EPIK Orientation

The past three weeks have been a hurricane of mixed emotions, severe jet lag, aching feet, and moderate-yet-responsible soju consumption. I’ve been through the EPIK orientation classes and presentations, my first encounter with my head coteacher, the much anticipated apartment unveil, my first faculty dinner, and the first of many classes I will teach in this lifetime. Oh, and I’ve also successfully failed at trying to register for an account on the Korean League of Legends server. There’s so much to cover, but one post wouldn’t do the experience the justice it deserves. So, let’s start at the beginning.

On February 22^nd, I touched down in Korea at Incheon Airport, after about 36 hours of travel. I met my Korvia recruiter in person for the first time at the airport, and was soon whisked off to Gongju National University of Education for EPIK orientation week. Located about two hours south of Seoul, Gongju turned out to be pretty much in the middle of nowhere, but it was home for the next week. Arriving at the university around 8:30pm, we shuffled through the cold hallways (turns out Korea heats its rooms, not its entire buildings, so hallways are typically frost caverns) and into our respective rooms. While some teachers went to explore the surrounding area, I fell promptly asleep the second my head hit my pillow.

In short, orientation week went by quickly. We were kept in a bubble of foreigners getting acquainted to Korean cafeteria food (seafood, duck, kimchi, etc…not a difficult transition for some of us at all), seeing snow for the first time (eyyyyyy Florida), and taking classes about both Korean culture and teaching expectations. We learned a few Korean greeting phrases to try out and deceive our schools into thinking we were fluent in the language and even took a field trip to a local museum. At the end of the week, we were grouped up with other teachers and assigned 15-minute condensed lesson presentation to the rest of our orientation class section. Luckily for me, my group ended up being awesome, and we even won our class section’s vote for best lesson.

Other than my group’s flawless lesson victory, the highlight of orientation was keeping my February 26^th birthday a secret but having a perfect day nonetheless. As luck would have it, February 26^th fell on the orientation’s field trip and craft day, so there were absolutely no lectures. Instead, we woke up and loaded onto karaoke-style busses equipped with television screens and speakers/microphones to go to a nearby museum and burial tomb. After seeing the different museum exhibits, I found an outdoor garden and walked around in the snow for a bit before the group headed to the royal tomb. With a fresh coat of snow hugging the ground and (for some reason) ABBA playing on the speakers spread throughout the garden, everything seemed perfect. Though I had Mama Mia stuck in my head for the next two hours.

After the tomb tour, we headed back to Gongju University to eat lunch and do a Korean arts and crafts project, coming out of the two-hour session with our very own tea boxes, which would prove difficult to transport with all of our luggage but would accent my apartment by offering the only decoration for the foreseeable future.

After dinner, the rest of the evening was ours. I teamed up with a teacher from Florida and another from Canada to explore the town of Gongju a bit in the moonlight. Earlier that week, we had walked through the streets trying to find bungeoppang, a Korean dessert made of cake stuffed with red bean paste that is shaped like a fish, only to come back empty handed. But on this particular night, we knew where we were going, and we found the dessert early in the evening. We each bought three red bean-filled cakes and three custard-filled ones, enough to reasonably feel like we had eaten too much dessert that night.

With our mission accomplished, we decided to wander a bit more before returning back to the university grounds. We ended up finding a stream and following it until it reached a larger river, where we found a convention center and a beautifully-lit bridge. A perfect evening with the perfect new friends!

On the last day of orientation, I found out I would be teaching at an elementary school in Seongbuk-gu, an area in northern Seoul. My Canadian and Floridian (from Florida?) companions were assigned schools in downtown Seoul, but we vowed to meet up every so often in the city. On the last evening, we bought some snacks and chestnut makgeolli (a special blend of the drink specific to the Gongju area) and walked down to the stream for one last night before we were shipped off to our respective schools.

The next day, we traveled Seoul, where we met our coteachers and were brought to the schools and apartments where we would spend the next year of our lives. We arrived at the pickup location a little earlier than expected, so we all gathered in a huddle in the cold parking lot as cars pulled up and took our new friends away to start their adventures. Eventually, a white car pulled into the parking lot, and a woman with a sign reading “Brian Wong” approached the group. I said my few choice Korean phrases to introduce myself to her, then broke the news that I had no idea how to speak any other Korean, and we laughed it off as we loaded up her car with my luggage and snazzy tea box that didn’t fit into any of my bags.

As excited as I was to get out of the orientation bubble and dive right into the immersion that comes with living and teaching in Seoul, I was a nervous wreck. I’d never taught before aside from a few Lego Robotics afterschool classes back in the US, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Sure, I had taken the training classes and had one practice lesson under my belt, but I was going to a school to teach kids their first years of English, and I’d be working at a school where most of the faculty had minimal English exposure outside of the classroom. Plus, I had heard that some of the teachers wouldn’t be provided mattresses, so that was another level of stress to top things off. And to make matters worse, I was pretty sure I had mispronounced “nice to meet you,” and was unsure what I really said to my new coworker. But I’d never gotten anywhere in life by worrying and overanalyzing, so I took a deep breath, opened the car door, and got inside.