Working in private academies (‘hagwon’) in South Korea provides a different spin to the traveller’s cliché of spending a year teaching English in Japan. In the process you get a chance to explore a place that few tourists have ever seen. And in a year of teaching Korean kids you will build up enough stories to do stand-up comedy every night for a month at your local pub back home.

There are some pretty persuasive reasons for going to South Korea: your whole year can be spent exploring. You have the chance to see chaotic, energy-filled cities like Seoul and Busan and smaller, more traditional, rural places where people still gawk at the sight of foreigners. You also get a chance to explore a surprising amount of natural scenery. But it is the cultural and emotional exploration that comes from your working life that is the big selling point.

Working in Korea gives you a real insight into the Confucian working life and the Korean sense of ‘group’, where workers are culturally obliged to attend monthly dinner, drinking and karaoke (‘norae-bang’) sessions. Through your relationships with students (predominantly children aged between five and thirteen, but sometimes including high school, university and adult students) you see how Korean life and language are organised by age, gender and then your perceived position on the social ladder. The more you explore these aspects of Korea, the more you explore yourself and your own cultural views. This inner exploration is one of the great joys and values of travelling, and in Korea you get this and the chance to save a lot of money.

You go from being an ordinary person perhaps struggling to get a break, to finding yourself with great social status. People in the street want to know you, and you get paid about two million Korean Won (about Aud$2500-3000) a month to act impulsively, sing songs, play games and do other imaginative things to stop children jumping around the room.

While $2500 a month might not sound like much, remember that most employers in Korea provide a free return airfare, free accommodation and assisted healthcare. Then there is the ridiculously low tax rate of five percent. So basically your only expenses are food and bills. And food is cheap enough for you to eat fabulously spicy and delicious meals at restaurants every night of the week and still save enough cash to swim in.

There is something that may put a dampener on the Korean work deal for some people though: you need a four-year university degree to gain legal work status. But as long as you have that, and a sense of adventure, teaching in Korea really is an opportunity too good to refuse.

It’s surprisingly easy to organise a job through a recruiter here in Australia. You can do an Internet search or, as I did, look for advertisements in the Employment section of the major Australian newspapers. You can also arrange a job directly with a school by checking out the noticeboards on websites such as www.daveseslcafe.com and www.pusanweb.com.

To cap it all off, Korea is conveniently located to allow you to explore other countries like Japan, China, Russia and Mongolia when you want to extend your overseas adventure. Happy travelling!