Shopping, Subway, and New Digs

The first weekend of our new lives in Seoul has been pretty awesome, crazy, scary, uprooting, etc.  Basically insert an adjective, and you've got it.  It's rainy season right now, so it's wet and muggy, but we're told that by the end of this next week we'll be back to sunny skies.  It's been a whirlwind, so we've decided to settle for the next few days, hence the ability I now have to post a BILLION things at once!!! Oh well, get over it, it's probably the way things will work, right?  haha.

We started things out by getting our health checks done for immigration, which meant we had to take the train down to the other side of the city and get physicals (you can drop any reference to Olivia Newton John, thanks).  What should we find on our way, but Dunkin Donuts!  Of course we stopped and got munchkins, which are way cuter over here, if I can be so bold... Maybe it's the packaging, everything here is packaged so cutely with little cartoons!!! I digress.

We've successfully exchanged some of our money to tide us over until we get our Korean bank cards, which we are told will happen sometime between our Alien cards arriving and our first paycheck?  So we're working with cash only for now.  Here's also a view of the rainy days we've been having:

 The subways in Korea all use what are called T Money cards, which are loaded up with cash and then you simply tap them over the turnstiles at the station when you enter and exit, and it automatically calculates the fare for you.  When you empty the card, you can refill it almost anywhere, from little kiosks at the station to convenience stores and pharmacies.  The subway system is phenomenal here as well, like clockwork.

 We moved into our apartment on Saturday, which, although in need of a wipe-down, is awesome, and has an amazing view, though I haven't taken any pictures of it yet.  Here's a shot of our closets, though, and I'll put more up when we get all unpacked and everything's sparkly.  We live in a high rise, and have a cool little sun room/balcony thing.  It's awesome, and close to quite a few shops (and a McDonald's that delivers?).

 The previous owners left us some of their groceries, including this incredible ramen, but it's so much better than ramen, it shouldn't even be in the same category.  The grocery stores we've found so far have LOADS of this type of stuff, so we'll be taking the ramen tour over the next few weeks and will report our results.  Blake, you should be insanely jealous, I'll bring you back some ramen for sure, it's insane.

 The other awesome thing about this weekend is that we found our church!  We are in the Youngdeung-po branch, which is somewhat of a trek, but is an awesome branch of over 500 people!  There are military families, teachers, etc. mostly from the states, but from elsewhere as well.  They gave us a welcome gift and immediately called us to tag team Gospel Principles every week, starting in two weeks.  Our building is this crazy-cool three story chapel smack in the middle of the city, with the chapel on the 3rd floor.  Similar to what I've heard about the churches in Manhattan, you can't hear any street noise from inside unless the windows are open.  It's really cool.  Plus they have an awesome window.

So after a pretty eventful 5 days, we are taking it easy for the next day or so, recovering from jet lag, unpacking, and eating our fill of ramen.  We couldn't have asked for a better way to transition into Seoul and the expat lifestyle!  I'll keep you all updated as our adventures continue.  For now, here's a fantastic quote we found on a bulletin board at our church which we thought was funny while being absolutely awesome:

 Happy Monday!

Dive right into the deep end

 I guess there's no better way to do this thing than to go for it 1,000,000%, and that's definitely what we are doing.  Upon our arrival to Seoul, we were ushered in a taxi for an hour to a korean-buffet-style restaurant by some random shuttle service driven by a gentleman who handed us a phone to talk with our recruiter and then said nothing else for the whole ride.  We then got to meet the staff from the entire school, and yes, it was awkward, as we had both been on a plane for over 15 hours and were pretty much the most raggedy versions of ourselves that we could possibly be.  I can gratefully say though that the people at our school are SO nice, and have really been fantastic to us so far.

They informed us at this scruffy dinner of ours (scruffy on our part) that we would be teaching the next day, so we sleepily piled our stuff in a suitcase and were driven to our hotel, which is basically a tiny box in which are two concrete-hard beds, a side table and a wall mount tv, and a bathroom that is basically a walled hose-down area.  It has air conditioning, though, so we love it. haha.  But seriously.

Our first day at LCI was pretty much a blur of instruction and overwhelming amounts of information followed by a lot of observation, which has actually been really helpful.  We will both teach kindergarten in the the morning and the older classes in the afternoon.  Our kids are flipping adorable! They were really wired these past couple of days because they are almost on vacation, but they are very hard working and pretty dang conversational for their age.  We have quite a support group of teachers and Korean teaching supervisors that share game ideas and experience.  All of them are American except for the couple we are replacing, who are from Toronto.  One of them picked us up from our hotel 2 days in a row, one took us to get our metro cards filled, and the couple is showing us around the neighborhood tonight before they leave so we have our bearings once we move in.  The girl, Heather, is also leaving me her Korean straightener so I don't have to buy one! Everyone has been awesome.

The second day, today, was a little more chaotic because there were parties for the last day of classes, a shortage of lesson plan material as kids finished their books, as well as a "newbie" class of young kids with very little English skills and a Korean teacher on vacation.  These resulted in one of the he supervisors asking us to take the young ones on with no plan, and man, to quote my friend Bryan, they were tiny Hitlers. Ok, not all of them, but at least two of them are absolute terrors, and they didn't speak enough English to discipline, and I'm pretty sure they were talking about us in Korean the whole time.  But thankfully, they will not be our classes, they are leaving after today as they were only here for summer school.  The rest of the kids are darlings, and are already excited to meet us.  The feeling is totally mutual.  :)

So, for now, we are just hanging on for dear life as we try to make sense of the world we were thrown into and stay afloat!!! More to come soon!  For now, here's some photos:

Above, the sweet plush taxi we took from the airport, and our tired selves at the airport.

Above: LUGGAGE!!! Below, the view from our hotel.  Not too pretty, the buildings are really crammed against one another here.  I have no idea how people even begin to park in Seoul.  It's a nightmare.

This is the mural that is (yep, that's right) above our bed.  WEIRD much?  We thought it was hilarious.

And here is the hotness, soon to be known by his new alias, The Keeper of the Won...

Two more shots of the room to get an idea of the size. (Hint: small!)

The open bathroom, pretty western style, but with no curtain, so water goes everywhere.

We'll finish things off with a photo of some cool dandelion sculptures we saw on the street:

En route to the unknown!

Well, we're off! And may I just say what a truly daunting process this whole moving-across-the-world thing has been. We were up at 4:30 this morning after a stressful night of packing - United's baggage fees are astronomical!!! I am happy to report that our bag weights were all under the limit, though we cut it close with weights like 49.5 lbs :) The frustrating thing, too, is that I KNOW that we could put way more stuff in those suitcases, except then they'd be overweight, and even 5 lbs. over the limit could cost us potentially $200+.
It's amazing though, how much stuff we don't know that we'll need... That's one thing I find to be lacking on the interwebs is a packing list. Here's some of the things we brought, and once we get settled  I'll post to let you know what was useful and what essentially just took up space.

We each took a suitcase of clothes, limiting us to basically a two week supply of stuff. For me, I was able to double duty the clothes I took to work for church, work, etc. I still took WAY more than Taggart, but for him, it's hard, cause he's so flipping tall that his clothes are enormous. And dense.  We then had one suitcase for toiletries and one for shoes and household items. The toiletries are a thing because we have no idea what will be available to us in Seoul. We've heard any point of the spectrum from 'you can't get anything over there' to 'you can find what you need no problem', so we aired on the safe side. This will have to have another follow up post once we determine if the eight million things of deodorant we took were worth it.

So we reached the airport in record time just to find that our first flight to San Francisco has been delayed. We have about a 15 minute window to make our connecting flight to Seoul, by have seats booked on a later flight that only tacks on an extra 3 hours to our travel time. So for now, here's hoping!!! 

Update 2 hours in: We have a tentative new bestie, though we did throw the term YOLO out in conversation, so it's on thin ice haha. Of course the guy who sits next to us is also going to Seoul to teach English! It's cool to have an American airport comrade who's also getting delayed to share this ordeal with. See you soon, San Fran!

San Francisco was HOT and HUMID in the airport, as was our first plane, so we are dripping and pretty gross.  It's a good thing that our new best friend was happy to share the next 12 hours with us!!! We had to go through security again and almost made our connecting flight by like 5 min, which ticked all three of us off because we were all geared up for an epic run-to-the-gate awesome connecting flight story.  Oh well.  We spent our three hour layover eating lunch and changing into less sticky clothes for the long flight.  Since we missed our connection, we also transferred airlines, and thank goodness for that, because I can't imagine a 12 hour flight with United compared to the amazing flight we had with Asiana Airlines.  The service was amazing, there was tons of leg room, they fed us 3 times and provided water, orange juice, and hot towels the whole flight, there were over 35 movie selections and games on our personal tvs, and the three of us new buddies got to sit together.  It was very enjoyable, and if we don't get to fly back with them I'll be very sad indeed.

Here's some pictures to tide you all over to the next post!

 A little blurry shot of the 4:30 a.m. drive, plus a shot of our luggage.  I don't think we brought too much!...

 Below you will see Nate and Taggart enjoying one of our fine dining selections, the interactive map telling us we were about to land, and two awesome shots of Korea from our window.

  This is the cabin of our plane, which was really roomy, plus a picture of a toilet in the Incheon airport that had a seat that rotated and changed the plastic cover before you could use it.  Weird, and cool!

Friendship is magic, and we're ready to go!  This is our new buddy Nate.

The process of processing goes on and on...

Ok, so this whole moving overseas thing is pretty complex and established.  We have learned over the past few months that not only is there no actual step by step process for expats trying to find the easiest way to go about things, but there's actually a more efficient way to get stuff submitted and done in order to make the visa application hoop jumping go a lot more smoothly.  In this post, I hope to catch you all up on what we've been up to the last few months as well as perhaps shed some light on what the steps are.

1. Research - We first looked at bunch of different Korean recruiting companies that primarily place ESL teachers to schools across the world.  We actually began our search with no specific country in mind, but quickly discovered that Korea is one of the highest paying countries for expat teachers with a more traditional, conservative culture than other places.  We felt it was safest and most lucrative to narrow our search to Korea.

2.  Apply to recruiter - After selecting about 4 recruiting agencies that we got good vibes from and consulting my friend who already lives here, we filled out the online applications and sent them off.  The apps are free, there are no fees, and they are fairly easy to do.  You also need to send a resume, cover letter, and a photo.  We heard back pretty quickly from two recruiters but only interviewed with one, who happened to be the same one my friend Bryan went through.  The interview was conducted through Skype with the recruiter, and then a phone interview with the school, where we talked to both a Korean supervisor from the school as well as a Western teacher to check that we had North American accents.  We got the job, signed our contracts, and then the paperwork began.

3.  Background checks - To work in Korea, you need to get an FBI background check, which is the most tedious part of the process, at least in terms of waiting.  The checks don't cost much, around US $18 each, but take up to 2 months to process, which for us I think ended up being around 6 weeks.  So start early if you are on a time crunch.  We received the results in the mail and scanned a copy to the recuiter, and later sent the copies to the school for the visa stuff.  More on that later.

4.  Foreign Documents and apostille - Really for me this was the hardest part of the process, mostly because of my school's end. Since I recently graduated but had not yet received my diploma, I had to get a notarized letter from my school to supplement that said I graduated.  Either this letter or a diploma works, but the first is much more of a hassle to get done, I'd say.  The documents the recruiter tells you to compile ranges depending on country, but basically include passport photos, passport copies, visa application forms, and apostilles.  An apostille is a foriegn notary which you have to get from a secretary of state office.  For your diploma/school letter of graduation, you can just go to the state capitol and get it done while you wait for about US $15.  For the background checks, though, you have to send them to D.C, which is fine if you have time, but if you're pressed for time because of your departure date, as we were, then you definitely want to express them.  We seriously lucked out because we had a contact who worked for the Sec. of State office in D.C, so we express shipped them to him and he submitted them in person for us and turned it around in about 4 days as opposed to over two weeks that they estimate on their website.

5.  Send stuff to Korea and visa application- Once you get all the required documents, notarizations, and photos compiled, you ship them to Korea for processing, and the visa office in Korea gives you a confirmation number that more or less says you have permission to apply for a visa.  This takes about 4 days, and you can start the visa stuff while you wait if you want/need to, which is what we did since we were so crunched for time.  Once you get the number, you attach it to your application, along with the required money orders, passports, and photos, etc.  and mail it to the office.  What we did, and what I think is really a good idea to do, is to call whichever Korean consulate you plan on mailing the visa apps to and letting them know that you're sending them, so they expect your applications.  It expedited the process for us by about 5 days, because the lady there knew we were in a hurry and so gave us priority.  I would also recommend spending the extra money to ship it priority and get tracking alerts on your documents throughout the whole process so you can see what status they're at.  Also, the visa office and the apostilles require paid return mailing envelopes, so if you buy a priority flat rate prepaid to come back to you, you know how to track it once they've sent it.  After about a week and a half we got our envelope back with our visas!!!

6.  Flight info and logistics - I will say the more questions you ask during this whole thing, the better.  We probably could have packed smarter and saved some internet research time by asking more about the conditions in Korea and the process steps, but we did pretty dang well, and were quite prepared for the move.  Most recruiters will provide a flight for you to your county and will arrange pick up and accommodation for you so that you just have to worry about getting there.  What I did is print off our own itinerary and check baggage stuff on my own, and that helped me feel more connected and in charge of our flight info.  We also just asked a billion questions to our recruiter, as we thought of them, and she was great at getting back to us.
So that's basically a summary of the last 4 months of our lives haha.  It was a daunting process from start to finish, but actually is much smoother than you'd think.  The number one thing I'd recommend for people interested in this is to plan ahead and get a time frame set in advance so you know when things need to get done by.  We simply mapped out the weeks on a calendar and set deadlines for when stuff had to get submitted by, and it worked well.  More info and updates coming soon!