannot explain.) I find that if I concentrate only on the immediate adventure - my flight, the orientation period, meeting my fellow "c0-scholars" (ugh, but I think I need to get used to that phrasing) - then I feel something that is a sort of happy nervousness. Is that what you humans mean by - how you say it? - "excitement"?
The second is, what is this thing I'm doing? Well, this is the TaLK website if you're particularly interested. Really simply - though no doubt I will have plenty of time for more detail over the next six months - I get three weeks training at Kyung Hee University, along with either 300 or 600 other scholars, I can't quite work out which. Lots about this is confusing, and rather rushed-seeming - I was only sent my ticket yesterday, for instance. That suits my mood at the moment, and I'm trying to embrace it. We will be taught how to teach English, the Korean language if we need it, at either Beginner's or Advanced level (about 85% of the participants seem to be of Korean descent, so I imagine Beginner's will be me and a couple of dozen other scared white people) and some other quite strange things, like a one and a half hour lecture on Korean pottery. Then there is another week's orientation in my province (Gyeongsangbuk-do) with the other scholars of the area, then from September I will be teaching little kids in the lovely town of Apo-eup. Possibly in my new suit.
Accomodation is provided. A homestay is an horrific though seemingly remote possibility; hopefully it will be some sort of high-rise boxy studio apartment, perhaps in Gumi or Gimcheon, the neighbouring small cities. Or it might be a shack nestled into one corner of the highway cloverleaf in Apo-eup; I won't find out for three more weeks. Everything happens at the last minute with this. Apparently it's a cultural thing. The teaching is fifteen hours per week, and the pay is pretty damn generous for that, particularly when taking into account the free accomodation.
It's part of the Korean government's attempts to school up their children in the English language - along with everything else - so that they can rule the world. Which they will no doubt do in a generation or two, along with the Chinese, the Indians, and all those other citizens of stable countries who are willing to work really hard for a first-world lifestyle, and not just take their comfort for granted while they pretend to be an artist. (That went from the global to the self-indicting really quickly.) Me - I'm gonna cash in on the death-throes of the West while I can. I'm also - and this is the ambitious part - going to try to work really hard and do lots of things and find a truer integrity, an artistic integrity, so that I can actually be an artist and stop pretending I am one. (Hence the "something vaguely pretentious" of this blog's new subtitle.)
The social side of things will also be interesting. I'm definitely intending to spend a lot of time writing, hopefully with the perspective that supposedly comes to a writer far from home, but this is not meant to be some On Walden Pond-type thing. According to the forums I've been reading, one can keep very busy on the weekends and see all of South Korea by making lots of friends during the orientation period. There are vague-sounding "organized cultural experiences" offered as part of the program, too. So this is my first goal: make lots of friends during orientation. Another interesting experiment in extroversion. So hopefully it will be Charming Nicholas who turns up, and not the other one. People tend to think I have more control over that than I really do. We'll see.
More from South Korea soon!
(The title of this blog post, by the way, was Tim's joyful advice as to what I should do if and when I found out I was in. And I did it, too. Thanks, Tim.)
posted by Nicholas at
4:49 AM
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