Research: A Limited Venture

This morning I decided to brew a second cup of coffee, because I knew that my intentions for the day consisted of staring at the computer browsing the same sites that I always visit.  This weather has made going outside less than appealing and I am under the assumption that there is no limit to the amount of research one should conduct before making a move overseas.  The wealth of information on the superhighway should last me until the day I depart for Korea, or so I thought.  I found that my ability to come up with different word combinations to feed the search engine has stifled my attempt at finding anything new.  Can that be possible?  Have I found all that there is to know about the place I am going, or just not the right wording for the search?

I have tried an umbrella search on Korea and there is a million pages of information on Seoul and North Korea, but I am not moving to Seoul and I have no plans yet to pay a visit to Kim Jong Ill.  He is not ready to meet someone like me.  Entering the specific province in Korea, I am greeted only with your basic government tourism pages, hotel reviews and travel writer forums.  A search narrowed to the city in the province I am moving to yields much of the same.  I have even bothered to sign up for a yahoo group specific to the location and have had limited success in response to my questions.  It seems the hippies are more interested in organizing an Ultimate Frizbee game.  Dave's ESL site people have been useless too.  Maybe my antagonistic responses to others' posts has made me a bad guy that nobody wants to play with anymore.  Oh well, thanks for nothing.

Upon more creative investigation, I turned to the blogosphere in hopes of finding a similar soul who has travelled to and posted about the place and the kind of information that interests me.  A nibble here and there is provided by a few visitors and resident bloggers, but with hardly the right amount of detail and gusto.  Not quite Mark Twain enough for me.  They chart the path commonly travelled by those who have bothered to write before them, probably unaware of their boorish similarities.  Unaware and without a care, they most likely satisfy whatever intent they had in their diarrheic appraisal of "one more place visited".  Like a notch on their belt, a check-off of their list.

 I imagine the people that follow, friends and family, for whom they have bothered to create the blog for, disappointed by their loved one's inability to convey anything about what it is like being there.  The kind of writing that allows the reader to imagine a place that they will most likely never see with their own eyes.  It is safe to say that what I have read so far won't be convincing any reader about making travel plans, ever.  Worse, I cringe at the notion that the author looks back fondly in their old age at the feeble attempt made at documenting their travels and feeling a sense of accomplishment.  Different levels of self critique I suppose, and who am I to judge.  I am only sad because I had high hopes before reading some of these blogs and feel let down.  

I have yet to find one blogger who satisfies that attention to detail and wonder that one should feel in a place so new and magical and different.  So far I have read a bunch of Book Report blogs and Tourist Guide blogs, Comparing This To That Which We Cannot Understand In Our Narrow Mindset blogs, Penny Pinching-Dirty Hippie Hiker blogs and the always popular, Look at Me and My Girlfriend/boyfriend Happily Traveling Together blogs.  Yuck!  So bland, so similar and all of the photos are exactly the same no matter what kind of blog it is.  Even the blogs that have been posted to help out Foreigner's who have moved to work there are sterile.  Is it inevitable that anything I write will turn out only a slight variant of the same?  Can there be only one collective POV possible about the subject matter?  I pray this lack of original thought doesn't infect my being upon arrival.

If by narrowing my search to specifics limits the amount of different and useful information these searches come up with, I may have something to contribute to the web once I get there and investigate for myself.  Maybe there is a job in it for me, or some money even, for contributing to the available knowledge about this place I soon will call home?  Maybe I will get the attention of some publisher or magazine and win the Pulitzer Prize of blogging?  Find my inner Robert Louis Stevenson perhaps?  Is it even possible that these questions have not been answered and information published somewhere in Web-land?  I seriously doubt that I am the first who wants to know the answers to these questions I have entered into my Google searches.  I must not have the right word combinations...

The Job Search-Dave'sESLcafe (English-speaking Sleazeballs & Losers)

-The title of this post reflects my interpretation of the overall sentiment of the message board on this informative and useful site. Do yourself a favor and avoid the Off-topic and General topic message boards and only use it for the Job search. The job board is updated daily and I abused that thing like a red-headed step child. Before I digress into the subterranean stench that lay in the chasm of dave's message board, I want to vent my anxiety and frustration that consumed me during my 2 month long job search.

While 2 months doesn't seem like a long time to look for work, it was a full time job in essence, without pay. Recruiter's will hook you up... or give you the runaround, or ignore you. I applied to many a recruiter who promised instant interviews and the best paying jobs in the best schools according to wherever you want to work in Korea. Then the job market crunch, thanks to the tanking economy, had recruiter's telling me to be open to less popular locations. As the weeks passed and many a resume sent to schools answering ads on dave's, I started to sweat the possibility that these jobs were getting filled by more qualified applicants. I got a few nibbles from schools and a phone interview. I got rejected by 4 schools in 4 weeks and all of the sudden it was September. Word on the message board was that fewer schools were hiring.

I abandoned my hopes of working in Busan by the ocean and started applying to schools everywhere in Korea. The sticks, industrial cities, places I knew would eventually kill my spirit but a foot in the door as I saw it. Contracts are only a year long, so I figured better to just get over there than face a frigid, dark winter in the states waiting for a perfect job that might never arrive. With my hopes dwindling as the jobs seemed less available until the hiring period of February and March, I began to panic a bit. I had no fall back plan, no money and no way to get around once this land froze over in the nearing months ahead. Just when panic and misery was about to sink its claws into my dwindling life force I got an email.

Weeks prior I had applied to a different school in a location that had earlier been a source of jubilation turned disappointment. I had gotten a great response from an owner of a school saying he thought I was perfect for the job and that he would call me the following Monday. When Monday came and went, I sent an email checking in with him. He responded that two teachers who were leaving are renewing their contracts and that he was sorry. I was seriously bummed as it was too good to be true. I was prepared to be let down by now as I applied to this other school and countless others. Then I got the email that changed my life.

As I courted the owner of the school, trading emails for 3 weeks, finally a contract was offered to me. Subsequently, I signed it, mailed it with my passport and transcripts. 8 days later I was issued a Visa and soon after a flight booked and paid for by the school. Knowing that I will be in Korea at the tail end of December, I laugh in the face of winter as it mocks those who hate it at -10 degrees F. I will be leaving at the peak of its wickedness, three months before Spring takes over and not a day too soon. Had I signed with a school earlier out of desperation or been offered a contract from some middle of nowhere town, my lack of patience would have betrayed me once again. I must have done something right to have things work out the way that they did. Now all I can do is pray that I have a cool boss and that I am well received by the school and community... and prepare as much as possible for the unknown.

***

What can I say about daveseslcafe.com that hasn't been said in the blogosphere already? Nothing new, nothing positive and nothing surprising. Living in isolation and spending time searching for jobs on dave's, I couldn't help but sign on to the site. I was going to milk it for all of the information I could get out of the thing. Signing on to the site would enable me to post questions and get feedback from this online community. What I didn't realize was what a smack-talking, smart-assed, know-it-all, hating bunch of regulars I was about to join in wasting my time voicing my opinion about stupid topics for the sake of argument.

I like smack-talk as much as the next guy, but it is a whole new ball of wax in cyber-land.  Face to face, I can tell in 15 minutes of spending time with someone if they will annoy the hell out of me eventually or instantly.  The thing about the internet is, half of these kooks are such geeks, the likelihood of meeting them in a social setting is slim to none.  In between Warcraft and D&D or whatever, they get on their dave's soapbox flexing their nerd muscles.  Before I offend all of Nerddom, I have friends who do that thing at night and i don't hate because they are cool people.  The thing is, you can tell the socially inept by the way they write or respond to others' posts.  I have nothing against geeks, because they aren't confrontational in the day to day, but cyber geeks turned bullies can piss-off.  I guess it is their chance at seeming cool in a world that veils their being in anonymity.

 All I know is that out there in the real world, these clowns would think twice about voicing such opinions in person. I must admit though, I lose my cool a tad on the board because I don't have to pretend to be nice or bite my tongue like I would in the face of these people, so I just let 'em have it usually. I swear it is because I am trapped in this frigid, isolated home, basically alone.   My active participation on dave's should cease to be necessary once I make my move overseas, but I might be addicted for arguments sake...

Documents

Having completed the TEFL certification and feeling all the more prepared to teach my native tongue to foreign students, it was time to organize my documents. It was by now the end of July and the summer was in full swing, sunny and warm. I phoned my University and requested multiple sealed transcripts, checked on the status of my diploma being delivered in the mail and rummaged through my bags, not yet fully unpacked, for my elusive passport. It had expired earlier in the year, but it is much easier to apply for a new one with the old one. I managed to space it back in Hawaii... where I left my brain saltwater logged and surfed out. Feeling pumped up about asking my dad for extra money for a new passport as apposed to a renewal at half the cost, I decided to call my buddy and see if he could locate the old one in my unorganized life now stored underneath his house. No luck (insert grief from father here).

Hey dad guess what? You get to foot the bill for the new birth certificate that I ordered online so I can send for a new passport. You are the best. Once I got the birth certificate I would be able to send it off with photos and completed forms for a new passport. In town I needed to get my CBC from the police, take it to the bank to be notarized and then send to the capitol to be apostilled by the Governor. Organizing, waiting for and obtaining documents, apostilles, Visa's, photos and notaries, is a stressful and time consuming process to say the least. It requires more running around than one might think. News flash: It isn't a cake walk trying to leave the country.

My certain plan was to escape winter. The reality was far from what I thought as totally do-able. I figured that once all your documents are in order you apply, get a quick interview, hired and two weeks later a Visa. Two weeks after that you are on a plane headed to the Far East. I thought I could, without fail, start a job by mid-September or October 1st. It was only August 1st and 6-8 weeks seemed like plenty of time. A plethora of job offers were just a right-click away on any job-site. I wasn't sweating winter in the slightest and my calculations were only off, give or take a few weeks. A November 1st starting date would be just fine and maybe a little time in the snow a beautiful thing before I go?

Certification: Prepping for Adventure

Come to Korea and teach English! Free flight and housing! No experience required! Any degree will do!... What a sales pitch. I must admit, Korea was not my first choice, but became the logical choice for these reasons and others. Being a person living below poverty level, Korea is the obvious choice. Sprinkle on top the modernity and slight-western influence and you have a clear winner for a first year teacher. I had been investigating my possibilities of places to go prior to graduating college and the relative ease in finding a job in Korea and the safety of the jump made more sense than trying to find work in Vietnam.

I committed to researching Korea after running into a girl who I had a class with the semester prior, at the supermarket. Her name is Heddi ( I imagine this spelling might be incorrect) and she is a stunningly beautiful Korean girl who convinced me I would love it. Sold. As shallow is this may sound, I had long before developed an affinity for Korean cuisine and have been eating kimchi out of the jar for a good 7 years. Her insistence that I would have a great time was merely icing on the cake and what incredibly delicious icing coming from Heddi.

***

The idea of teaching in a foreign country with no experience or background in education sounded like a bold thing to do, bordering on stupid. I am no spring chicken and unlike most fresh out of college graduates, I have lived on my own in a few different places. I have felt that sense of anxiety of things new before. It takes getting used to. I am also different than most recent college graduates who, young and eager and ready to conquer are somewhat delusional because of their newly acquired knowledge and sense of ability that has been fostered by college professors. College has, in a sense, made me more jaded. So instead of assuming I knew what it takes to teach a class (I had attended many) I thought it wise to get a certificate from TEFL. I paid for the expensive, most intensive online course available because it seemed the most in depth and worthwhile. It might even bump up my first year salary according to the program salesman.

This course was worth it. Maybe the cheaper course would have been just as good, but I found that more information and in-class hours needed to complete the course, very beneficial. I could not believe how little I knew about what goes into teaching. Grammar? My god, I need to learn it so I can teach it. Classroom management? Thank you for that chapter. It is entirely possible to find everything you need to teach on the web, but I felt the need for some structure and this course was super helpful and to my liking. Not to mention the actual classroom observation. It was humbling getting up in front of English learners for the first time.

 I wasn't expecting the course to be as difficult as it was, or as detailed and heavy in the work load. My online classmates were feeling in a similar way by their comments, some were obvious over-achievers and others were plain stupid. The worst part about the course was peer responses. Shoot me if these clowns are supposed to be my peers. College really cranks out the trite. Halfway through I realized that little effort would get you the pass after reading garbage lesson plans by ding-bats and dip-shits. I made sure to get the most out of it though, knowing that I paid for the course using student loans and I am essentially paying more for it as the interest accrues. I worry about the livelihood of the Liberal Arts Major who assumes their drama experience will suffice for running a classroom. Good luck!

Revival: From the ashes and darkness, this blog

I wasn't gonna do this. I had forgotten about this blog months ago. I had no intention of maintaining it once I had re-read my first posts. I just deleted them. They were pointless. I was in a bad place at the time. My girlfriend of two years and I had split and I was taking it badly to say the least. No need for details because this is more about the future and the present than processing the past. What I have learned in the 5 months since my last post now deleted is, don't dwell on the past and try hard to move on... I found out recently that she had no problem with the latter. Nevertheless, I still care for her deeply and I don't imagine those feelings leaving my thoughts at least until I am able to interact with people on a regular basis.

My situation has been agonizing in regards to "moving on". They say you need to surround yourself with people, get out there and sorrow will gradually leave you. The problem for me is, I am stranded 3 miles up a mountain road and the nearest town is 10 miles away. I don't have access to a car and this state has the worst guy to girl ratio than any of the 49 others and I am living with my parents! Let's just say I have had a multitude of sober time to process my feelings... a true test of self and faith in one's self. The worst has been weathered and my situation has been looking up.

To my credit, the plans and goals that I had set to accomplish as mentioned back in June have come to fruition. In a little over 6 weeks, I will be on a plane heading off to South Korea to teach English and experience life overseas. It is safe to say that any grief or longing for my ex-girl will have no choice but to evaporate, as I imagine my senses overloaded with the unfamiliarity of my surroundings, new job, language and culture. In the following posts, I will explain the process I underwent in successfully landing a job in Korea.