Pictures

OK, now let's see what this place is like. I live in a planned industrial city called Changwon, which is close to the southern coastal port of Masan and about forty-five minutes' bus ride from the famous port of Pusan. This first picture shows a view from my workplace about six months ago; the bare ground on the left is now occupied by an extensive building site. On the right is the local elementary school, and in fact many of my youngest children come to classes on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from here, conveniently just across the road.


Changwon seems to have plenty of minor waterways, and in fact Korea has the distinction of being the most heavily afforested country on Earth (we are told), hence there never seem to be any water shortages. Being surrounded by hills, the city is always scenic and if you go to places like nearby Masan or Pusan it is much the same, although in the latter case the city occupies a much larger plain.





Here we can see the hills behind the local government offices, looking due north from the big road circle junction at the centre of the town. Behind me as I was standing there on a hot summer's afternoon was the E-Mart (on the left) and the Lotte shopping/cinema complex (right). South of here is the Sangnam-dong shopping area.






Korea also has very cold winters and although there is a dusting of snow here, it is comparatively rare in the extreme south; in the winter of 2003 we only had a very light sprinkling of snow on a weekday afternoon, which did not last very long. Here we see some snow from the winter of 2004, which lasted a surprisingly long time although it was never very deep. In fact, the footpaths also often degrade badly as a result of heavy rains, and have to be repaired on a regular basis throughout the year.



Finally, here's the place where I actually work five days a week. It is one of a nationwide franchise chain, and from reports freely available on the Internet, some branches are not as good as the ones I have worked for by a long chalk. This is an unfortunate characteristic of all English teaching franchises wherever you go - they are really only as good as the calibre of the owner, which varies on an individual basis. The picture at the top of the page was taken before construction work started; the elementary school is on the left and the developer's safety wall is on the right.



For anyone considering going to Korea to teach, this matter of manager calibre is a major issue. Communication in English is something managers are often very poor at, as their main raison d'etre is making money; and a very good student will probably speak better English than either their Korean teachers or the manager. But this is just a fact of life.