Alright, so in the past couple of days we've had quite an impact on the English Teacher community here in Korea. I had heard rumors over the weekend of teachers getting quarantined but didn't pay much attention to it. Today, when I went into work for our monday meeting, our head instructor told us (amount rumors of us talking about other branches closing down) that our branch would be closed all of this week, and we wouldn't resume classes until Wednesday of next week.
This is huge; think of our school as the mcdonalds of english teaching schools. You have the main ones funded by corporate, and you have the franchises, owned by businessmen/individuals. I happen to work at one of the franchise ("branchises"...cute, right?), but even THEY have to close down as its some contractual agreement that comes all the way from corporate, because apparently some of the instructors in training (what i was in for the first week when i first got here) for our school had been exposed to Swine Flu and are currently in quarantine in Northern Korea, primarily because of the risk of spreading it to children. You can read more about there
here and
here. The latter is an actual blog from one of the quarantinees and a very good one at that.
After getting out of work without having to actually work, some of us met up at the local park to drink and hangout/talk about the events of the day and how we plan on spending our newly-found week and a half of vacation. Our head instructor came with us, and during that time got some phone calls alluding to that we were expected to "stay in our apartments" under some fucked up form of self-quarantine that obviously none of us are going to do, but its varying reports from some of the branches/branchises whether you have to stay home, whether its optional, some of us have been advised not to hang out with other "foreigners" (aka white people), some of us are getting paid, some arent' sure yet, so yah, its pretty much a shitshow. Some of the instructors even got their temperature taken when they got to work tonight.
I personally plan on leaving my town at 6AM tomorrow morning to go to the east coast and hike a mountain all day and spend the night there, then head down south for the weekend. We only get 6 days of *contractual* vacation per year, unpaid, and thus far this seems like a 9 day paid vacation to me, which i'm not going to spend in my apartment, nor does anybody else seem to be. I'll keep y'all updated.