Vacant Vacation

When I told a close friend at home that I was going on vacation this weekend, they replied with “But aren’t you already on vacation?”

The simple answer is no; while I enjoy my current teaching job more than I ever imagined, at its core it is still just that: a job. However, in comparing my life in the past month and a half to anything that I’ve done since graduating college, I really am surprised that I’m actually getting paid for all this. When I first started reading information online about teaching English abroad, I tried to take everything with a grain of salt. Already equipped with an easily excited personality (This is the BEST movie I’ve ever seen, etc.) I didn’t want to move halfway across the world after reading three brochures; this decision was going to be well planned, well researched and if possible, I hoped to stave off the inevitable eye-rolling responses from friends and family when they heard of my latest adventure.

So when I started reading that the English academies would pay for your round trip airfare to Korea, I had to physically restrain myself from taking the first offer that called (“We pay. You come tomorrow?”) and use some discretion when selecting a school to work for. After posting a resume online, my phone started ringing at all hours of the day with extremely polite and persuasive recruiters from the various schools offering awfully lucrative sounding employment packages. However, the more I read and the more people I talked to, I began to hear the horror stories of prospective teachers who arrived in Korea only to find that what had been promised to them over the phone and even sometimes in a signed contract didn’t exactly pan out.

As with most things in my life, the circumstances I ended up with were the combination of effort, luck, and only a little bribery. And like I’ve said countless times before – the situation is very comfortable. I was given a free plane ticket, a free apartment (after only a minor debacle), free cell phone, extremely low health care costs and a great salary. Before I signed the contract, and even before I came to Seoul, I scoured the online discussion rooms to find out what exactly the catch was – was I teaching classes of 55 kids? Who had been diagnosed with ADD? And had never heard a word of English before? By “free” apartment, did that mean they would take half of my salary back in some unforeseen “tax”? There had to be something.

And there was. Mostly small things – where most hagwons are relatively laid back, ours is more regimented. While most teachers get to go to work in jeans and t-shirts, our dress code involves ties and khakis. Like I said – mostly small things. But the biggest catch? Excluding major Korean holidays, my contract only provides for seven paid vacation days for the entire year. Actually, as I just typed that, it doesn’t sound that bad; I’m aware that some jobs back home don’t give any paid vacation. Still, when other schools here are giving anywhere from two weeks to two months, seven days starts to look a bit measly. To top it off, the stipulations in the contract that outline exactly when we can take said vacation look like the beginning of an SAT prep test question:

The Instructor shall be entitled to seven (7) days of authorized leave per year to be taken upon written approval of the Management. The Instructor may not apply for leave until after the first four (4) months of the term of this contract, and no more than twice in any consecutive four-month periods. Leave may not fall on any Korean holidays, and cannot encompass both a Friday and Monday. Or Wednesday. Or every other Tuesday, excluding but including Leap Year. 

This is more or less what I have to deal with. The good news is that my school does give us some Korean holidays off. And by “off,” I mean we have to work the following Saturdays to make up for lost time, but vacation is vacation. The first of these holidays? The Korean Thanksgiving period called Ch’usok, which is this weekend through Wednesday.

Like most Americans, when I hear “Thanksgiving,” my stomach immediately goes into stretching exercises, preparing to hold my body weight in mashed potatoes and corn. And from what I gathered from my kids this past week, the Korean festivities also center around eating – although I doubt anything can rival the American appetite when it comes to the holiday season. As Bill Mahr points out, one of our most treasured traditions involves stuffing food inside of food – and we wonder why two-thirds of our kids can’t see their shoes.

Also, like our holiday season, Koreans travel across the country to return to their families. While Ch'usok is usually described as a kind of Thanksgiving for a good harvest season, it is also an ancient holiday dedicated to a family’s ancestors. As such, it is tradition for the eldest son to host the entire family, performing various rituals that honor the dead. This all sounds fascinating to me – but the point that the kids kept reiterating? All the relatives in one place means more presents for them. It seems the kids hit up each aunt and uncle for around $10, and so usually return to school with fond memories of Ch’usok.

Not having a Korean family to collect money from, the Texan couple from my school and I decided to head out of town for a weekend adventure. However, because we only recently started getting paychecks, our bank accounts weren’t ready for a trip out of the country. We figured this wasn’t really an issue; there was a whole country we hadn’t explored right outside our door – who needs to get on a plane? According to anyone who heard our plans, we did; every foreigner we talked to advised us that we did not want to be in Korea for the holiday. As most Koreans were with their families, apparently nothing would be open and the whole country would be dead. Not one to take other people’s advice quickly, I was glad to find my new travel companions equally as hardheaded. There had to be some things open – the whole country couldn’t shut down. And besides, we wanted to go hiking and sightseeing – we didn’t need banks or post-offices to be up and running. Please.

The task of picking a destination seemed easy enough: so far we’d only been to Seoul and Busan, so anywhere but those two cities would definitely qualify as an adventure. Hampered by my strep throat and subsequent visit to the medical center, I was out of commission for most of the week leading up to our departure, and so let the Texans decide on our destination. They settled on Gyeongju, a city roughly an hour north up the Eastern coast from Busan. The place seemed to have an endless array of tourist spots – ancient tombs, temples, a lake resort, a national park and roughly ten youth hostels. And travel expenses? The one-hour bus ride cost $3.50. Sold.

As I had to teach a make-up class on Saturday afternoon, the Texans planned on taking an earlier bus up and I was to meet them later that night. Getting sporadic texts Saturday during my class – “rented bikes, this is awesome” and “we love Gyeongju” – I got more and more excited for a weekend away in the Korean countryside. It wasn’t until I got on my bus around 6:00 that the texts started changing – “is it raining there?” and “make sure to bring a coat” – plus the dark clouds in the distance didn’t look promising.

By the time I pulled into Gyeongju, it was pouring. Because I had envisioned a weekend hiking in the sunny mountains and hadn’t gotten their later texts until I was already on the bus, I had only packed shorts and t-shirts. But it was ok. Cold rain is great weather for a bald guy trying to get over being sick.

After meeting up with the Texans who had spent the day biking around the downtown, we decided to head over to the lake area to try to find some dinner before locating a hostel to crash at. We hailed a cab, spent five minutes pointing at the designated area on the map, and were soon flying through the countryside, excited for the weekend ahead. Passing resort after resort, we wondered out loud what all the gloomy predictions were for – clearly this was a tourist town, and was not at all dead.

Ten minutes later the cab driver, apparently deciding he had taken us far enough, stopped in front of a random hotel and declared we were “there.” Piling out of the car, we could see the lake through some buildings and trees and figured we could walk the remaining distance – and unless we managed to hail another cab on the highway, we didn’t exactly have a choice.

At this point the rain had let up to a steady mist, and the three of us trudged towards the lake, where we envisioned we would find a warm meal in a bustling restaurant. When we finally arrived to the area twenty minutes later, we found every single shop, stand and restaurant closed and not a person in sight. Anywhere. Still not wanting our vacation to falter, we decided to take a cab to the area with the hostels; surely with ten hostels there would be a semblance of nightlife and a place to grab a bite to eat.

Sitting in the front seat, I was given the assignment of negotiating with our cab driver, who clearly did not seem to want to deliver us to the part of town I was requesting. Again, I used our trusty map and repeatedly pointed until he shrugged his shoulders and began driving. I couldn’t understand why he kept pointing at the train station, but figured he saw three white people with backpacks and assumed we wanted to get on a train. It wasn’t until he was dropping us off in front of one of the hostels that I noticed the smirk on his face. As he pulled away, he smiled, waved and said “good luck.” This could not be good.

The term “ghost town” does not apply to what we found – even the ghosts were gone, busy being honored at their relatives' houses elsewhere. Walking up to three hostels in three blocks, we found each of them darkened and closed. As we headed towards the fourth hostel on the map, the Texans decided to take this opportunity to tell me about the horror movie Hostel, which involves unsuspecting travelers getting lured into a hostel only to be mutilated and killed. Exactly what you want to hear when you’re walking around what looks like an abandoned city.

The fourth hostel took up an entire city block, and from the dimly lit sign hanging over the open parking lot gate, appeared to be open. However we couldn’t see one room light on in the entire place. At that point, we had missed the last bus back to Busan and as the only car we had seen in the past half hour was the taxi that deserted us, it didn’t look like we had any way of getting to the bus station. Nervously laughing at our situation, we entered the hostel, almost certain that we were going to die.

Maybe it was all the talk of movies, but I’m not kidding when I say that from the inside, the place looked like the hotel in The Shining – impossibly long hallways with darkened doors and again, not a person in sight. Ringing the bell, we were greeted by a tired looking Korean man who spoke near fluent (too fluent?) English with an affected British accent. Feeling both grateful that he was open and confident we could bargain on the price for the room, we negotiated a price and he showed us down one of the hallways.

Still a bit frightened but happy to have a place to stay, I was confused when he presented us with an empty room. He quickly informed us that hostels in Korea do not come with beds; rather, guests are given blankets and sleep on the floor. If we had known this, it might have affected our negotiation strategy, but we kindly thanked him for the blankets and locked the door behind him. I would like to say this is when the “we’re doing to die” jokes stopped – but twelve seconds after he left, we discovered what could only have been dried blood splattered on the wall. Blood. On the wall. No one around. We’re going to die.

As I’m writing this, I’m not sure why we didn’t just ask for another room or run out of there screaming. It just seemed we didn’t have any options at that point, and figured if he was going to kill us, it would probably come quicker if we inquired about the previous tenant’s blood on our walls. We also were starving, and he had mentioned there might be an open restaurant a couple blocks from the hostel. On our way out, trying our best to smile as we walked past the killer front desk guy, he asked us if we wanted towels or bottles of water, and said he would just put them in our room while we were out. We’re going to die.

The one open restaurant was less of a restaurant and more of a family’s living room – regardless, they fed us incredibly good food and we didn’t mind that they were watching Korean soap operas one table over. Finally full, we spent the next hour exploring the rest of the neighborhood only to conclude that it was, in fact, desolate. Trekking back to the hostel, we darted inside our room without incident and luckily didn’t find anyone waiting there with a chainsaw. Unfolding our “beds,” we collapsed and went to sleep before midnight for the first time since I arrived in Korea.

 At 5:30, I woke up sweating, thinking my fever was back and cursing my immune system for not working properly. However, when I sat up for a minute the fever seemed to go away. Confused, I laid back down and stared at the ceiling. The blankets were hot, and it wasn’t until I flipped over the pillow that I realized it wasn’t the blankets that were hot, it was the floor. Like most places in Korea, the room had heated floors for the winter, and someone must have turned them on. Unsuccessfully searching the room for a control switch, I flopped back down and decided that while we may not have been met by a man with a chainsaw, this must be the front-desk guy’s slow torture method – he was going to fry us to death.

Unable to sleep on the now roasting skillet, the Texans were up by 6:00 and we resolved to make the best of our early day and head off to the nearby temple. Glad to be alive, we packed our things and decided that we would stay elsewhere the next night.

What we couldn’t tell from our hostel window was that the rain had not let up, and the sea of gray clouds did not look like that was going to change anytime soon. Regardless, we walked the ten blocks to the ancient temple where a kind old woman sold us three ponchos, which made our day.

The temple was amazing – built over 1500 years ago, it has since been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site and just walking around the place you felt a sense of quiet peace. Ok, it wasn’t exactly quiet due to the sound of pouring rain on the plastic poncho glued to my bald head, but you get what I mean. From there, we found a bus that took us to a park with small hills under which ancient rulers of Korea were buried. And after that we walked through a giant outdoor market, where we finally found actual people selling everything from clothes to pig heads. This was all before noon. And all in the pouring rain.

As we sloshed our way from one activity to the next, we silently mulled over the fact that our cozy apartments were a mere hour and $3.50 away, and so when the discussion of the next night’s accommodations came up, we somehow found ourselves a block away from the bus station. Each inching towards finding out when the next bus back to Busan was, we finally caved and saw there was a bus leaving every thirty minutes or so. Waiting for the next bus, we decided our vacation wouldn’t be a total failure if we spent the rest of our time off in Busan. We had a great time in Gyeongju – we literally had the entire city to ourselves. We came, we saw, we conquered. And there was plenty we hadn’t done in our own city, right? We could have adventures in Busan –they just wouldn’t end with us sleeping on a sweltering floor and wondering why there was blood splattered on the closest wall. And so, an hour later, I’m back in my apartment happy to have a bed and the next two days off.