Busy Little Me... Tuesday, July 12

I’ve been too busy to enjoy the rain. I say enjoy because I do love the rainy days. Beyond the whole comfy feeling of a rainy day, rainy days here in Korea are an especially welcomed quest in my week.

With the monsoon season mixed in with the summer heat, rainy days are truly a blessing. The summer sun here roasts us like ants under a magnifying glass so the rain is a refreshing cool down. Complain about the rain, as most do here in Korea, but if it weren’t for the rain blocking out the brutal sun and it’s skin-frying rays, they’d be all complaining it’s too hot.
I love running in the rain and no, not splashing around in the puddles like a little kid but running as in working-out running. No one’s out on the path but me, no sooner do I work up a sweat but then it’s washed away by Mother Nature, and the added weight of wearing soaked-through clothes ups the intensity of my training.

Rainy days at the daycare however… yikes. Keeping 22 overly active mini-Koreans in a building all day is quite challenging because they do need their outdoor play to run off some energy. They’re good though and I’m going to really miss them when I finish this job. There’s one mini-Korean in particular that I’ll miss and today she stopped me in the hall when we were heading to the bathroom to wash our hands. She stopped me to say “Amy teacher, I love you” and I tell ya, I could have crashed and crumbled right there on the spot. She’s going to be the hardest part of walking away from this job.

With my days at both the daycare and my part time academy job dwindling down, I’ve been looking for a new job. Honestly, my choices here in Korea are pretty much teach English or… teach English. And it’s not that I don’t like teaching English because I really do. It’s that I really don’t have a choice but to teach English that really bothers me. I mean, as a foreigner I really am limited and expected to teach English. I couldn't even work at some run down coffee shop even if I wanted to. Sometimes it seems like getting a "normal" job or any job here that's not some how connected to teaching English seems next to impossible. I'd have a harder time trying to get a minimal coffee shop cashier job than I would getting a teaching position.

The stereotype here in Korea seems to be that if you’re south east Asian you work in an industrial complex, if you are Russian you’re in the sex industry, and if you’re North American, Australian or British you’re an English teacher.

Finding a job that’s outside of the classroom is hard but the other day I scored an interview for a writing job. I thought I’d be in and out of that interview in no time but boy was I wrong. The interview was a bit over 2 hours, of which I spent 20 minutes writing an on-the-spot 700 word expository essay for them. Three people interviewed me, drilled me about my educational and work experience, and then quizzed me with “what-would-you-do-if” situations. I quite liked the intensity of the interview.

I’m on the fence as to whether I really want this job though now because of the details of the job, particularly the hours, are not what I was lead to believe. I’d love to do the job they’re offering and attack all the challenging and brain teasing work it’d imply but I’m not about to let anything beyond my husband and my boxing eat up all my time and effort.

The interview ended with them asking me what my expected pay was and because I wasn’t as optimistic going out of it the interview as I was going in, I threw them a big number. I figured I had nothing to lose.

QUESTION OF THE DAY...
Do you love what you do?

QUOTE OF THE DAY...
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
-- Aristotle