Note on my last post:

-"Italian food" should always be taken with a grain of salt here, as well as ""French bakery" and "German Biergarten". In North America, these retain a smidgeon of authenticity from their long-ago immigrant origins. Here, they hope to round up the homesick ex-pats who will almost always be disappointed.

So training began Monday February 2nd, Groundhog Day. I didn't realize it at the time. Orientation that day meant being shuttled to another Seoul neighbourhood, the Company headquarters, then attending a presentation in a conference room about the Company and how great it is and how quickly your career can move up if you stay with the Company. Actually, quite convincing. I like the Company. (If this sounds a little Big-Brother-esque, it's because I don't want to name the Company on this blog - the Company kind of scares me.) They really do insist on a uniform programme, on high standards. That's why They're very successful, in Seoul and all over Korea.

The one thing They told us not to do was ask questions about logistics: where are we going to be teaching? How do we get there? When do we leave? When do we start teaching? What courses? What ages? Do I get reimbursed for my plane ticket any time soon? Should I open a bank account, get my residency card? Don't ask. The Company will take care of you.

And in fact, They did. Eventually. But under the mysterious circumstances, much speculation brewed. That Monday, they'd handed us two hundred-page manuals - one Grammar, one Reading Skills - and asked us to learn them for a test the next afternoon. But as for that very afternoon, we were shuttled off to a Clinic to each be paraded through a medical test: vision test, measuring, vials of blood, cups of urine, chest x-rays, nurses telling you things in Korea while you stand half-naked in a hall wearing a paper gown. Normal, quoi. I got the paper stamped to clear me at the end of Training, and my roommate translated it for me: I'd also passed a psychiatric test. For the life of me, I can't remember when that happened. Nor can anyone. All of this Training Week was already starting to pass in a confused, stress-fuelled jetlagged daze. I read my manuals that night to prepare for the Test, while rumours swirled about high fail rates, and what do they do with you then? Deport you?

The next day, we met our Trainers: the Company teachers who would introduce us to the Method and Curriculum, and have us "mock" each class component; also a Test. I was training for Reading class and Memory class, all well organized in Company textbooks - but they demand a very dynamic performance. There were only two other girls training with me, and one (another Guelpĥite, which I would come to realize was not such an odd coincidence at the Company) had missed Monday's orientation and was really thrown in blind. This training was intense. I can't think of another word. Lots of work, lots of learning, lots of note-taking, and, we would learn, a huge amount of acting. Who would think you could get tongue-tied in front of a group of kids? Well for one, they weren't kids while we practised, and they were evaluating us. It was nerve-wracking. I decided to concentrate on studying the Class Structure all week. Luckily, I'm not one to shy away from public speaking. I just wanted to know what I would be talking about.

The theory Test went well for me - Grammar, Reading Skills; I'd crammed it all into my head, and it has stayed there: the kids really do use the terminology in class, as foreign as it was to me a week ago. Adverbial Clause. Contrast Transition Word. Skimming and Scanning: a very structured process. In any case, the problem for me came with the Codes of Conduct test: the Company rules, which I hadn't gone over in my studying blitz. While many of my peers failed the content tests, I missed one question too many on the Codes test! I mean really, how ambiguous can they make it:

Why should you dress appropriately while working for the Company?

a)the Company must keep a professional image of its teachers

b)the students look up to Company teachers as role-models

c)business attire keeps your personal life out of Company classrooms

d)dressing appropriately shows your colleagues that you are at the Company to work

Ummmmmmmm…. All of the above? Come on. They were all like that. You just had to know what had been written exactly in the Codes. The point is, no ripped jeans and hoodies. Got it. Whatever; I passed the makeup, obviously. But my new friends thought it was pretty funny that I aced the "hard part", only to fail Codes!

I was pretty antisocial the rest of the nights of Training Week. Our days were long and crammed with information, and while my roommate was an old hand at teaching for the Company, it was all new to me. I discovered a free hotel breakfast which I often shared with a classmate - the apples served there were amazing, and they had cereal for us Westerners, but I noticed most of the Koreans opting for the three kinds of spicy fried rice they had sitting out at 8a.m. Not my cup of tea. REALLY not my cup of COFFEE, which was brewed to the colour of tea, unless you were willing to pay a small fortune at the of the ubiquitous Starbucks. Our hotel rooms all had kitchenettes in them, so I cooked for myself most nights, and stocked our fridge with fruit juice and "Danish Drinking Yoghurt" found at a hidden supermarket the Alabamans had discovered.

My sweet roommate kept inviting me out, but I was usually fighting to stay awake when she rolled back in (she only had afternoon training, so didn't need to be up at the break of dawn like me) so I only took her up on dinner one night, which exposed me to the delights of real Korean food. Soups! Gimchi! All sorts of stuff to put with rice, a lot of it boiling and cooking on the gas burner built into every table. I surprised myself by really enjoying it, although the novelty has since worn off. Most of the vegetables are pickled and then drowned in hot pepper paste, so it tends to burn a hole in my poor WASPy stomach. Even my roommate, a native Vancouverite, said she craved lettuce salad often. But she'd been living in Mexico for two years, deprived of Canadian comforts. I'm still a bit of an ethnic-food-virgin. (There's my ignorant generalization about all non-Western food for the day… I think that means it's time to stop writing!)

Coming up: the kidnapping of Kate to Daejeon. Bet that sparked your interest, eh?

xo