A year really isn’t all that long of a time. Sure, it can drag on for dozens of work weeks, a thousand meals, 0.5 haircuts (if you’re Harry, anyway). But especially if you move around a lot, a year can pass by in a flash.
We didn’t come to Seoul to find the Real Korea. We didn’t come to make friends or learn a lot about ourselves. Frankly, we came because we could earn more money in a year teaching English here than we could anywhere else. Our months of job hunting while touring in Japan (which is not recommended, btw, as it requires carrying around unnecessary button-down shirts and showering on the semi-regular) yielded a multitude of job opportunities for experienced but unlicensed educators, yet none of them as good on paper as even the lamest of hagwon jobs in Korea: an international kindergarten in Hong Kong paid just well enough to afford the astronomical cost of living in an exciting city, provided we were willing to live in a tiny apartment with two other roommates; Disney English in China offered us a chance to work for the Evil Empire, which, as Star Wars has taught me, includes decent pay but terrible benefits; a program in Vietnam, astoundingly, offered us a pittance to work at a dozen schools for an absurd number of hours per week...and also would not pay us a cent of that pittance until the end of the contract.
Meanwhile, while the Powers That Be are definitely trying to pop the EFL bubble in Korea, it’s still possible to find 30-hour-a-week jobs in Seoul for about $25,000 a year, benefits, housing, and completion bonus included. Factor in a relatively low cost of living and suddenly Korea makes a whole lot of sense. Sure, the job you find might be one of Those Jobs that we all hear about: a friend of ours fled her contract after a few months of late paychecks, missing paychecks, and bedbugs. But for thousands of dollars in savings, we could endure any job for twelve months.
So in short: while we were fond of Korea (except for the bugs), we didn’t really choose Korea. It chose us.
It wasn’t easy after a year of unmitigated freedom to go back to working a regular job five days a week. We tried to focus on the positives, on the luxuries like air conditioning and showers that we missed on the road. But our goal was to make the year pass as profitably and quickly as possible so we could get back to our Real Life, as we thought of bike touring. We didn’t seek out new friends, knowing that we’d be leaving in a year and would have to say goodbye right after meeting.
And yet, somehow, after twelve months in this dirty, crowded, sprawl-y city in a damned sub-Arctic desert, we found ourselves tearfully bidding farewell to more new friends than we had ever expected.
“You may not think you have anyone here in Korea,” said our Korean teacher, beginning to cry, “but you do. You have me, and I hope you come see me if you ever come back to Korea.”
The last days in Seoul were to be spent simultaneously getting ready for an international move and a year-long bike trip. We’d had a to-do list taped up next to the bathroom door since March, and a dozen tasks to be done were gradually whittled down to two or three, which then ballooned back up to twenty or thirty in our last days as more and more chores made themselves known.
“Get travel vaccinations.”
“Buy ferry tickets.”
“Transfer money.”
“Buy shoes.”
The final week was insane...and in the process of leaving, we discovered that we had so many friends to say goodbye to that we underwent an abrupt re-prioritization of chores. More tasks were discarded as unimportant or impossible than actually completed. Some of those we regret. “Buy spare inner tubes” never got done, for instance. Nor did “Go grocery shopping.” But we regret not a minute that we spent saying goodbye to our new friends who are soon to become our old friends.
In short, Seoul is a good city. It’s not a great city, perhaps. It’s dirty, the air quality is fairly hellish, and it takes forever to get anywhere. But it’s not a bad place to live. Especially with friends like these.
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| Also, Jenn learned belly dance! Truly, our skills are as varied as they are impractical. |
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