An Orange Wonderland

After a full day with no Korea phone talks, I got another call from the girl at Orange Recruiting, "Stephen" Cho. She called to make sure that I'd gotten the revised contract(again?! We'd just talked about this a couple of days ago and I had confirmed to her that I had it!) and to tell me that "Jennifer" would be calling me soon. Hmmm...that was kind of pointless.

Before I go on, I'll explain why I put "Stephen" and "Jennifer" into quotations. Many Asians have two names that they use; the name that they were given at birth(Hyunkyung, Aikiko, Li Ming, etc.) that they use at home and with everything Asian, and an "English name" that they use with everything English or foreign. That is why, even though these two girls that I'm in contact with Korean, they're named Stephen and Jennifer. As far as I understand, they choose their own English names. I wonder if Stephen realizes that her name is often a boy's name?

Back to the main topic...

Jennifer called me not too long after Stephen did, sounding happy and giggly. This was not much different then when I talked to her a couple of days ago. Cute. She only talked to me for about five minutes, but she did give me the phone number of a girl named Dianna(who's from eastern Canada) so I could talk to her. She told me one other thing too. I asked her why I was talking to her and not to the owner. She told me that the owner could not speak very good English. Well, that explains that.

Within an hour, I had another call from Stephen. She called just to tell me that Dianna was going to call me. Great... Was that 30 second call really necessary? Come on now.

So, sure enough I get a phone call from Dianna...with A LOT of noisy kids in the background. It was the kindergarten lunch break. I think that there must have been at least 600,000 kids there! Anyway, what she told me was that the hours were generally from 9-9:30 until 7-7:30. At least that beats the 16+ hour days that I used to work at fishing camps! I can deal with a ten hour day. She told me that Tuedays and Thursdays were finished earlier in the afternoons and confirmed for me that there was indeed plently of opportunities to work overtime and make 2.x won a month(she said that she's able to make another $600 more). Dianna informed me that this was her second year in Korea teaching ESL and that she enjoyed this job much more than the first. One person, she said, had worked there for six years. Because of that, even though she swore that she'd never work at a Wonderland franchise because of their often bad reputation, she took the job there. She says that she doesn't regret it at all. Around this point, I asked if I would be able to speak to any other employees. She gave the phone to Scott. He'd been there for seven months and had worked in China previously as a teacher. Like his co-worker, he told me that he enjoyed it there and that it was a good school to work for. I asked them both if they had ever heard of anyone being fired and they both said that they hadn't. Scott told me about a couple of people who'd quit to move on to something else(what that was, I don't know). He said that he knew one of them and that he'd received everything that was due to him at the end of his contract. He gave me his e-mail address, after I'd asked for it, and that was pretty much the conversation. At this point, I was feeling very re-assured about this place.

A bit of information of the Wonderland franchise:
This is a franchise with literally hundreds of Hagwans(English schools) across Korea. Each Hagwan owner pays for the right to use the Wonderland name and does not have to answer to any superiors(to the best of my understanding). Therefore, it's not impossible for an owner to act rather...questionably. However, because they have to invest a lot of money to get any foreigner over to Korea, they are likely to treat a teacher fairly(a very general term). Of course, there's always exceptions. I'm under the impression that these exceptions are in the minority.


I do think that this job would work out okay, but I'm still curious if I can get a few more contract offers to compare this with. I can say that I'm happy that I've talked to a couple of teachers and I'm now more interested in this job.