Winter Intensives
The school is a lot different than it was a month ago. For one thing, we have broken off from our parent company of Kim Hak Su. I was aware that Albert, my boss, had been itching to do this for a while, but I didn’t expect it to happen so fast. He had told me over beers that while the man, Kim Hak Su, was very smart and a social brother to him, he was also very selfish. Truth be told, this hasn’t had a noticeable impact on my day to day life. We just don’t have a school name at the moment.
Boram has been gone since Christmas. Since then a foreign teacher at Albert’s other school bailed. To remedy this, he brought Hae Jin to that school. She has been replaced with a Korean girl named Ara, who has some pretty amazing English under her belt from Australia.
The problem with Hae Jin and Boram leaving, other than it being sad to see people I’ve known my whole time in Korea leave, is that they were the ones who really kept kids under control. Han and I do not inspire the same level of fear of death as those two. So, to a certain extent, a few classes have descended into anarchy.
What makes things worse is that public schools have let out for winter break and again the kids flock to private academies. They come earlier and they stay for a longer part of the day. Classes have all changed and with that the general dynamic. Kids who were subdues and peaceful before are now with their friends and they combined to become a kind of axis of evil.
Winter Class B would be a pretty decent example. In the class is one boy and two girls who, on their own, aren’t beyond manageable. Individually, whenever I told one of them to stop talking they would immediately apologize. The boy would make a heart with his arms and say “Ok, sorry Thomas, I love you ok very good.”
Currently, I spend most of the class screaming like a lunatic at all three of them. A week ago, the boy smacked one of the girls on the head and made her cry. He spent the entire 45 minute class kneeling in front of the smart board. He still wouldn’t shut up.
Then, there is the Missing Boy (who went MIA for a few hours a bunch of months ago). I would be lying if I said that winter intensives have made any difference in his classes as he is all alone but he has definitely stepped up his game.
He is one of my first classes a few days a week. Everyday, he comes in and we do our little dance. It ends in two ways:
1. Trap him in a corner, put him in a headlock or pick him up and carry him to class.
2. He sprints into class and tries to barricade the door.
I win both of these scenarios. He is a scrawny 8 or 9 year old and I outweigh him by approximately 500 lbs. One day last week, I joined him in a pre-dance glass of orange juice. We stood there until he took a big sip, threw his glass and ran for the door. Ok, I thought, scenario 2. Generally, my strategy is to get my foot into the door as he closes it and then pull the door handle off of the inside (it is broken). He then closes the door, realizes that he is trapped inside with nothing to hold onto. I win.
On this day the door was too far broken and wouldn’t properly close. I thought nothing of it and reached my left arm in and tickled his side. He responded by shotgun spitting a mouthful of orange juice into my face and all over my folders.
The dance was over. He won.
The next day, after literally dragging him on the floor and into the classroom, he tried to instigate a repeat of the previous day with a mouthful of green tea. I’m no fool so I laughed and said “no.” He then spit his at out into my thermos of water. I said something to the extent of “seriously” and he grabbed my papers and blitzed around me and hurled them out the window. Kid is like a sneaky little velociraptor.
As of today, I have been in Korea for 265 days. I have 100 days left on my contract and I can only imagine that the time I have left will fly by. The first thing I did upon receiving a cell phone here was set a countdown for the end of my contract. It wasn’t so much an issue of me wanting time to go by quickly or the need to know exactly how long I have left so much that I sometimes don’t realize time is going by at all.
When I first landed here, a year might as well have been forever. There were so many milestones that I needed to get through before I went back home: Halloween, my birthday, New Year’s Eve, Christmas, Thanksgiving. Now: there is nothing.
In an hour I will check my phone and see that I am down to double-digits. I don’t know why it is so significant to me; not really. I suppose I can remember laying in bed at my first apartment in Cheongju with no internet wondering what kind of mess I had gotten myself into. I recall laying there wondering how I would feel when I was down to the last 100 days; whether I would be emotionally scarred from a Christmas alone.
I guess I feel pretty much the same as I did at the half way point; which felt pretty much the same as the 4 month point. Though I am starting to feel that urgency to start doing as much as I can in Korea; my days are numbered.
In 10 days I have a lot of work to do. I have been mulling over how to get home for quite some time. I don’t feel like jumping onto an airplane and being home 20 something hours later. Somehow that seems so anticlimactic to a year abroad.
Part of the reason I like travel writing and books about journeys (The Hobbit / LOTR) is that they acknowledge that the way home can be an adventure in itself. I am getting a decent wad of cash when my contract is completed and I feel it would be a waste (both personally and with the whole photographer thing) to skip out on the rest of the world. As it is, I have not so much as touched my portfolio in a year or so.
The plan is this: Ferry from Korea to the eastern shore of Russia. Rail from there to Moscow. Moscow - Europe (avoiding Belarus). Eventually I mean to make my way to Barcelona to see an old friend before I finally get on a plane head back to Boston.
It’s a plan anyway. A Russian Visa seems to be require a horrible amount of patience, but the embassy told me that it was possible to get while living abroad. So, I am going to make a go of it.