This is, by far, one of the craziest days I’ve spent in Korea since my arrival. It started at the lovely time of 3:00 AM, when I woke up for the first of many times this morning. We had to catch a 6:20 AM KTX high speed train to Seoul because my wife was going to the American Embassy for her Non-immigration visa. We plan to visit the States together sometime this summer, so we needed to get a visa to begin the process of buying tickets and whatnot. Today was the culmination of about a month or more of paperwork and several months of waiting for tax documents to be provided by her school. Any problems we encountered today would only add to our problems later if we tried to do the same thing, so the flawless execution of paperwork, arrival, and procedure that needed to be followed at the embassy occupied both of our minds and prevented us from sleeping.
We arrived nearly an hour before her scheduled interview. Once the line started to move, they could interview a large number of people per hour. The line wrapped around the huge building, but it didn’t take long for her to get inside. We had prepared our own paperwork, but the couple behind us had used an agent. The agent never arrived with their paperwork in time.
I wasn’t allowed inside to help, but she described the inside of the embassy as a long bank style number queue with different zones and "dings" alerting people as to where to go at a certain time. I waited outside nervously. The Kyobo bookstore in the embassy district wasn’t yet open, so I sat on a bench and read my book. An hour or so later she left, visa to be delivered to our home in Daejeon. Success!
As we were coming back to Daejeon before work, exhausted from our trip to Seoul, I got the call I had been waiting for about work. We had found out, in the course of our visa work, that there were paperwork irregularities with our school and what our contract said was supposed to be happening. It was confirmed when a teacher at our school, when trying to get a marriage visa, got interviewed in a special "interrogation" room. He had to sign paperwork detailing his coworkers and what he knew about the situation. There was a raid on our school the next day in which I had to prove legal residency. Things were not peachy keen at our school. It involved all the teachers at the school, and it was simply a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop to see how serious things were going to get.
The shoe "dropped" today, and we’ve been told the school is closing at the end of the month, or even sooner. We’ve been given two days to consider a new contract offer at another branch of the school. This is after asking questions for months about our legal status and school’s future, they decide to tell us what’s going on two days before the decisions need to be made. Typical of the school and administration in general. No one knows anything until everything needs to happen.
We’ve got to go interview at the main branch campus within the week. We all have job offers standing at the school, and they’d even pay for visa runs to Japan (which I no longer require due to my "married" status). But without seeing the contract beforehand, any realistic expectation that anyone was going to go to the school and sign a contract immediately seems extremely foolish. I’m going to hear their best offer, consider my options, and then decide what I’m going to do. No pressure for me, as I can stay in the country while looking for work, unlike some of my coworkers.
One of the teachers, spending time with his family after his wedding, had paid for substitutes for his classes. The substitutes all came from the main branch campus that now wants to hire us. The teachers I work with spent the day getting information and rumors out of the substitute. All the people I’ve met from the campus seem like very nice people, and he was no exception. He told us what he knew. We were the last people to know about our school’s situation, and our boss was the very last of all. He found out only after another foreign teacher called and demanded information and left a note for him.
It’s hard to stay motivated to stay on topic in class when you know it’s only two weeks before you’ll be looking for work, and will likely never see any of the students you worked with for a year or more to improve their English. The students still haven’t been told, so they think the end of the month simply means that we have a normal vacation. I think they were surprised when I let them play a game for part of the class today. I’ll definitely tell my students next week so they have a chance to say goodbye. After work today, the teachers went out for a beer and we talked about our thoughts about work.
Now, as I write this, there are people screaming outside my apartment building. Korea is playing Togo, and has just tied up the score at 1:1 after a Togo player was issued a Red Card. There are fireworks and people yelling. Everyone in the country is probably watching, except my wife, who got sick from the stress of preparing the American visa paperwork and the early morning run to Seoul and is now resting in bed.
