So begins the final, relatively short chapter of my life in South Korea. Chloe and I moved out to Gapyeong on Saturday, and we'll be living here with her parents until my flight back to Canada on September 20th. We already have a lot of awesome stuff planned for the intervening time though, including a trip to Jeju Island next week! I've never been before because I've been a lazy ass about planning it for four years, but my wife is decidedly not a lazy ass. So we're finally going and I'm stoked. After that, we're going to meet up with some friends to explore Yeosu and Suncheon, a couple cities in the south-western area of the country. Then I might just hope a boxcar train to wherever the hell and drift around for a few days, eating beans out of a can and playing the harmonica until people pay me to leave them alone.
As of Friday at 10pm, my fourth and final year-long teaching contract ended, so I'm officially on holiday! I just realized typing this out that this is the only time I've lived in this country without having a job. From day one I was in training and since then I haven't had any substantive time off, apart from the few holidays and short amount of vacation time I was given each year. It hasn't really sunk in yet that I'm not on a schedule anymore, there's not any pressing need to catch a train back to Seoul later or anything like that. I'm excited to take some time to really enjoy living in this country outside of the context of "You have about a day and a half to have fun in this place and then you've gotta get home."
I have a lot of mixed feelings about my career as an English teacher in this country coming to an end. I'm sad about it, but not for the reasons one might expect. I'm gonna try to be as diplomatic as possible with what I'll say here because I'm not trying to burn bridges or anything, but I had some...let's call them positive-deficient experiences with my employer over the past few years. The people I worked for had, hmm...I would describe it as a creative interpretation of the truth, which lead to some pretty challenging and frustrating working conditions. This past term was particularly difficult because it was revealed to me that my manager had done some...let's say "interpretive math" with the number of vacation days guaranteed by my contract, so I ended up having to spend most of my days off working to make up for the difference. Combined with an already busy schedule, challenging material, high number of students a month-long summer intensives period lead to me spending the last three months too exhausted and stressed to really enjoy the end of my time in Seoul. In fact it got to the point where I was so frustrated that I set up an app on my phone to count down to the exact second my contract would end, and I would just stare at it from time to time willing the numbers to go down faster.
So I was sad because I wasn't sad, if that makes sense. I was excited to be done, relieved to no longer have to work for those sorts of people, thrilled to be free. That's not the way I wanted it to end, watching a timer count down to the very second my contract expired and then audibly cheering when it did. I wanted to not want to leave. I loved teaching, and I loved being in the classroom and helping my students, teaching lessons, making things fun, making a positive impact, all that stuff. It was truly amazing, and I always thought that when it was over I'd be regretful, that I'd need someone to talk me out of just signing on for another year even though I couldn't. Instead I practically sprinted out the door so I could go celebrate with my wife and our friends.
Imagine you're in a noisy room, and the sound is coming from a hundred different sources. You've been in there so long that you've gotten used to it, to the point where you don't even really notice or think about it anymore. And then, over the course of a day, someone just slowly switches each one of those sources off, until everything is quiet. So you suddenly feel like you can actually hear yourself think again, and you're not just vaguely uncomfortable or annoyed anymore. That's what my last day was like. And I'm kind of sad about that too.
But that's life, and I can either dwell on it or move on. I feel like with time, when the anger and the hurt subsides, all I'm going to be left with are memories of the good times I had and the great people I worked with. The weather is a bit cooler today, so I'm sitting outside writing this on the porch in Gapyeong, hanging out with the family dog and watching the clouds drift down a green valley, and right now everything is great. You know, if not for my job I never would have met my wife, never would have experienced this beautiful country. So it was a small price. A small, small price.
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