Yeoju; Oh ju

China, in their paternal wisdom, blocks Blogger, so we were unable to update from China. Three weeks later, our Korea status has changed little, but a lot has happened since then. Recap!

The morning after we arrived in Shanghai, we got an email from our recruiter telling us that the Eastern Language School in Yeoju had decided to back out of our agreement and instead hire teachers who were already in the country. We asked around and folks who know say this kind of thing just happens--hogwans look for the most expedient way to get teachers in the door and we found ourselves on the other side of expediency. This happened to our friend Ashley a couple of years ago. So we were back to square one--find a job in Korea. We had already sent our visa documentation to our recruiter's representative in Korea, so that process, at least, was ahead of schedule, but it was little consolation. We had just gotten to China for vacation and we were going to have to schedule and do phone interviews. No fun.

We did two interviews. We did the first just before leaving the apartment to go to the airport to fly to Harbin. The school is in a small town south of Seoul called Eumseong. Our interviewer was Australian--he was very helpful--but the picture he painted of Eumseong didn't make it sound like the place where we wanted to live for a year. A delightful country town, but not the kind of experience we're looking for. There isn't really much of a city/town center ("a market comes twice a week," is about exciting as it gets) and, according to our interviewer, there wasn't much of a teacher community in Eumseong--most folks just went to Seoul on the weekend.

Eumseong was out. When we got back from Beijing we had a second interview with a school in "Dongtan New Town," a planned city near Suwon (near Seoul) that was recently built for Samsung employees (factory nearby). High rises and mixed use retail seem to be the best things that Dongtan has going for it, so we declined this offer too.

So, we boarded our return flight from Shanghai on Thursday having made no more progress. On Friday morning though, we had an email from our recruiter. Turns out that the teachers that ELS wanted in Yeoju hare having documentation problems and they want us back. Hrmmm. Sounds like bad news, right? Maybe, maybe not. Consulting again with our Korean spirit guides were advised not to read too much into it--good schools, bad schools--this kind of thing just happens. Hm. Ok. So we decided to take them back up on their offer. I'll believe that it's final when we land in Korea (or when we show up for our first day), but for now we're doing the best we can.

The positive byproduct of this fiasco is that we'll probably have an extra week (or more) before we leave. We were orgininally scheduled to leave on or around Valentine's Day, but since our documents have only just begun to be processed for our visas it looks like we'll leave around February 20 or later. So, more time to move out and see folks. Very nice.