Corona, Zoom, and Solo Travel

Updates from the past few months as life descended into chaos, and slowly crawled its way out of it.

Hello.

To answer all of your most pressing questions: yes, I am safe. Yes, I am taking care of myself. No, I don’t know anyone who is sick. Yes, I will continue to be cautious on public transit, in bars/restaurants/cafes, and any other crowded spaces.

To say that the world is radically different now than when I published my last update (my meditations on loneliness in a foreign place- it’s great, go read it) is a massive understatement.

In just a few short months, due to a variety of factors that we both had control over and were completely out of our hands, a huge portion of the world is sheltering in place to prevent the spread of COVID19.

I am not going to use this post to point out all of the failings that governments all over the world have perpetrated and as a result have placed millions of people at immense risk of death. No, I will leave that up to people whose job it is to deal with the depressing fact that, a lot of the time, the world sucks.

Instead, I am going to give you (who ever decides to spend their #quarantine time reading this) a glimpse into what my world has been like over the past few months, as the world went into, and is slowly coming out of, literal chaos.

January

January was a busy month. Since the kids were off from school, pretty much every single private academy runs “intensive” classes in the morning in addition to their normal schedules. If you don’t know, my average work day as a teacher started around 3pm and ended around 10pm. In January, however, my days were stretched to begin at 9:30am and end at 10:15pm.

To sum up how it felt to teach children almost 12 hours a day for 6 weeks, I would like to quote one of my good friends from work:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

-All teachers during January

It was literally one long cry for sleep, from beginning to end.

Amidst this scheduling nightmare, South Korea started getting cases of this virus that had been devastating mainland China since the latter months of 2019.

At first, the outbreak in South Korea was really minor. It didn’t really start until the end of January, with the first case happening on the 20th, and it was mainly isolated to a few places, those that had individuals that had just come back from trips to China. The general population wasn’t too worried, but began wearing masks as a general precaution due to the craziness we were seeing in China. Our academy asked the teachers to start wearing masks to work around halfway through January, and encouraged us to sanitize the children as they came into our classes.

(For my classes, I appointed a sanitizer who would stand by the door and distribute hand sanitizer as the students entered my classroom. It was adorable to watch them wrangle each other into being safe)

But for the most part, life in Seoul was not affected by any aspect of COVID19.

February

As intensives ended and life went back to normal, I started enjoying my regular classes. I had been given the chance to teach a Masters debate course, which has the highest level students at our branch. I got to teach middle school kiddos how to debate, which for those of you that knew me in high school, this was MY DREAM.

As a way to better aid students in learning the finer aspects of debate, I decided to rewrite the curriculum to include deeper explorations of debate theory, argumentation, speech formation and so on. While this added 5 to 6 hours per week to my schedule, it honestly paid off as I watched these cautious kids come out of their shells and become genuinely excellent debaters.

And then, the incident happened that would bring South Korea to a standstill.

Known to the public only as “Patient 31”, a woman who belonged to the radical, Evangelical, born-again Christian church (cult) called “Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony” (yeah…..) broke medically suggested isolation to attend a meeting of the church that “are typically held with people in very close proximity and include physical contact of the members” (yeeahhh……..).

No one really knows what this church(cult) does in their meetings, but whatever it was, dozens of other members got infected and took COVID19 back to their various neighborhoods and cities (yeaaaaaaah…..). After February 18th, the number of cases jumped by 70 to a total of 104.

After that, the country pretty much shut down. Daegu, where the church as located, went into lockdown as the government tracked down as many members of the church(cult) that they could and disinfected the entire city.

Due to the simple nature of the spread of COVID19 (you really only need to breathe on someone) the number of cases started to increase rapidly.

(Keep in mind that at this point, South Korea had, by the end of February, administered over 20,000 tests to literally anyone that had felt they had had contact with someone that had COVID19, and had over 19,000 negative cases).

After the Shincheonji incident, all of South Korea went into crisis mode. Restaurants started checking your temperature in order to let you enter, clubs required you to wear masks if you were inside, and there were constant emergency alerts to our phones updating us about the contact tracking of confirmed cases.

At the end of February, the South Korean government decided to delay the start of the new school term, as students had been on break up until that point. This delay put a lot of social pressure on the private academies, which led to my academy closing for a week. Essentially, this was a way to ensure that none of the teachers showed symptoms and gave the heads of our academy the chance to figure out what they were going to do about class.

The social pressure on the academies was coming from parents who (rightfully) feared sending kids to enclosed spaces. By the end of the week closure, the government had joined this pressure, and asked academies to begin remote teaching.

And so began the Zoom Debacle.

March

By the beginning of March, less than two months after the first confirmed case, South Korea had just over 4,000 confirmed cases of COVID19. The country was terrified of increasing the spread, so all educational institutions remained closed.

Academies responded to this by switching over to online classes. Since the beginning of March, I have been teaching almost 110 kids over Zoom, the video calling platform that is sweeping the globe.

If keeping the attention of middle school students is hard in person, imagine how hard it is when they literally have the entirety of the internet at their fingertips and you are powerless to stop them from clicking away.

Needless to say, March taught me that there are worse things in the world than teaching a bad class once a week.

March did have some bright spots. The nicest part of the outbreak in Seoul (if you could call it that) is that since the country responded fairly early and limited most of the outbreak, businesses have been able to stay open.

I spent the weekends in March exploring the city, trying out new cafes in the area of town called Seongsu. Seongsu, also known as the Brooklynn of Seoul, is full to the brim with artsy, funky, and fantastic coffee shops and cafes that all offer amazing aesthetics and awesome coffee.

I have also been visiting the new man in my life: an adorable orange tabby named Sparky.

If you have been anywhere near me in the past month, you have seen at least one if not dozens of pictures of “my baby”. From his chubby cheeks to his one green eye (he lost the other one due to neglect 😦 poor baby) to his weirdo tendencies, I have fallen for this little boy. Due to the rules of my apartment, I cannot adopt him yet. However, his lovely foster Keri is kind enough to let me just crash in her apartment and hang with him on weekends.

Overall, after the madness of February, March started to seem like an off-kilter new normal.

April

And now we have reached this month. My academy is looking to reopen in the coming weeks, schools are opening at the end of the month, and the cherry blossoms are blooming all over the city.

Generally, life is seeming to creep back to its normal frantic pace. Large gatherings are still forbidden, everyone wears a mask any time they are outdoors, and they are still disinfecting any public area at least once a day. But, the number of new cases is far, far lower than the number of recovered cases. As of the 10th of April, the whole of the country reported only 30 new cases. There have been only around 10,000 confirmed cases, with 214 deaths. The number of recovered cases is over 7,000 and still climbing.

You can see it in the way that people exist around each other. Sure, you can only see half of peoples’ faces at any given time. But the fear that seemed to permeate every open space is receding. People aren’t hunched over, avoiding eye contact or hurriedly brushing past you.

And this weekend, I felt safe enough to take a solo trip to the east coast, to a city called Sokcho. Known for its beaches and delicious seafood, Sokcho is a popular summer hotspot for people from Seoul to go to in order to escape the oppressive summer heat.

For me, I have always loved the beach in off season. I am not sure if that’s because the only time we would go would be in the spring, but I love when I can walk for ages and not see another person. I love being able to wear a sweater and drape a blanket over my legs and just breathe in the salty air.

The escape from the city has been a god send. The chance to use my time as I want, away from work and from obligations, is a luxury I didn’t realize I had been craving. And it truly is a luxury. That I am given the chance to not only leave my apartment, but also leave my city is something that I am not taking for granted.

I am so very thankful to the South Korean government, my workplace, and the Korean people for taking this pandemic so very seriously. While it was stressful, and terrifying at some points, I have always felt safe in the knowledge that should something happen to me there was the infrastructure in place to take care of me. I realize that this is not the case for everyone; that there are so many people that are facing extremely risky situations in their own lives right now.

All I can give you is the hope and the knowledge that with time, life does begin to shift. Maybe it’s not the normal that you were once used to. But I like to think that it’s a better normal, where people care for others’ wellbeing and do not take the time that they have to enjoy the world around them for granted.

As I sit here, watching the tide come back in to the beach, I am thinking of all of you, all over the world.

Stay safe, stay healthy, and stay as sane as you can.

Good luck.