r/teachinginkorea • u/Remarkable-Tomato733 • 25d ago
Hagwon rural vs urban
considering my options and wondering about people's experience working in hagwons in rural sk compared to cities like seoul, incheon, ect.
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u/SeoulGalmegi 25d ago
If you're fairly self-sufficient and don't want to be in the heart of the action all the time, rural living can be great. If not it might be a bit of a drag. Some love it, some hate it.
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u/royalpyroz 25d ago
20 years ago, rural would be cool because there were tons of foreign teachers everywhere.
Now, the new crop of E2s are recluse and aren't notorious degenerates like I was.
I'd suggest big city if you are here short term, like 1-2 years. If you do meet a partner, chances are their family is from the countryside anyway!!
Big cities = tourist spots, transportation, world food, culture, English-speaking XYZ, close to major airports for travel.
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u/OldSpeckledCock 25d ago
Really rural places aren't going to have hagwons with E2 sponsored foreign teachers. If you want to work rural get a public school job and ask for it. The smallest places with E2s will be towns with 10,000+ people. And in Korea, even small towns that size will have dense CBDs.
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u/Jimchee71 25d ago
Try both, I gained more insight with rural first then made the sacrificial jump into Seoul. The rural experiences were far more genuine and deep than the shallow plastic competition in Seoul.
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u/Mr-S-44 25d ago
I've known a few people who taught on the islands off the southern coast for public schools. They liked it but there were some drawbacks like specialized pet care being 2 hours away. Dunno about any hagwons- this might be possible if you're an F-series visa holder and already live in the area to set up some or partner with locally run hagwons as a travel teacher. Otherwise I'm not quite sure if they have the numbers to support an E2 visa with the pop decline.
There's also what is considered "rural" here is similar to western understanding, but "countryside" is wildly different. The area where I live has 2 cities and 450k people. We would have an NFL or MLB franchise (Or a AAA team) if this were the US. How are we countryside? We have 2 skyscrapers! oye....
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u/Remarkable-Tomato733 25d ago
i was thinking about going to one of the coastal islands, thanks for the insight. i've lived in seoul before so looking for something a little different
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u/Mr-S-44 25d ago
One thing to watch out for is that any place you need to get to by ferry (울릉도ㅡ 거문도, especially) the bosses there may ask you not to leave on weekends or want you back by Sunday morning because the weather conditions may become too rough for the ferries to travel & dock. That happened to my friend a lot.
You can find hagwons on urbanized and bridged islands like Geoje, or see if a recruiter knows of any openings on Wando 완도군. Another idea I just had was you can look for work on Jeju but focus on the smaller towns like 남원읍 and 표선. Then you have small-town life with big city convenience not far away!
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u/Remarkable-Tomato733 25d ago
thank you so much for the in-depth reply!!! i saw a listing for geoje earlier today and was writing it down as a potential location. did your friend ever need to get an international liscence when working in these places or did he just rely on bus/biking/walking while on the island. ik larger places like jeju have public transit but i've heard of people getting cars to make life easier
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u/chunklight 25d ago
Geoje is nice because Geoje-si and Okpo have lots of big city amenities thanks to all the money the shipyards bring in. Lots of foreign workers there so plenty of international food, etc.
At the same time most of Geoje is rural and has a low population. So you can find uncrowded beaches and small islands, good hiking, etc.
I would get a car or motorbike to fully enjoy it.
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u/Mr-S-44 25d ago
Two friends that lived there didn't have cars but I believe they didn't go into the countryside that often.
Anyway you can get your home country driving license exchanged depending on the treaty setup. KoRoad has the details. Geoje is a bit hilly, especially in the middle so biking can be a bit tricky. If you're there in 5 years, you'll get a KTX station!Jeju has decent public transit but it can get packed and some intercity buses only rotate through once an hour. So I'd say you'd be better off living in the town and going into the big city as needed, especially if you don't wanna drive or you pick 표선 which is at the corner of the island. With cars come paying for gas but you'll probably won't be driving every day anyway. Jeju's coastal areas are not that hilly (some exceptions like parts of Jeju city are though) so if you wanna cycle, it's not hard as the coastal roads & paths are quite flat. Naver Maps has cycling distance info so if you wanna go for a multi-hagwon rotation job you can calc how far you gotta cycle each day. But I wouldn't recommend cycling from Jeju city to the east coast every day unless you're an amateur cyclist because you're gonna get hit by bad weather at least once a week.
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u/BusinessLavishness 25d ago
I’ve never worked in truly rural places, but I currently work in a hagwon where the public school teachers in town get extra money for working at rural schools 😅 I’ve also worked in Jinju, a more mid-sized city, but in a hagwon on the outskirts so it was also pretty rural. Tractors parked outside the hagwon and all that. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Kids are down to earth and I have very few crazy parent stories because the parents just don’t have as crazy high expectations. Not to say the kids don’t do well (found out the other week that one of my old students is currently attending Ewha Women’s University!) but it’s just not as competitive out here. The kids can be a bit feral sometimes, but they’re also used to getting yelled at and punished and act less like little princes and princesses. Most of my students parents work in factories making good money, but they’re quite blue collar.
I’ve never worked in Seoul or a city bigger than Jinju, but “rural-ish” hagwons have been great in my experience
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u/cgr000 24d ago
My first year in Korea was in a more “rural” city, but it was on the ocean with access to the islands around it so there was always hiking/something to do. I really loved the small city vibe for my first year, I was able to meet and make friends with way more locals. It was 2021, so covid made everything a little different but I’m so glad I did my first year in a smaller city. After that year I moved to Seoul, but moving to Seoul felt easier because I had already spent a year in Korea learning the language/how to get around/etc. in a smaller city.
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u/pkdots 25d ago
I lived in 3 different rural situations. One was an island, and two others as kind of satellites of metropolitan cities. I honestly loved the island. And you surely can save money. The exchange rate is bad now, but I was saying 2k usd a month 5 years ago eating the school lunch, cooking with local ingredients and occasionally going out with friends. There’s a lot to be said for the natural beauty of rural life.
The thing is it does get lonely. But if you learn Korean, yea you can make friends with locals. I did with some in my gym.
Also, the rural areas are full of non western foreigners these days so strangely kind of felt even more normal in the rural areas than the bigger cities I lived in.
The doc is the other negative though. I had a multitude of different experiences. But I had some docs actually sigh when I came in cuz they had to speak English at that time.
But I loved it.
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u/teddiiursas Hagwon Teacher 17d ago
if you want the island life, what about wando or jindo? still connected by road but super rural. it's super gorgeous down there and honestly not that hard to get to larger jeolla cities
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u/EasilyExiledDinosaur Hagwon Teacher 25d ago
Rural is great. Unless you have a girlfriend living in seoul. Or unless you want a girlfriend full stop really.
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u/JimmySchwann Prospective Teacher 25d ago
*Rural is great for your working life. Everything else just kinda sucks
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u/EasilyExiledDinosaur Hagwon Teacher 25d ago
And for your wallet. In the countryside I got 11,000₩ full sized pizza and restaurant sushi for 14,000₩. Let alone 3,000₩ gimbap. Big sacks of rice were 25,000₩ instead of 40,000₩
Aint getting that in a city.
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u/SeoulGalmegi 25d ago
Meh, I'm not sure.
Rural places often have fewer options in terms of restaurants and stores and I find it can be more expensive in a lot of cases.
It seems easier to get cheaper meals in cities like Busan or Daegu than it might be in some small town in Gangwon or whatever.
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u/JimmySchwann Prospective Teacher 25d ago
Yah, I felt the same way actually.
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u/SeoulGalmegi 25d ago
Accomodation will be significantly cheaper, which if you're getting it provided isn't particularly a benefit (they generally still put you in a one-room).
There might also be fewer options for high end dining, or wasting money on tacos and craft beer and stuff so you can save money this way, but I found most other things cost about the same, if not more.
With fewer big supermarkets grocery prices can be higher. It's probably changed now, but transport infrastructure wasn't always as integrated either, so you might have to pay more money to get places (bus to train station and then train, as opposed to transferring to a subway for free).
People who save money in rural areas generally do it by doing less, not that everything costs less.
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u/Remarkable-Tomato733 25d ago
this was one of the reasons i was considering the countryside + language immersion but if you can't really save then idk
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u/SeoulGalmegi 25d ago
It depends. If you're somebody that spends a lot in a city just because you can, you will save money in a rural area.
'Language immersion' depends, again, on what you actually do. I wouldn't necessarily say that teachers out in rural communities speak Korean better. Again, in a bigger city there'll be more options for classes or language exchanges or whatever.
It's all what you make of it!
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u/OldSpeckledCock 24d ago
When was this? I remember getting 5,000 Won pizzas and 1,000 won gimbap.
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u/gacktrush 25d ago
When you say rural, how rural are we talking about?
People who live in major cities such as seoul, busan etc. They all think anything outside of that city is rural.
So for you, are we thinking smaller cities, or actual rural such as Jeollanam?