Today I went to get my D-4 visa, the visa that lets me stay in Korea until I basically finish my language education. It wasn’t so easy to get it and there’s a lot of bull shit information on the internet (especially on the websites of the Universities, where they basically tell you you need a Korean sponsor to get this visa… ‘forgetting’ to mention you can just as easily get your visa by simply showing them a bank statement of over 3 million won. I don’t know why anyone would prefer to get a Korean sponsor as opposed to simply getting a bank statement, unless they are racially Korean and have relatives in the country. Which, of course, seem to be the very people these language courses are aimed at. Sigh. Forever swimming against the stream). Well, since the information online is rather, ahem, weird, I’ll tell you how to get a cute and shiny D-4 visa, step-by-step, the easiest way if you happen to be one of those people who don’t have a convenient Korean uncle or aunt around somewhere.

 The first thing you’ll want to do when you arrive in Korea is get a phone and a room. Both of which is pretty easy – most Koreans will be willing to register a phone for you and there are always lots of free hasukjip rooms around Universities. It will probably take you no more than 5 days to acquire both. In the meantime, stay at lovely Golden Pond guesthouse (very nice atmosphere, nice owner) or, if you must, any other youth hostel. You need an address and a phone number to set up a bank account and a bank account to get your D-4 visa, so when room and phone is cleared, proceed to get the bank account.

As mentioned before, getting a bank account in Korea is not hard at all. All I showed the lady at Woori Bank was my passport and I had an open and working account within the next 15 minutes. Once you have your account set up and running, arrange for at least 3 million to arrive on it and you’re ready to take the next step.

Admission to a language program is not that difficult, especially not to Sogang – they’ll admit you immediately without even screening your papers (a little unprofessional, I must say – but as long as the quality of education is as good as I’ve been hearing, I won’t be complaining). You’re then supposed to pay your tuition fees immediately and sent to the basement where there’s a Shinhan Bank. They accept cash and money orders – despite the fact that they live in perhaps the most technologically advanced country in the whole damn world, for some reason they still don’t accept credit cards. I guess making it convenient for the language student would be just too much to ask for. Moving on…

Once you’ve paid, you get your letter of admission, and we’re getting to the meat of it, finally! Now you have all the essentials you need for the visa, the only thing now missing is 2 photos, which can be taken in pretty much every subway station and 3×4 in size or something close should be fine.

NOTE: If you are American, you must have a C-3 visa in order to get a D-4! EU citizens and citizens from most other advanced countries, though, don’t need to look into any visa prior to coming to Korea and can convert their non-visa status to D-4. Why is Korea so much harder on Americans than on any other nations? Probably because the US has one of the strictest immigration policies, making it much harder for Koreans to move to the US than to the EU or Canada. Tit for tat, I guess.

Now take:

 - your passport

- your bank statement proving you have access to at least 3 million won

- your admission letter from your University

- your photos

and head to Omokgyo station, line number 5, exit 7. Taking the taxi to the office costs 1900 won. You can walk, too: straight ahead, and then follow the street branching off to the right. The office is about 1 kilometer away from the subway station.

 Once there, walk to the information desk right in front of you and say you’re here for a visa. You’ll be given an application form to fill out. With that, walk into the room on your right and fill it out there. It’s a big room where many people, most of whom Chinese, who will all be waiting patiently for the immigration officers to spare a moment. Get a number (in Korea, you are assigned numbers, and when it’s your turn, your number is called) and wait. Possibly, you’ll be waiting for a while.

Then, at long last, when your numbers rolls off of the mellifluous lips of your immigration officer, massaging your auditory channel in its sheer canorousness (or something like that), the time has come for you to confront your officer and present your documents to the eye of the law. Don’t worry, it will be over soon. Show all of the documents listed above to the officer, pay 60,000 won and you are told to pick up your D-4 visa 10 days later. Oh, and your passport is held until then, so I hope you made some copies of it.

 Hope someone will find it useful – I sure would have liked someone to write down a step-by-step guide like that when I was still at home, worrying everything would go all right. *sigh* Anyways, Korea is not nearly as hard to live in as you might think – IF you do your planning ahead of time.

Today I have some news that might actually interest people who don’t know me personally and are thinking of coming to Korea themselves: I took the placement test at Sogang University yesterday. Originally, I didn’t even want to take it because I’d always known I wanted to start at level 1 and that level 2 would be too hard for me, but the guy at the reception desk where I handed in my application told me that I’d have to take it since I had some knowledge of Korean and that there would be distinctions between different level 1 classes. Well, I hope he’s right.

 I was scheduled for 2:20 and I was a little disappointed to find out that they let me wait a full 40 minutes before I actually had my interview – I always try to be as punctual as I can, so I am generally rather displeased when other people or institutions display tardiness.

So, at approximately 3 PM, I was led into a room with a short Korean guy who started asking me very basic questions in slow and easy-to-understand Korean. Some of the things he asked: what was my name, where was I from, why did I come here, what were my hobbies, when was my birthday etc. etc. All very, very basic stuff I had very little trouble answering. After that, he had me read a short story about a person named Andy who was very desperate to watch a soccer game and had me talk about it. That was a lot more challenging: I don’t know how to do reported speech yet, so I didn’t know how to explain what was said and by whom, but somehow I managed to bring the gist of the story across. My grammar is not that hot yet and my two best skills are doubtlessly listening and writing (because I mainly studied Korean via watching Korean dramas and chatting in it on Skype).

 Afterwards, we discussed my abilities and the guy told me I already knew a lot, but that I should probably start with level 1. Level 1 should be very easy for me (perhaps too easy), but he suggested it was probably better to start with an easy level than put me into a level I could barely keep up with. I fully agree with him there. Then he said that, given the fact that I’d never studied Korean in any kind of academic or official setting, my abilities were rather impressive. And I blushed.

Well, to sum it up, I’m happy with both the interview and the outcome, but I can’t deny I’m a little worried about being put into a total beginner’s class. I am definitely not a total, super beginner and I would be rather pissed if they put me into a class where half of my peers didn’t even know how to read Korean! I don’t mind going over some of the basics again, but I’d consider my time wasted if I had to sit through classes of being taught how to read or how to construct the simplest of sentences. I hope they put me into a class where people already have some knowledge and if they don’t, I’d be pretty disappointed.

 My first day of class will be on September 3rd. I’m really looking forward to it!

Recently, I’ve gone back to something that I hadn’t gotten into ever before while abroad – geek mode. I’ve been re-playing Final Fantasy X.

 I can say with full confidence that I’ve completely assimilated into Korean life by now and that my family is the only thing I miss about Austria. Everything else back there, I can happily do without and I’ve thus been blessed with very few instances of homesickness. There’s no doubt in my mind right now that I’ll survive here for a year or longer.

 Actually living in Korea is very different from visiting here. When I first visited, I knew I would be leaving in the very near future, so how I spent my time was quite on the opposite of what I am doing now. Knowing that I wouldn’t have much time here, on my visits I hurried from one place to the next, met as many people as I could to keep busy, spent money mindlessly on food and drinks (I must have spent tons of money on drinks that day, because I was running around outside a lot, and I couldn’t bear it for very long without a cool can of coke or juice from the vending machine) and was, all in all, just trying to have as much fun as I could in a relatively short period of time. This time, it’s all different.

 I spend a lot of my time doing things I did in Austria, such as surfing the internet, writing stories, playing games, reading books (I bought and read, among other novels, Harry Potter 7 while in Korea), meet just one man instead of several per week, budget my money to the best of my ability and sometimes have to deal with not being able to afford something I really want. It’s very, very different – but despite all that, I don’t consider my current life here to be any worse than when I was a mere traveller and visitor. Both has its charms, of course, but in the end I have to say that actually living here is even more satisfying than visiting, despite the fact that I’m not doing very many fun things I would do were I here only for a trip. I can’t quite describe it – all I really know is that my life here is a happy one and that I very much like the steadiness of my life here in South Korea. I’m not bored here like I was at home and I’m not lonely, either. It’s a good life and the decision to come here is one I don’t see myself ever regretting.

Well, while I was outside today, it started raining, so I had to walk home without an umbrella, getting all wet. However, it didn’t take long for a handsome Korean guy to approach me and give me his umbrella. Korean guys for the win. ^^

In other news, I spent 2 days of last week not in Seoul, but at Hajodae Beach, which is a little beach in an even tinier village set on the East Coast of Korea, bordering on the Sea of Japan…or East Sea, as it is also known in Korea. Well, regardless of what you wish to call the sea, this is where I went last week with my boyfriend, with the kind financial support of my boyfriend’s father (you know how there are so many girls online who complain their Korean boyfriend’s parents hate them and try to break them up? Well, I guess I can consider myself lucky then, because the parents of my kimchi lover not only do not mind us being together, but actually support our relationship).

 Hajodae Beach turned out to be very nice and the place we stayed at was a comfortable, though completely overpriced “Contel” (mixed condo and motel.. I had never heard of contels before, personally). However, what was decidedly less nice was the weather – it rained throughout our entire stay there, which resulted in us spending quite more time than I had imagined we would watching TV. Watching the weather report revealed that all parts of Korea were sunny those days – except, of course, for the province we were in, which was stuck underneath heavy clouds and prevented me from seeing the sun even once while I was there. It was quite frustrating, but we managed to make the best of it – instead of being depressed over the fact that my dream of resting on the beach all day while getting a charming tan had been pretty much ruined, we thought of other ways to entertain ourselves. Twice we went swimming when nobody else on the entire beach was and fully-clothed at that. It was fun, despite being somewhat of an unconventional holiday.

 On the second day of our stay there, we made a trip to Yangyang, the closest city – however, being used to Seoul, it wasn’t much of a city at all. I really missed Seoul while I was there. Despite the fact that I appreciated the change and being able to spend a lot of time with my boyfriend was fantastic, I ended up missing Seoul by the end of the first day. Have I become a true Seoulite already…? All in all, an enjoyable trip that not even terrible weather could ruin completely.

 The few pictures we took will be uploaded later.

Originally , I wanted to upload this post last Monday. Then, when I couldn’t on Monday, I promised I would on Tuesday – well, that didn’t work out either, and we’re looking at Friday night now. All because I’ve been so tremendously busy and preoccupied this week. Plus the fact that uploading the pictures and commenting them all took literally hours – and I’m still not finished uploading all. A good number of them, however, can now be found here: http://neavanille.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=4

 As I mentioned a few times before, I attended Bible Camp at Omega Presbyterian Church last Saturday and Sunday… despite not being religious. But, my boyfriend is, and he is volunteering at the church as a teacher for a group of children aged 4-12 , whom I had the pleasure to meet last Sunday and, as it often is with children, their charm immediately won me over. Though I am not Christian, and never will be, the atmosphere I had encountered at the church the Sunday before had impressed me deeply (I would never have thought I would feel so accepted and so part of a community. They say that as a foreigner, you will never truly be accepted by Koreans, much less Koreans you’ve just met. Well, despite all that, feeling totally accepted was exactly what I did). Though I might have attended church for less than noble reasons (basically, to make my boyfriend’s parents like me more), I did find plenty of reasons why that Sunday was not a wasted one. Even though I initially felt very dismayed at having been talked into attending… Bible Camp, I ended up not regretting it and coming home with a positive feeling and a happier outlook on life. I must say, though, that as an Austrian, “Bible Camp” is a very weird concept, as it doesn’t really exist there – at least not to my (honestly, quite religiously-challenged) knowledge. My mother even sent me a worried e-mail “child, what is this Bible Camp? You’re not hanging out with some sort of religious cult groups, are you????” Yupp, that was my first reaction as well.

 However, Bible Camp turned out to be very fun. On the first day, I was assigned the ‘job’ to take pictures and ’sell’ food during breaks (the children paid with stickers). I liked nearly all of the children very much, and while they had certain reservations about me the first time we’d met what with me being a foreigner (most children their age have probably never talked to a foreigner before in their lives) the second time we met, on Bible Camp Day 1, they were considerably more open to me, some even hugged me. The girls called me ‘unni’ (big sister), which I think kind of pissed of my boyfriend because they call HIM ‘ajeossi’ (uncle).

 The day started with Bible work-shops taught by Sung Ryong and the pastor’s wife (it keeps occuring to me that calling her just the pastor’s wife is kind of sexist (but I can’t call her anything else because that’s what everyone calls her and I don’t know her real name), because she is reduced to being associated with her husband, stripping her of her stand-alone individuality. But I think this is just how it’s done in Korea – people are very often addressed by their family connections, women more than men, although it happens to men as well. I believe Sung Ryong’s parents call each other “Sung Ryong’s mother/father”. In Korea, individuality doesn’t seem to be a very popular thought). After that, there was mass for the children with songs sung by Sung Ryong and a few sermons by the…. uh, pastor’s wife. The children went out to play some outdoors games following mass and all in all, the day was full of much more games and play than any ‘real’ Christian propaganda and in fact boring stuff was kept at a minimum for the children – which I think is reasonable given the attention span of children, and handled MUCH BETTER in Korea than in Austria, where the majority of churches are Catholic and the majority of church services are as dry as a nun’s gusset where you’re expected to shut up and wait until the ordeal is over. Compared to that, church in Korea is muh more enjoyable, especially the service for the children. Though it might all be a Protestant vs. Catholic thing, and Catholic churches in Korea might be not one bit better. Who knows.

 Anyways, on the second day, I was asked to help prepare ddeokbokgi (spicy rice cakes) for the kids and though I happily obliged, I was not so happy anymore after discovering that my t-shirt had ended up pretty red shortly after I was done. Still, I enjoyed to see the children take to MY spicy rice cakes with childish enthusiasm. On the second day, the children’s day was interrupted by the adult service at around 11 PM. Adult service is decidedly more boring than the one for children, but it’s quite bearable with all the songs we sing. Plus, it helps that I don’t understand a word of what the pastor is yapping on about – while in Austria, I kept thinking, “who are they trying to fool with this bullshit? Sinning? Man in the Sky?” here I am just blissfully unaware of everything said. ^^

The day ended with games when the children came back and after they had left for good, I was taken out by Sung Ryong’s parents for dinner and had two delicious servings of BBQed beef. In case you didn’t know, Korean BBQ is just out of this world, so if you haven’t tried it, DO IT NOW!

Check out the pictures for a lot more comments about the weekend and photos of all of the children. All in all I have to say that Bible Camp might be my most unusual experience in Korea to date – but it’s definitely something that, against all odds,  I quite enjoyed experiencing.