Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

I live a good 20-30 minutes from either the language institute where some of my classes are held or Woosong University complex, which is a group of buildings on the side of what feels like a small mountain every Tuesday and Thursday morning when I have to trek up the side of that mountain and climb a gazillion steps to get to my class that fortunately is on the first floor.

The mornings are getting cooler now in Daejeon-which used to be written Taejon and yes, there is a difference in the pronunciation-and I don’t mind the trek up the side of the mountain. Autumn is almost in the air, not quite autumn because the days still get a little on the hot side.

Actually, it is more of a trek through a residential area, a literal asphalt jungle because where the road ends the buildings begin. There are patches of grass and what passes as a yard here, but it is just and endless asphalt, concrete surface. It is no wonder then, when someone is jack hammering at 6:00 in the morning in one part of Jayang-dong you feel it in another part.

If it were a straight shot to the university it would probably take me only 15 minutes; as such, I have to walk up one road, cut across another, take another right and then a left and then it’s a straight shot for the rest of the way, but there is this steep hill that invites taxi drivers to either gun it going up or going down, oblivious to the students walking up or down the hill and for some unknown risky reason, students tend to walk in the middle of the road.

Today I added two more side streets to my circuit to avoid that steep climb which is well suited for a four-legged Alpine Ibex and not a two-legged and too tired English teacher weighed down with books and a CD player that is carried like a lunchbox. I added one minute to the trek but spared more wear and tear on my Doc Martens. I’ve got them worn down on one side-testament to the street climbing I have to do. (Remember that Monty Python skit when they were climbing a street in London?)

It feels a little strange to have to walk through a residential area to get to a university which doesn’t really have what could be called a campus (though the technical college, not far from where I live has more of a campus feel to it). Then again, this residential area resembles more of a housing gulag with all these cheap one-room apartments for students thrown in with traditional Korean homes. Indeed, in the three years that I have been teaching at Woosong, many homes have been torn down and in their place, these apartments for students.

You have to be careful when walking down some of these side streets, especially when it comes to vehicular traffic. I nearly got run over by a motorcycle today. Not on the street, but on the sidewalk. It is okay for motorcycles and scooters to use sidewalks and pedestrian crosswalks; okay in that for all the years I have lived in Korea I have never seen a cyclist being ticketed for using the sidewalk. Of course, the cyclists expect pedestrians to get out of the way.

I left my apartment at 8:30, stopped off for a Diet Coke at a 24-hour convenient store and got to my classroom at 8:50. Plenty of time to set up my classroom and get ready for my 9:00 class.