The next day I was picked up by the driver and he and I went to the school and I got my schedule and an advance of about 250,000 won until pay day. And payday was once a month. Somewhat the same as it is in the USA for teachers and teacher’s aides. My schedule was all over the place. There were days and times I would be teaching in the mornings and then in the afternoons in classrooms. In people houses teaching students privately in their homes and at a business in the early mornings Monday’s through Saturday’s with the only day off on being Sunday’s. The driver would be picking me up to take me to the school for the morning and evening classes. The classroom on the second floor I would just have to walk down one flight of stairs to get there for the scheduled time.
There were three different situations away from the classrooms. One was a Koran Colonel in the Korean Army and his wife in the mornings Monday and Wednesday or Tuesdays and Thursdays for private lessons. Another one at a Beer Manufacturing Company in the early morning at 6:00 a.m. Monday, Wednesday and Fridays and the last one was on Saturday’s with a 12-year-old boy in the evenings for a private lesson. All the other classes were scheduled in between all of the others in the morning and the evenings. It was a wacky schedule is all knew.
Being driven to all of these appointments throughout the week by the driver that would see to it I was at all the class schedule throughout Seoul, Korea. I felt at times I was being watched or being spied on like I was a slave, rather than a free American. I was treated as if I were property instead of a teacher of English as a second language. It was as if I had to ask permission to go anywhere I wanted to at all times. I was getting fed up already and I had been there less than two weeks.
Two weeks later just before Christmas we moved to a new house. This time it was a house on the third floor with stairs on the outside leading up to it. I remember the stairs very well. Especially the day I tried to clean them with hot water to remove all the dirt. That was a major mistake because by nightfall the stairs had frozen over and there was a thin sheet of ice on them. Which made it difficult to walk up and down them without the possibility of slipping and falling down. It is funny now but it was not at the time I did it. But I learned a lesson of what you do not do to stairs in the wintertime.
By this time I had met Greg, the other teacher who had shared the other apartment with me. The other teacher that was in the room at the apartment never came back for his stuff. I guess he quit and by now I could understand very easily why he might have quit. This was nuts. I was ready to find another job teaching somewhere else in Seoul, South Korea too and leave.
So I stated looking in the Korean Herald, the English version of the newspaper. I started looking in the want ads for another teaching job at another school (hog won). In the mean time I was preparing for my exit and by this time Greg and I got to know each other a little better.
I finally decided to bail out of this situation and find another teaching job and I did. I found another job at another school and quit the other school. The manager of the new school I would be going to helped me move my stuff to a motel they provided for me until they could find me more suitable housing at least that was the promise I was given by Miss Kim the manager of the new school.
The day I left was during the New Year in January 1995 right after Christmas and a few days after payday. It was funny my roommate knew I was leaving and it was not the first time he had seen it happen in the time he had been working for this school. Greg and I had gotten into it one night and he broke a beer bottle over my head because I had the music too loud one night after he had been out with his girl friend and he was pissed off at her and took it out on me. We ended up breaking one of the outer glass doors as he pushed my head through it that night.
But after words Greg apologized the next day and thank god I did not need any stitches. Greg and I had a special last night dinner the night before I bailed. We discussed how he would handle it when the driver came looking for me at 6 a.m. on the next scheduled classes after the New Years holiday. We came up with the idea that I would put a sign on my bedroom door “Do not disturb” and when I put that sign up he would know that I had left and was gone forever.
The day I finally did leave Miss Kim and her driver picked me up and we went up stairs and got all my stuff out in less than 10 minutes time and then headed to my new housing situation working for a new school. That day was like “I spy” as I had taken a bus first to meet Miss Kim at the new school where Miss Kim and her driver then drove me back to pick up my suit cases. And while on the bus I felt I was being followed and spied on by someone or that was the thoughts that were in my mind at the time as I remember back to that very cold winter days in Seoul, South Korea.
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