Charlie and Friend

Orange Cat likes to hang out on the roof of the neighbor's porch. Charlie is, of course, fascinated. Today they were meowing at each other.

The Cat Lady is moving to Seoul!

Woohoo! After all the hurry-up-and-wait nonsense that's been going on for more than two months now, I finally have a job offer. I will soon be leaving sedate East Daegu and the ESL field in order to work as an English language technical writer for a software company located in the Wall Street of Seoul. It's going to be a big change.

Then there's all the stuff-n-nonsense that will be going on between now and my start date in early September:

1. Rent an apartment in Seoul. That will surely be a fiscally painful experience. And by apartment, what I really mean is 'officetel' (and here I'd thought my old apartment in Southern California had been tiny and overpriced).

2. Spend three weeks in Ukraine. Obviously. Because that's what one does.

3. Fly to the US in order to get my visa (because despite there being a perfectly good Korean Consulate in Kiev, I must present myself in person at a consulate in the country of my citizenship in order to apply for my fancy-shmancy visa). On the plus side, I'll get to pick up all of my business clothes from my business-y days in SoCal, and will thus avoid having to outfit myself in frilly Korean businesswoman clothes. And I'll be able to do all my yearly checkups (joy). I'll only be in the US 2-3 weeks, and I expect I'll be running around like a jet-lagged headless chicken.

4. Fly back to Korea. Hooray for global circumnavigation. Put me in a category with Ferdinand Magellan and Francis Drake.

5. Find a cat-sitter for Charlie, as dragging a cat on said circumnavigation would be nigh inhumane. But wait! I can check this one off my list as I've found one already! Come to find out, my replacement at my current school is a cat-lover, and he has kindly agreed to watch Charlie while I'm gone :-) Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure he won't be living where I live now, so she will have to move, which will be stressful for her - although nothing like traveling Korea-Ukraine-USA-Korea in the belly of a plane would be.

So much to do and so little time! (Also, for those of you who know me well, I would just like to point out that this is my 43rd post on this new blog of mine!)

Welcome to the 장마

장마 (pronounced jahng-ma) is the Korean word for the east-Asian monsoon season - and we're right in the middle of it. This is my third summer in Korea, and by far the rainiest. Take a look at the forecast for the next ten days:

At least this weekend I succeeded in getting some awesome rain boots.

I went and splashed in puddles during a lull in the rain...

A moment of self-reflection :-)

And I got a new suitcase to replace the one Charlie peed on when she was in heat (back before she was fixed).

If only I knew whether or not I was coming back to Korea - I can't really start packing until I know where I'm going. If they toss another delay at me on Tuesday, I'm going to tell them to bugger off.

And by "Friday" what we meant was "Tuesday"

This. Is. So. Frustrating. I leave Korea in 23 days; I need start packing and arranging an apartment for September - and doing those things will be vastly different processes depending on if I'll be moving to Seoul or Eastern Ukraine. And I STILL DON'T KNOW.

I had been told that I would receive a decision by "Friday, July 8th at the latest." All day today I kept checking my email every chance I got, growing more and more nervous as the day went on. There's something just so stressful about not knowing. Or about knowing that your future is being decided in a boardroom hundreds of miles away.

I didn't receive a message until I got home from work (sent at 9:15pm), which meant I was feeling stressed all day. Here it is:

We promised to give you an answer by today, but, since there is a small discordance between [...] executives regarding your pay grade.

I feel very sorry, but, would you mind if I give you a final answer by next Tuesday, 12th July.?
If there is any concern about this, please kindly let us know it.

I am so sorry once again.

It seems rather like the people who have been communicating with me (and who were also the ones who interviewed me) made me a salary offer without clearing it with the people in charge. Gah!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

"I am a goddess!"

Yes, I did indeed utter those words to my co-worker, J, earlier today. I had succeeded in removing the Personal Shield Pro virus from the shared computer in our office without losing any of our files, and I was feeling pretty stoked.

That feeling carried me through the workday until my 8pm break, when I sat down to check my email. I had received an email from the company in Seoul. I opened it expecting either a 'You're hired!' or a 'Thank you for your interest, but...' Instead, I received this:

It was really nice to have interview with you. It may seem to surprise you, but there is one more step for employment. This step is one of our regular recruiting process and usually given for whom is waiting for our final decision.

The mission is,

Write one page of complete paper (MS Word Format) introducing our product [******] to people who are the target of our sales.

Target readers are native English speaker. In this way, please fully show your English writing skill in the best manner.

Also, please show your understanding ability for our product.

Since our [...] executives will make decision by this Friday, I would be appreciated if you could send the paper by tomorrow, 7th July, 18:00.

They included a document on the product to which they refer (the sort of file which could be used as a promotional brochure or in the background of a presentation) for me to use in writing this paper.

I have to admit that my initial reaction may have involved a lot of profanity. It was 8pm on July 6th, and they needed this by 6pm July 7th? It's not like I'm unemployed here - I have a full-time job! I've been talking with these people for months now. Couldn't they have given me more warning? I mean, I spent most of the rainy weekend inside, kicking my heels. I could've been working on this!

And then I got over it. Yeah, it's annoying, but Korea is the land of the last-minute. That class you were told you weren't teaching today? You need to teach it. It starts in five minutes. That meeting we scheduled for later this week? Actually, it's tomorrow morning. I'm half convinced that if the South ever decides to attack the North, the US forces stationed on the peninsula will find out as the attack gets underway. (Oh, BTW, we decided to launch airstrikes. Didn't anyone tell you?)

I went home (my work day ends at 10pm), juiced myself with caffeine (which is why it's now 3:30am and I'm blogging...), and sat down and typed out a kickass paper. Well, I think it's pretty kickass anyway. If they disagree, well, it wouldn't have worked out between us. And then, because I was feeling awfully go-gettery, I edited the document they'd emailed me - complete with MS Word markups, detailing what I had done, and why.

Then I walked to my local convenience store, only to discover that they aren't actually open 24/7. Damn. And here I've gone and drunk my morning coffee.

Not much going on...

I have a sneaking suspicion that when the company in Seoul said, "We'll let you know by next Friday at the latest" that what they really meant was "We'll let you know on next Friday." So far, I know nothing either way.

I spent the weekend cleaning my house and shopping for stylish rain boots. The house is a mess again, and the only stylish rain boots I found were not in my size. In addition to not finding rain boots, I discovered that someone had bought all of the Premium Royal catfood (other than the 'special hairball formula' variety) from the only store in my neighborhood that sells it. Charlie is a tad cranky.

One of my coworkers (I don't know who, but they deserve a smack) allowed Personal Shield Pro to get installed on the work computer we all share. It's a fake anti-virus program that in reality is actually a virus. It won't let you do pretty much anything (well, it will allow you to submit your credit card number, if you were foolish enough to fall for it), and the damn thing is clever enough to prevent me from accessing/installing/running anything that might remove it. And sadly, the version we got seems to be newer than the one discussed here, as the instructions for removal don't work. There is talk of reformatting the harddrive.

I am mostly annoyed about this virus nonsense because I had typed up a fantastic summary of all my classes for my soon-to-arrive replacement. It included information on each class, such as grade, textbook, the kinds of activities that specific classes like/dislike, the students who get good/bad grades, the well-behaved kids and the discipline problems... And yes, that's saved on the shared computer. Grrrrrr.

And now for something a little more amusing - the cover of one of the new textbooks the Korean teachers at my school are using. The series is called Button Up, but there's just a little too much space between the t and the o. Every time I look at it, my brain reads butt on up.

Going Solo in Seoul

I'll start this post off by letting you all know that I still don't know if I'll be working in Seoul or not... I was told I'll find out "by next Friday at the latest." This is a little maddening! Ahh well.

I left Daegu Wednesday night after I got off work, and arrived in Seoul a little after 12:30am. This being Korea, land of the love motel, I rather expected to see one immediately upon emerging from the train station. (I mean, you exit Busan Station, and just about all you see are love motels.) I walked out the first exit I came to... and saw nothing of the sort. No glowing cheap motel sign glimmering in the distance. I figured I'd walk a ways to see if I could spot one, thinking that if I couldn't, I'd go back into the station and pop out another exit, and failing that, I'd get a taxi.

I'd walked about two minutes, when the skies let loose with a torrential downpour. I was soaked before I got my umbrella up. And then, out of the corner of my eye, down a narrow, winding alley I saw a dingy sign reading 여관 (yeogwan). A yeogwan is a Korean cheap motel, a step (or so) down from a love motel. I promptly went inside. As long as it was dry and had a spare bed, I'd stay there.

When I asked if there were any rooms available, the woman at the front 'desk' initially began to answer me in English, "Yes. Twenty-five...." then she paused, looked me up and down, and apparently decided that I was not an English speaker. She continued on in very slow Korean "eee-man-ohh-chon." For ₩25000 (roughly $25), I got a dry, private room in probably the seediest place I've ever stayed:

The rain continued to pour all night, beating on the window right above the bed. It was still raining when I woke up... Still, I was up and dressed bright and early, as the yeogwan wasn't exactly the sort of place I felt like hanging out, rain or not. Amazingly, however, the rain had tapered off by the time I left. I went to the train station and stashed my suitcase in one of the coin lockers, then hopped on the subway, and headed for Yeouido, the Wall Street of South Korea. (At this point I should mention that if you walk out the other side of Seoul Station, the first thing you see is the Seoul Hilton. Yeah. I was a bit on the wrong side of the tracks, apparently.)

My interview wasn't until early afternoon, but I was in Yeouido by 10am. After making sure I knew how to find where I needed to be for my interview, I decided to explore the island. I walked down to Building 63, along the Han River, and past Daewoo Trump World before deciding that I was going to melt from the humidity if I didn't immediately find some air conditioning. I went and sat in a nice airconditioned cafe across from the location of my interview and nursed an ice coffee, a bagel, and my kindle until interview time.

Building 63

Han River Park on Yeouido


Daewoo Trump World


Yeouido


Yeouido

The interview itself seemed to go really well. Of course, it's always hard to judge. I've had great interviews and then never heard from the potential employer ever again, and I've received job offers following what I thought were pretty shitty interviews. You never can tell for sure. The people who interviewed me were really friendly, and we all seemed to get along very well... but I have to wait until "next Friday at the latest" before I learn if I'll be moving to Seoul or not.