South Korea, what?

 
I know I've been name-dropping this South Korea place a lot lately, but only a few pertinent details here and there. So just to make sure everyone's on the same page, here's what's really going down:

"Why South Korea?" you might ask. Well, for starter's Shawn has a friend from college who is currently on his third year teaching in Korea, so we had some initial insider low-down. Shawn had actually mulled over this scenario at different times in the past, but none of those times happened to be the right one. Then one day in July, Shawn said something to the effect of "Why don't we try teaching in Korea?" and I said "Sure" and the rest is history. Actually, as we've found in our research and application process, Korea is a great place for English teachers. You don't need any type of teaching experience. All you need is to speak English and have a Bachelor's in any field ... well, those are the minimum requirements anyway, but more on that later.

So we turned to the answer for every question - the Internet - and we came across a great place called Footprints Recruiting. The good people at Footprints specialize in helping hopeless wanderers make their dreams come true; we told them we wanted to go to Korea, and they filled us in on a little thing called EPIK (English Program in Korea). EPIK is essentially the government program that's in charge of all English teaching in Korean public schools, and because the Korean government has promised to have an English teacher in every public school, they make it very enticing for us native speakers:

• We get paid a minimum of 1.9 million Korean Won (about $1700) per month. Shawn and I are both in the process of complete a TEFL course, which will bump our pay up to 2.1 million KRW ($1900) a month. Plus this is all tax-free income.
• Our housing is FREE and furnished.
• Our airfare is FREE (reimbursed in our first month pay).
• We are guaranteed 25-30 work hours a week, NO WEEKENDS, and ample overtime pay if our work exceeds this for some reason.
• 18 paid vacation days + Korean national holidays.
• We have complete medical coverage under Korean national health insurance, half of which is paid for by our employer.
• If we complete our contracts, we get a nice severance pay, or a resigning bonus if we decide to stay and teach for another year. 

Needless to say, Shawn and I were sold. So we got the wheels rolling on an application process that proved to be far more involved than I expected. Surprise - if you want get a government job in a foreign country you have to provide a lot of paperwork and documentation! Luckily we were on top of our game, and several background checks, notarizations, reference letters and transcripts later we were first in line for the EPIK interviews in October. Which we aced, of course.

Now here we sit, a whole 4 months later, waiting for our official contracts to arrive, while we slowly start to pack things up and get the heck out of Phoenix. We're hitting the open road late on December 3rd, and taking our sweet time to meander eastward. First Louisiana (where we'll take a month-long hiatus) then across the Gulf and up the east coast to Virginia, where we'll settle for a little while before we trot 'round the globe in February. Of course, it won't all be peaches and cream and vagabonding for two months. There's still plenty of paperwork to slog through, and as we've found, hardly anything goes right the first time, so we're making sure we've got plenty of leeway for mistakes and redos.

So there you have the epilogue (or maybe I should say epiblog - ha HA!) to the SoKo story. It's going to be an epic.