Korea was not my original plan for this month. I meant to be far away, on another continent, somewhere far hotter and just plain farther. That trip didn’t happen; it has been pushed back to July or August, when it won’t bring my travel budget down to zero.

I have maybe 10 days left in this country before I float back to Dalian. This trip has drizzled away, with most of my time spent in classrooms filled with elementary school-age children, or online late at night. It’s strange, thinking back now, how this trip almost didn’t happen. A month ago, I was shoring up Plans C, D and E, since Plan B (Korea) looked to be going the way of Plan A.

I kept quiet about the Korea plan because I was afraid I’d somehow jinx it, like I probably did by telling too many Dalian friends about Plan A (keeping mum for now for the same reason; I’ll write about it eventually). I meant to write about how I got here earlier, but as I’ve discovered since starting this blog, there is always something more immediate I can write about, and it’s easy to let things slip into the ever-growing pile of “things I meant to say.” I’ll keep this to a few (relatively) short installments to save my reader’s eyes. Here goes:

It started in Dandong. I went because I wanted to see what I could of North Korea after it conducted its nuclear test in October, before it or someone else took it off the map. Through a friend in Dalian, I met Keith, another journalist-turned-teacher, who offered me his couch. While waiting for him to get off work, I met Sam. She mentioned that an intensive English camp near Busan paid for a semester of Chinese study. I filed that factoid away.

Then it was back to Plan A, which involved looking for airfare and vaccinations and scrounging whatever cash I could find. Somewhere in that process I started thinking about grad school and real jobs post-China, whenever that is.

The money never really added up. Plan A was going to cost everything I’d saved in China, not much in international terms, but the equivalent of several months salary there. It would mean dipping into other savings for a rushed trip. It was one of many recent moments when I wrote a note to myself saying, “You need to plan your life, just a little, but more than a week ahead.”

Plan A was rescheduled for summer, when it will make more sense anyway, for reasons to be detailed later. Sam put me in touch with a recruiter at this camp in Korea. Within a day, I had a job offer and a contract FedExed to me.

The schedule was always going to be tight. The camp started Jan. 3, and I applied for it in early December. Korea is ostensibly more strict than China, requiring an original diploma and transcripts to teach there. I had neither in Dalian, and when I called my parents, they reported that my diploma, which bears Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signature and so far has been half as useful as a blank piece of paper (you can only write on one side), was missing from the house.

I ordered transcripts. I needed something on paper (any paper seems to work in China) showing I graduated from college. I waited. I placated the recruiter: “The documents are on their way. Funny thing, diploma seems to have disappeared. Isn’t that strange? Don’t worry. Replacement’s on the way.” That last bit was a lie. It takes four months to get a new diploma.

What I had was a scan of my diploma, printed on beige, antique-looking card stock, the kind with that sort of marble texture. It probably looks the part enough.

My transcripts arrived the Friday before Christmas. That meant Christmas day would be spent on a bus to Shenyang, my least favorite city in China, dealing with an absurd concoction of Chinese and Korean bureaucracy.

More on that tomorrow…

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*Photo of the Yalu River bridge by Samantha Manniex

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 8:31 am and is filed under roadside blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.