Like every government everywhere, the Korean government has a long and storied tradition of getting things exactly wrong, of creating policies by fiat and without consultation that worsen the problem they were intended to address, and result in unintended consequences down the line. The newest proposed change to regulations for the single largest group of foreign temporary residents -- holders of 1-year E2 English teacher visas -- neatly fits the bill.
Are you new to Korea (or planning to come) and want to know how to order food at one of the local eateries, or just know what it is? Do you live somewhere else and want to impress that beautiful waitress (or waiter, I guess) at your local Korean restaurant?
Well, despair no more, friends, because I'm going to give you the beginnings of a Rosetta Stone for ordering Korean food with style and aplomb and hopefully not too much embarrassed-for-you giggling.
I learned an important lesson about living in Korea today, and I learned it at the point of a gun, which may just make it stick for a while, for a change.
Most people who come to Korea to teach, whether at a hakwon (the catch-all term for the private-study schools that can be found literally 10 to a city block, catering to the monomania not for quality but quantity of education here in Korea, many of which specialize in English and employ most of the short-termers in Korea), or a university or foreign school, or in-house at a company, or somewhere else entirely... most of them are provided with housing.
This is, few actually realize, mandated by the legislation controlling E-2 (English Teacher) visas. Which is not to say that this legislation is universally obeyed ('rule of law' not being a concept that has achieved great penetration in Korea thus far), of course, but it goes some way to explaining why the feared-and-loathed, often dishonest and always money-struck hakwon owners actually do something that does not financially reward them in any tangible way. That is, provide housing for their English Monkeys.
As it is for expatriates everywhere, after you recover from the initial 'stop poking at my ego-balloon' sensitivity of the first few culture-shocked months of living in a new and different country, there are a thousand little things you begin to take in stride, things that friends or family would pick up on instantly if they were to come and visit.
One of these, one you'll notice immediately if you spend any time watching one of the many evening variety shows on Korean TV (all of the major networks stream on the net live or on demand, by the way, if you're curious and have the bandwidth : the big three : MBC, KBS, SBS. Even without being able to read Korean, you should be able to find the streams pretty easily...) is what I've called the 'schoolgirl howl'.
There've been a few questions on Ask Metafilter that I've answered with some variation 'why not teach in Korea?', and I realized that there was no place of which I was aware that served as a comprehensive introduction to the Honourable Slave Trade. So, this, originally written for my private site, and lightly revised for OutsideIn.
Truth : I have been working on (OK, thinking about) writing a book, one digging into the topics whose merest surface I scratch here, and one that also answers some of the million questions of general survival ("Oh sweet lord, where do I get real cheese?" "When my male adult student just told me he loves me, what did he mean, exactly?") that loom large in the minds of new arrivals to Korea. A few thousand people a year show up here to teach, at a minimum -- there's gotta be a market for a book like that.
So here's a taste, hot off the keyboard, so that in the future I can answer questions about teaching in Korea with a hyperlink rather than repeating myself all the damn time :
It's pretty often the case that Teaching English in Korea involves very little teaching and not a whole lot of English. This is perhaps the most important thing about all this that nobody ever tells the newbies. In other words, for a very large proportion of people coming to Korea thinking they'll be teaching the English language, the reality is that they probably won't, really. If they have been hired by a kiddie hakwon (variously romanized, a 'hakwon' is a private cram school, and every city, town, village, hamlet and roadside rest stop has 2 or more in any given building), they may well end up in reality as a babysitter, thrown like human chum into the toothy screeching kindy shark pool with no guidance whatsoever from management and no means of self-defense. The actual English teaching that gets done in this situation may be minimal, while the neophyte teacher is busy struggling for survival. These teachers, with no training and no idea of what's expected, end up relegated to the position of entertainers. Many, having had no experience teaching, are completely OK with this.