SNU take 1

I doubt I'll be posting once (or twice) daily once classes start on Monday (Dec 3), but as of now, I wake up at 6 or 7 am, go out for a bit/run errands in the afternoon, then have nothing to do during the evening... nothing, that is, except for updating the blog... :)

Today I decided to head to SNU for the first time. I took the bus right past it during my Bedding Adventure, so I knew how to get there... but apparently I failed at getting back (more on that later). It only took about 25 minutes overall to get from my room to the classroom... and it probably would've been less had I taken the first bus that came to the bus stop, but I didn't realise until it was pulling away that it stopped at SNU. Oops.

SNU is surprisingly pretty, with Gwanak-san ("hat-shaped mountain") in the background. Someday, I will totally be climbing that mountain. There are many 3-4 hour trails nearby (though, obviously, you can turn around any time before the end, but that seems like a waste). However, as I was out of breath just climbing the darn hill to the Language Building... I think that goal might take til spring or summer to accomplish. ^^

Anyway, some pictures of campus:


On the left, SNU's "main gate" (정문, "jeong-mun"). On the right, the view from about 10 steps past the main gate.


Left: The bottom of the hill to climb to class. It doesn't look like much from this angle.... but my poor legs
and lungs will tell you differently. Right: The two Korean language buildings. Also, construction.


Left: Half the stadium that's across the road from the language buildings. Looks like they took the bleachers out for the winter. Right: The SNU cultural center, along the same road as the main gate. This was on my way back to my room.

However, things never go as planned. I decided to take a different bus on the way back (so far, I've only taken #6515 everywhere, because it's easy, though inefficient, to only remember one number and one route). I got on #5516 just inside the main gate, thinking it was #5515, which goes further back into Daehakdong (closer to my room), rather than just traveling along Sillim-ro outside the main gate (leaving me to walk 4 blocks). So I got on and waited, and waited, and waited.. for it to make a left onto a side street from Sillim-ro. It definitely didn't. It took me 2-3 extra stops to realise I was well past my area... and that point, I said "screw it, it has to come back eventually" (because it's also a bus I can take TO campus). Turns out that "eventually" was pretty accurate:


A nice tour of the city.

I was telling myself "as long as we don't cross the Han River..." right as we approached the most northern part, and I saw Namsan Tower (a landmark just on the other side of the river). Luckily, a few seconds later, we made a U-turn and went back the way we came.

On the plus side, I got to see a LOT of Gwanak-gu (the district where I live) and Dongjak-gu. And we went past a store dedicated entirely to bedding (near Boramae-ro 2-gil)... /cry. Anyway... I also noticed that there's a stream right along Sillim-ro, with a walking path and biking path. That could be useful later on (wishful thinking?):


This particular picture is about 1/2 a mile from my road.

After all that, I need a drink! I bought a bottle of makgeolli (rice wine) from the mart that's a half a block from my room. It was 90 cents. It's strangely carbonated, and strangely...thick. Also only 6% alcohol (according to the website).


Taste that polished rice....

Oh - I almost forgot... after I got off the bus at the right stop, I bought a drying rack and some hangers. After unpacking all my sweaters, and moving my jackets from the back of my desk chair, it's starting to feel a little like home in here. :)

Just like home?

Some things since arriving:

Finding bedding I had a nice down comforter at home, but it was quite large, so I left it behind, figuring I could find something here. Yea... not so much. After a few Google searches, it looked like only large department stores and the Express Bus Terminal subway station had bedding for sale. As none of the large department stores (Lotte, E-mart, Homeplus) are conveniently located on the south side of the river ("gangnam," if you will), I decided to try the EBT yesterday. 4 blocks walking, 6 bus stops, 6 subway stops, a subway line transfer, another subway stop, and I finally arrived at EBT. (Keep in mind, all of that cost me about 90 cents.) There were MILES of stalls and stores selling things. Just when I'd almost given up hope (there was one bedding store in the main area outside the turnstiles but they only had queen size comforters), I wandered through this cement corridor (of course with more stalls), down some stairs, and stumbled upon the main drag. I thought there were tons of stores in the first area, but no... this went on forever -- 2 halls, with stores on both sides of both halls. Shoes, makeup, winter clothes, underwear, cellphone covers....x100. About halfway down, there was a bedding store! The Korean ajummas (middle-aged ladies) working at the store were helpful, though confused by my lack of desire to buy a comforter and sheet 'set'. The comforter I found is fluffy and soft. I didn't want to be surrounded by fuzz (plus I figured it wouldn't wash well), so I bought a quilted "sheet" for the bottom (it's not fitted or sheet-like as far as what I've come to know. It's hard to explain, but it's more like a mattress cover than a 'sheet'). Anyway, the one lady wrapped it up well and I didn't really have trouble taking it on the bus and subway. The worst part was walking 4 blocks after the rest of the trip with this huge, heavy bag. And after all that, I was wandering around Daehakdong today, and I found "리빙 & 홈" (Living and Home), a store with everything for a house imaginable. It was overwhelming. I bought an extension cord, a bath mat, laundry detergent and fabric softener, and a hot/cold pack. There were sections for electronics, stationery, an entire aisle of lunchboxes (the vacuum-sealed ones looked interesting), mops, etc etc. And there was also a section for bedding! Though none of the comforters looked as warm as mine... I might've settled for one of those ones to avoid the trip to EBT. Ah well. There's also a section with drying racks, which I'll be visiting again tomorrow. I had no hands today.

Garbage bags Korea has an interesting system for trash collection. You can't just go into any store and buy a box of Hefty bags. You have to go to a convenience store near your residence and purchase local trash bags (it has the area name on it). There's no trash collection tax/fee, so the city makes its money by selling the bags at whatever price is appropriate for the area. But the system is a little complicated (at least to me, now). First, the bags aren't put out in the store. I had to ask the sales clerk and he pulled all the different colors and kinds out from under the counter. You have to separate food waste from regular trash from recyclables. The food waste bags (yellow) came in 2 liter and 5L varieties... and the regular trash bags (white) came in 5L and 10L versions. I paid ~90 cents for 20 2L yellow, and ~$3 for 20 5L white. It doesn't look like you need a bag for recyclables. There's no trash collection day, either. There are bins outside my building, and it seems like they're emptied every day, or at least frequently. But being restricted to 5L (~1.3 gallons) trash bags? No wonder no one seems to get plastic bags at the store (I've had to ask for one every time)... even crumpled up, that'd fill half the trash bag. Though I guess I can use them for recyclables, hmm...

Skype Skype is great. Not only can you do free internet-to-internet voice and video calls, but for ~$50/year you can buy a local Skype Number (I got one in the Pittsburgh area), where people can dial that (on a mobile or landline) and you can pick it up via Skype. It goes to a voicemail system if you're offline, or you can forward it to another number from your Skype account. And for another ~$50/year, you can subscribe to Skype Premium, which gives you unlimited calls to US mobile and landline numbers. (For both of these options, other countries are available. For example, I could've gotten a local South Korean number that forwarded automatically to my Skype.) I actually set off a credit card fraud alert purchasing these subscriptions, and then I used the "fraudulent" Skype subscription to call the card's 1-800 fraud protection number. ^^

Washing machine Man, I don't know how people that don't know any Korean (especially no Hangul) can come here and not go crazy. I know a fair amount of Korean, and I like to Google and/or Translate things ahead of time (or, when wifi is in range, while shopping), and I still couldn't figure out if what I was looking at was fabric softener, laundry detergent, dish(washer) detergent, etc. I made a guess based on size (and I recognized the word for fabric softener, 섬유 유연제, "Seo-myu u-yeon-je"), and after some more extensive Googling at home, I figured out I had bought one each of what I needed, but for a while there, I wasn't sure. The pictures on the bottle are all of green fields and smiling ladies. Not even clothes, to indicate it's not for dishes. Anyway - if you're looking for laundry detergent and fabric softener, I can tell you that these, at least, will work:


Act'z laundry detergent on the left, Downy fabric softener on the right

Refrigerator The dorm comes with a Samsung Korean refrigerator, and a users manual only in Korean. At first I couldn't figure out how to turn it on because the settings are pretty generic -- 강 (gang) when by itself can (also) mean "river" or "strong." 약 (yak) means "about/approximately" or "medicine." Obviously those meanings have nothing to do with refrigerators. Luckily the manual went into a little more detail (as will I, since I spent a few minutes translating it):
강 - Use when there's a lot of food and the fridge is already cold
약 - Use when there's not a lot of food and the fridge is already cold
중 (jung) - Usual/normal setting
동계 (dong-gye) - Use when temperature is ~10*C (50*F) (for a quick chill?)
성에제거 (seong-e-je-geo) - Defrost

That's all I can think of for now.

Korea so far

The trip to Korea went much smoother than expected. Granted, I had people helping me (thanks!), but still...

The Flight I found out Delta's international baggage fees are pretty ridiculous. I like United more, so I looked at their policy -- 2 free bags, and $50 for the next. I guess that was still in my head after I bought a more convenient/cheaper ticket on Delta... cos when we got to the airport, Delta only gave one free bag, and you had to pay $75 for the 2nd, and $200 for the 3rd. Because my third was carry-on-sized and everything in it could be re-bought or mailed for <$200, we rearranged some things (put some into other bags, left some at home). One bag was a few pounds over (a $90 charge), so I took out my leather coat and wore it under my peacoat. Anyway, the Delta flight definitely wasn't $200 cheaper than United, so if you've got a lot of baggage, United might be cheaper overall.

The Airport Last time I was in Korea, Incheon seemed small. After pushing (thanks, free carts at baggage claim!) my body weight in baggage from one end to the other... I no longer think that. :) Immigration/customs dumps you out in the middle. My cellphone rental pickup was way at the one end. (Sroaming has a prepaid student plan that's $50 for a year. All incoming anything is free, outgoing domestic texts are 9 cents each, outgoing domestic calls are about 48cents a minute - so obviously it's better to receive than to send.) I plan to stop using this once I get a smartphone, but that could be a while. Then the international taxi booth was back in the middle. I only had to wait 10 minutes for an English-speaking driver to come. (The Int'l Taxi offers reservations, but they charge a mandatory $9 fee to have the taxi driver hold a name placard at the Arrivals door. As I had to pick up my phone, I didn't want to do that, so I just walked up to the booth, expecting a long wait.) One of the benefits of the International Taxi (besides the English-speaking driver) is that it's a flat rate based on zone -- $60 total to SNU. The regular metered taxis are $2 for the first mile, then $1 for each mile after that, but there's also a timed meter that's running when you're sitting in traffic. And the passenger has to pay a $7 toll in cash, which, until I get a Korean bank account, I'm using sparingly (I have Capital One Venture card with no foreign transaction fees). I couldn't find an exact distance from Incheon to Seoul, but it took about 2 hours with traffic to get to my room. Oh, there's also a bus that goes pretty much everywhere in the city for $13. I took it last year because it had a stop right in front of the hotel. This time, the closest stop was SNU's main gate - so I'd have to hail a taxi from there, or catch a bus with bags. Neither sounded appealing in the dark and cold.

The Drive The taxi driver couldn't find the address I gave him on his phone's GPS (the neighborhoods in my area were recently broken up and renamed, and a new Western-style address system is starting to be used, so things are a mess), so I had to guide him from SNU's main gate. Thank goodness for my pre-trip research. As I wasn't expecting to have internet at first, I took a bunch of screenshots of Google Maps and dumped them on my tablet. We eventually found the place. The taxi driver helped me carry my bags up to my room. :) I think it's because we had a nice chat on the way. He pointed out some places as we went past. And he took some side roads to avoid the main highway's rush hour traffic (apparently it goes from 6-9pm, as people here start work later and work longer hours).

The Room It's about what I was expecting from the description on SNU's website. The main room is probably 13'x9', the kitchen is 5'x5', the bathroom is 4'x4'.


The entranceway. Clothes washer under the sink. Bathroom to the right. And one of the nice
things about Korea -- no house keys required. My building and my room both have keypads.


The bathroom is entirely tile with a drain on the floor. The showerhead is above
(and attached to) the sink. It's actually not a bad setup, except it stays wet for a while.


Closet, shelves, desk, mini fridge and microwave. Sadly, facing forward the microwave
cord doesn't reach the plug, so it's sideways.


Someone before me left some stickers from Singapore on the glass... and the view isn't exciting
(plus there's a guard that sticks out), but... you know.. it lets light in, as a good window should.


Bedding is apparently hard to find in Korea. And their idea of a bedsheet is more like a paddingless
mattress pad. It is thicker than a regular sheet and isn't fitted. And there's no top sheet.

Buying the comforter was my first adventure. I'm saving that exciting tale for the next post.

D-4 visa

I had a fair amount of trouble finding information about D-4 visas online, so hopefully this post can help someone else.

In the US, in order to obtain a Korean visa, you can either mail or bring the following items to the consulate in your jurisdiction:

1. A valid passport and a copy of it
2. A completed visa application (available here)
3. A passport-sized photo
4. $45 for US citizens (more for non-US citizens) -- cash or money order

These are required for every visa, and are all self-explanatory. The real fun begins with the particulars needed for a D-4 visa, which are:

5. Certificate of Admission
6. Certificate of tuition payment
7. Certificate of graduation or certificate of enrollment
8. Financial document(certificate of deposit balance over $3,000(USD) or certificate of remittance or exchange)
9. Copy of Certificate of Business Registration of the school

So, what exactly are those items and how do you get them?

#5 and #6 will be mailed to you by the university (in my case, SNU). I was worried I wouldn't get the documents in a timely manner, but they shipped them via Global Express. The package was mailed November 1 (Korea time), as they state on their website. It arrived at my house on November 2 (US time), however, I wasn't home and had to sign for it, so it wasn't in my hands until the 3rd.

For #7, I used a copy of my college transcripts, but bringing an original high school or college diploma should also work. The man at the visa section of the consulate (henceforth "the visa man") said he wanted to see the originals, but would make a copy there.

For #8, I went to my bank and asked for a printout of my most recent statement. It was on regular printer paper, and they charged $5, so you could probably print it yourself and save some money. Just make sure it shows your name and an available balance of >$3000. I thought about using a balance statement from the ATM, but it didn't show my name.

Dealing with #9 actually made me have second thoughts about attending SNU. They didn't provide it in the package, and I actually went to the consulate without it. The visa man was not pleased and (somewhat understandably) yelled at me. I had recently read a blog where the girl had her school fax the document, so I got him to agree to take all my other paperwork, and I'd call SNU that night to have them fax it. Wishful thinking. I guess here is a good place to mention that Verizon charges $2.49/min to call South Korea without their "International Value Plan." It's $3.99/mo (it takes effect immediately and supposedly you can cancel after just one month) then it's only 7 cents per minute to a landline and 11 cents to a cellphone in Korea. Let me just say -- get the value plan then cancel it after you get your visa, because you'll probably be making many long phone calls to SNU. The folks at SNU had no idea what I was talking about when I said "certificate of business registration." Luckily, Google Translate didn't let me down. After I said 사업자 등록증 (sa-eop-ja deung-nok-jeung), they were all like, "Ahhh, THAT document!" However, SNU said they don't give the document to students. They also wouldn't fax it to the consulate. From what I gathered, they do not do international faxes at all, period. (Which is hilarious, given it's an international language program. Certainly a non-trivial number of students wanting to learn Korean are actually outside Korea.) I managed to get them to email it to the consulate. I called the consulate the next morning and had to convince the visa man to accept an email (much more effort on his part than a fax). I convinced him, but he said he didn't receive the email that SNU had supposedly sent the night before. That night (after many more hours of worrying), I called SNU again. While I was talking to the woman on the phone, I sent SNU an email with the consulate's email address written out (as we'd had some spelling/communication issues the day before). The next day, I called the consulate, and he said he'd received it! He didn't seem very happy to accept an email, and told me that I should have applied to another school, because many others (Sogang and Yonsei in particular) are much more accommodating. Hopefully this isn't just the beginning of issues at SNU....

Anyway, 40 minutes of international calls, 6 hours of driving (because I didn't want to risk mailing my passport so close to departure), 3 days of dealing with #9, 4 [business] days of waiting for processing (much less than the month some websites said it would take) and finally:

It's pasted in the back of my passport, so I have no idea what they needed the passport photo for. I was expecting another passport-like document to carry around, but this is much easier.

Introduction

Hello!  My name is Bre.  This blog is mainly intended for family and friends, but I feel like I should give a short introduction anyway in case someone else stumbles upon it.

When my grandmother died in February 2012, it made me realize that no one lives forever (I know, right?).  I'd been thinking about going to Korea for school for a while, but I was afraid to take the leap.  But I realized I'd rather regret going after having tried it, than regret not going because I was afraid.  So, in April 2012, I applied and was accepted to Seoul National University's language program for the Summer 2012 semester.  However, some things came up at work, and I ended up delaying it for two semesters, making my first semester the upcoming Winter 2012 session.  If you know me at all, you know how much I hate winter -- the snow, the cold, the shorter days.  So it took a bit to convince myself to go halfway around the world to a place that's much colder than Hampton Roads, Virginia.... where I'd be outdoors for a large portion of the time (vs. just scurrying from my house to the car, and from the car to the building where I work).

I applied to SNU because I'd heard good things about the university -- classes are made up of students from a bunch of different countries, that don't all speak English.  The common language is Korean, so you're forced to use it if you want to communicate with your classmates at all.  But, mainly, honestly, I applied to SNU because everything was able to be done online.  Other schools like Yonsei and Seogang seemed to cater more towards the foreigners already living in Korea... the application, registration, payments, etc all had to be done in person or via a proxy in Korea.  As I actually had a full-time job, moving to Korea just for the chance to go to school didn't seem like a possibility.  And I know a few Koreans in the States, but I don't know any Koreans in Korea.  (I know some friends of friends, but none that I know well enough to entrust several thousand of my dollars to.)

For this blog, I intend to use the Revised Romanization of Hangul (the Korean alphabet) quite often, as well as Hangul itself.  I'm still not sure how I want to write the words that are affected by certain pronunciation rules... but... we'll figure it out as we (I) go.  For example, I'm living in 대학동.  According to the RR, that should be written as "dae-hak-dong," but my Korean teacher (here in VA) says it "dae-haeng-nong."  Is that going to confuse people?  Is it better to type it letter-by-letter so you get the right Romanized letter, or to write it out how it's actually said?  I guess it doesn't matter, so... we'll go with the pronunciation for now.  :)

Anyway, today I finally got my D-4 student visa.  I'll save the story for the next post.