I have a question for all of you. If you were to see a live chicken running about blithely in the middle of Seoul, would you consider that normal? Because I sure as hell didn’t when I saw one hopping around in front of the 24 h convenience store at approximately 11 PM yesterday night. Damn, it was the first time I’ve seen a chicken that’s still alive in like a year.

Funny enough, while I stopped in awe to watch someone’s escaped dinner merrily walking around, all the Koreans passing by gave it only a passing look and didn’t seem all that surprised by its presence. I even stopped a guy and pointed at it and said, “look! A chicken!” and he was just like, “uhh…. so what?”

I am confused.

LOL, I just realized that by the way I left my last post all those months ago, it almost seems like I died from my sickness back then. XD No, I haven’t died, I’m still very much alive and still living the high life here. It’s still tons of fun to live here, although my priorities have changed a lot since coming.

Also, happy new year to everyone! My New Year’s Resolutions are as follows:

1) Continue to study Korean very hard every day as I’ve been doing recently. These days I do nothing but study Korean after coming home from school, and drill in something like 50 words a day. I don’t know for how much longer I can continue to learn quite that much (so far, I have been able to plant them firmly into my memory, and been very successful studying that much) because I may very well discover a bit later I can no longer retain that many words, but until then, I’m going to keep studying like mad. I’ve been way too lazy since coming to Korea, and since Sogang University just doesn’t teach you enough vocabulary (it’s still a good school, though, and I intend on sticking with it), I’m going to make up for that in my free time. My goal is to be able to read contemporary novels in Korean by the end of year.

2) Lose some more weight. I’ve already lost 6 kilograms since coming to Korea (without a diet, mind you; it’s something that seems to come quite naturally when living on a budget and in a country where the food is – on average – much less fattening), but I’d like to lose just a little bit more. The first resolution is more important to me, though.

That’s it.

I have just TONS of photos I took in the past couple of months, I’ll try to post them all within the next couple of updates.

Well, first the good news! I passed all my mid-terms with over 95% in all of them. The speaking exam turned out to be the far most challenging out of them all, though. While they didn’t ask you anything new or even challenging in the written ones, they seem to expect that you have learned additional spoken Korean outside of the classroom, and will throw vocabulary and expression not covered during class time at you (not so much that you could fail if you only knew the class-words and expressions by heart, but enough that you could only get a passing grade if you had never once used Korean outside of the classroom). A-ha! So this is where they’ve been hiding their difficulty! Luckily, I have used it quite a bit in my free time so the speaking exam was easy as well.

In not so-great-news, I am damn sick. I’ve caught one-sided tonsillitis, and my left tonsil is about twice to 2.5 times the size of my right, uninfected one. In addition to that, my left tonsil shows fashionable white spots, and causes me to wince in pain when I swallow even just saliva. Oh, the joy of tonsillitis! A good friend and frequent visitor in my childhood whose visits have become increasingly rare with my ascension to adulthood has finally found its way back to find me once more….!

And they told me I wouldn’t have to worry about tonsillitis anymore once I became an adult.  -_-

I’m in the very strange situation that I usually can’t sleep during the night at all. I tend to have a high fever during the night, and instead of sleeping, I’ll have restless fever hallucinations and my thoughts are just stumbling over each other and bumping into each other like a bunch of intoxicated amusement park go-karters. They go something like this:

“I should go to the pharmacy tomorrow…”

– “The girl had green hair and a horn on her forehead.”

– “Maybe the elevator in the building is on fire.”

– “Then she saw him and smiled.”

– “Asterix and Obelix are running a marathon!”

– “Yes, I should go to the pharmacy.”

– “And the flying soju bottle with the freckles winked at me.”

– “Then she walked over to him and said hi. Is that a good idea?”

– “Yes, I think I should definitely go to the pharmacy!”

As you can see, they didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I hate fever hallucinations.

I’m not sure where I caught tonsillitis, but I think I may have last Friday when I went out to Hana and met some of my friends there. It was a good night (I got a bit too drunk, though). Some Korean girls were marvelling over my big breasts and asked me if they could touch them. I said sure. Then they poked it with their fingers and oohed and aahed about how soft they were. It was funny.

Last Friday, I took my reading/listening and grammar mid-terms and yesterday I took my writing test. I can say with full confidence that I got 100% (or damn close) on all three of them, and I wasn’t the only one – from what my classmates told me, all of them are pretty sure they aced it, as well.

And how couldn’t they? The exams were ridiculously easy. Maybe it’s because we’re the most advanced level 1 class and to most of us, everything we covered in the first half of level 1 was nothing but a more in-depth repetition of stuff we’d already learned, but I think that the test should have been dead easy even for the slower and less advanced level 1 classes. Sogang really drills the few things you learn into your head and makes sure you don’t forget them. Lots of valuable teaching time is lost drilling the same words everybody already knows over and over again.

I can’t say I am too happy with this method. I hope that they start to spend more time on teaching and less on practicing and, most of all, start to teach more vocabulary.  I don’t think I learned many words at Sogang so far and I look with envious eyes at Yonsei students who complain about having to learn too many. Between the two extremes, I prefer too many rather than too few. Challenge wins over boredom.

Not to confuse anyone, I’m not going to quit on Sogang or transfer or anything yet. It’s far too early for that and the difficulty may very well increase in later levels. It’s just that I feel a little bit bored in the afternoons, but lack the motivation (most of the time) to do studying on my own. When I do study on my own, though, I find it most effective to watch Korean dramas reading the scripts and looking up all the words I don’t know. It’s a great supplement to Sogang because 5 minutes of drama gives me dozens of unknown words to study. I figure that whichever language program you choose you are going to have to make up for the areas it neglects in your free time.

In non-school related news, I am addicted to watching Legend, or Tae Wang Sa Shin Gi, a historical/fantasy Korean TV drama that feels like a mix between Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Final Fantasy.

I also have to finally let off something that’s long overdue – I have to praise my landlady for providing me with more food than I can eat in the mornings and evenings. Sometimes I seriously wonder how they are making any profit at all! They provide free internet (and I make damn good use of it, and download a lot) and in the mornings, the landlady, understanding I’m a Westerner with weird quirks, always offers to make me pancakes, toast, fried eggs or whatever else I want, and I even get fruit to bring back to my room as dessert. She also sometimes asks me what I’d like for dinner, and cooks it for me. Seriously, giving me two big meals a day plus free internet at 350,000 won a month seems like an incredibly good deal to me, especially considering all my classmates are paying close to 500,000 for the same or even slightly inferior services! This is all thanks to my boyfriend who managed to find this wonderful room for me. Thanks a lot!

About one week ago, Sogang University held its annual cultural festival and we foreign students were, of course, expected to participate. I chose to take part in the Hanbok Fashion Show, of which photos can be found here (along with some photos of myself I took in a coffee shop because it seemed like a waste not to take photos when someone had put professional make-up on me ;)):

 http://neavanille.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=8

We started preparation at around 9 AM with the fashion show scheduled at 2:30 PM, and I didn’t know until approximately 2 PM that I was even going to walk! We ran hopelessly out of suitable hanboks, so the majority of girls didn’t get to participate (horribly incompetent management on Sogang’s part here – they had us register a few days beforehand so they should have known how many of us were going to show up, and prepare enough hanboks for all of us). For about 5 hours, the others girls and I just sat around, chatted (I made several new friends that day and had it not been for them, what ended up being a memorable experience would have deteriorated into an infinitely boring and dull day dragged down by the first 5 hours of sitting around and sloooowly, one-by-one, getting our hair and make-up done). Something that was quite entertaining during the dressing-up process was sneaking looks at the boys next-door who we all felt looked an amazing lot like soldiers or samurai in their curious-looking hanboks. 😉

When it finally came to walking on the stage, I felt it was very thrilling to be watched by so many people, and ended up flashing the crowd peace-signs and making love signs (that’s when you raise both arms and touch your head with your hands, causing your arms to imitate the form of a heart). Later, I ended up dancing (uh, headbanging) on the sideline while we were waiting for some of the other participants to finish their walk, and from what a couple of people told me, I got more attention than the people on the stage. I guess they’d all seen girls walking around in hanboks close to a millionth time, but seeing a girl dancing and shaking her booty in a hanbok might have been somewhat of a novelty. 😉

 In other news, I have mid-terms on Friday. I can’t believe time passed so quickly, and that half of my first term at Sogang is already over! I expect to ace mid-terms and get an A. School is still ridiculously easy, although it has gotten a lot more interesting lately.

The temperatures here are rapidly going south and autumn has long since completely taken over. The blanket I bought 3 months now is much too thin now and I find myself freezing at night. Girls no longer wear mini-skirts on the street (a tragedy, I suppose) and Shinchon is quite empty at night these days while it was consistently bustling at 3 AM throughout the past couple of months. I guess a lot of college students are settling into a quieter life now that summer is over and winter is inevitably going to take over.

Just as well, more time to watch dramas. ;D

We’ve already established I’m a lazy writer, but now, my friends, you also have to learn that in addition to that, I’m also a very slow writer. Chuseok update comes only now, after the holiday has been over for about 4 days.

 Chuseok is the biggest holiday in Korea and therefore a number of things happened:

a) I didn’t have to go to school, which sucked (refer to c).

b) Super Junior, Lee Hyori, DBSK and a number of other Korean as well as foreign bands gave a free concert, the Asia Song Festival, at the World Cup Stadium and

c) I was bored out of my mind because all Koreans were off spending Chuseok with their families and/or left Seoul to go back to their hometowns. I managed to snatch my boyfriend away from his family several times to spend time with him, but overall it was a very boring experience. I have officially decided that, despite having no objective reason for it, I severely dislike Chuseok. Thankfully, it’s not for another year now. Yippah-deedle-doo!

Going back to b, the Asia Song Festival. The concert itself was decent for something that’s completely free, but if I had had to pay for it, I would likely have been rather pissed. The stage was very small, much too small for everyone in the stadium to get a good look and what was even worse, the TV monitors around the stage were tiny, too! It was hard to make out who was on stage due to this (thankfully, you could tell by the audience ;)). Due to the stage being so small, it felt a lot like just watching those people on TV, so I can’t say it was a very overwhelming experience to watch Super Junior, DBSK etc. live. At least the sound was decent and everyone got a full dose of sugary sweet and generic Asian pop!

It was marketed as an Asian music festival and for this reason, performers from China, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia all came there to celebrate… Asian unity (how they are one Asia) and bringing world peace and some of that other stuff the moderators would keep yapping on about. It resulted in very little other than what they said going in one ear and straight out of the other.

What destroyed that littled illusion of Asian unity rather hilariously was the fact that nobody sans a couple of handfuls of people gave a damn about any of the non-Korean performers. Personally, I enjoyed some of the non-Korean performancers, especially F4 from Taiwan and Kuraki Mai from Japan, but the vast majority of Koreans just whipped out their cell phones and yawned quite openly, waiting for the “foreigner” to finally disappear. The scene was quite different, however, when Korean performers graced the stage.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many crazy fangirls in one place as at that concert! I’m seriously surprised I didn’t get deaf from the rows upon rows upon rows (seriously, about 3 quarters of the whole audience) of screaming fangirls chanting “DONG BANG SHIN KI!!! DONG BANG SHIN KI!!!” (a boyband’s name) while popping up on down on their seats and flapping their arms like excited ducks. It was… quite a sight. I wouldn’t have been overly surprised if the whole stadium had just collapsed underneath the weight of orgasming fangirls. It did have one advantage, though: we didn’t hear the boybands singing due to them. Yay!

 The rest of Chuseok passed quietly and last Thursday, school started up again. We’re slowly starting to get into somewhat new territory which, while I do theoretically know, I haven’t thoroughly studied before, so I expect my boredom to get reduced the following week of language instruction. It still frustrates me on occasion that while I can have a conversation in Korean, I still don’t understand so much of what people are saying. However, for now, not understanding is still motivating rather than frustrating for me, so it’s all good I suppose.

Well, it’s been forever since I last updated, and it wasn’t even that I was particularily busy! I was just plain too lazy to update. I’ve never been good at keeping a diary… anyway, here’s the long-awaited update. And looky-looky! At least I uploaded some new photos.

 http://www.neavanille.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=7

 Photos of my classmates, my teachers and my classroom. Enjoy.

My 3 weeks at Sogang have ended, the first 2 weekends have come and gone and I’ve now completed my first 14 days of Korean language study and the first 56 hours of Korean language instruction I’ve ever had. Those 14 days have given me a much deeper understanding of what studying at Sogang University entails, has given me a clearer view of what I want to do those next 1.5 to 2 years and has given me the chance to make friends with most of my classmates. I always got to know all 3 teachers better, and can say I like them all (and guess what! The male teacher is apparently not gay like we had all assumed from the first few lessons!!) and I think they are all good teachers. Which brings me to…

 1) The Language Classes

The classes have improved dramatically in difficulty since the first day and I was very pleased to learn several words I hadn’t known before, including “cross”, “sponge” and “gymnasium.” Most of the vocabulary learned was things commonly found in most homes (everything from book and pencil to hair brush and soap) as well as drinks and places (swimming pool, hospital, book store, zoo etc. etc. etc… I knew all of those already).

Grammar-wise, we didn’t learn much. Basically, we learned how to introduce ourselves (name, job, likes, dislikes), how to order something at a restaurant, how to ask what and where something is and how to say how many things there are (counting). We also learned how to say what time it was, what day of the year it was, how to ask for someone’s phone number, how to ask for the price of something etc. etc. I know a lot of grammar already, so at the speed we’re going with grammar, it will be a while until I learn any I don’t already know. However, even though I already know everything, I feel like my time in level 1 is not wasted. It’s strenghtening my foundations and since I have a lot of time here, reviewing the basics now to be better able to soak up later levels is  worth it.

The teaching style consists of the teacher explaining the target grammatical pattern and us students spending the rest of the lesson practicing it with help of the target vocabulary. Often, we will do so in groups of 2, 3 or 4, but sometimes we’ll be asked to stand up and mingle in the classroom. This can get very boring very fast – when you already know the target grammar and are not completely unintelligent, you will have mastered the sentences by the 5th time you utter them, and the rest just becomes boring drawl. Everybody else in my class has studied Korean before as well, so I feel the boredom is rather universal.

Still, I have to admit that while it is boring, it has given me a lot of confidence in speaking Korean. Last Saturday, I went to an international pub called Hana, where I met a lot of Koreans whom I socialized with in Korean. It went rather well. Though it was at a very basic level, I could communicate and have a good time. I was a lot more insecure about speaking Korean before I started the Sogang program, so I can say the fact that I could communicate with ease is probably largely due to them, so they have succeeded in teaching me something despite so far failing at teaching me anything new.

 2) My Classmates

Despite the fact that I am the youngest in the class, the other students treat me as an equal and are generally very kind. We have good classroom dynamics and often have lunch together after class. All of us have already studied Korean (as I found out, most of them have studied Korean for at least one year! O_O Wow! The fact that a lot of these Asian students have been studying Korean for a year, yet their skills are on par with mine gives me a confidence boost..) so we can communicate easily with each other despite coming from different parts of the world. None of the Japanese and Chinese students speak English, so we are ‘forced’ to use Korean.

Our class is in fact so advanced that two of the Westerners we started the term out with were transfered to slower classes! A guy named Jonathan and (sadly, sadly) Tara are thus no longer studying with us. I guess that if you don’t know any Korean at all and have never studied it before, the speed at which our class is going can be rather overwhelming.

I’ve developed an especially close bond with Ryuichi (the anime-hair guy ;)). Maybe it’s because we’re both so young that we like to tease each other so much, but in any case, I’m probably having the most carefree fun with him, followed by Tara. But as I said, everybody in my class is very nice and I’m frequently trying to socialize with all of them.

2 weeks into the lessons, 2 new students joined us – Jibin (American, half-Korean) and Ran, a Chinese girl. They don’t really ‘belong’ yet, meaning that in the first 2 weeks, our class had already been formed, so by the time they arrived, they were the newcomers to an already established group. Everybody is very nice to them, so I think it won’t be long until it feels like they’ve always been here.

 3)What else have I been doing?

Nothing special, really. I went with my boyfriend to the zoo 2 weeks ago, and they just had the cutest dolphin show you’ll ever see! I also learned a lot of words there, like elephant (koggiri) or tiger (horangi).

My friend Soyoon whom I went clubbing with 3 weeks ago has since left to study in England for a year. I’m very sad about that, but thankfully it isn’t hard in Korea to find friends because due ot having grown up in such an isolated country, a lot of people are very interested in being friends with foreigners. Tonight I’m going back to Hana International Cafe & Pub, where I’ll hopefully meet up with some of the people I met last Saturday.

In other news, it’s typhoon season in Korea right now, and it’s raining, raining, raining…. I forgot to bring my umbrella to school once because it didn’t rain in the morning and I can safely say that I got the most thorough shower outside of a bathroom of my life that afternoon.

My hair is a big hit with Korean girls… today, as I was waiting for my meal at McDonald’s (yeah, I know, I’m in Korea, why am I eating at McDonald’s? Well, even though the Korean food here is great, I like the quick fix McDonald’s offers, so I find myself getting American fast food about once every 2 weeks) , 3 Korean high schools students started talking about me in Korean (“ooohhh, her hair is so pretty!” basically). I turned around and said thanks in Korean, and they made these cute big eyes and exclaimed, “wow, you can speak Korean!” upon which they commenced to actually touch my hair while making “ohh” and “ahhh” sounds. It was cute.

Tomorrow, I’m going to the Asian music festival with my classmates! SG Wannabe, Super Junior  (Korean bands, in case you don’t know) will be there, and what’s best about the whole deal is that the concert will be completely FREE!

Well, I have to get ready to go out now. I’m glad I finally updated and I hope so are you.

Today, I had my very fist day of class, and that after I spent all of last night clubbing with Soyoon (a friend of mine) in Kangnam (the rich part of town, in case you didn’t know – the Beverly Hills of Seoul) and when I came home at 7 AM (had to wait until the subway was running again to make it home), my hair and clothes were reeking of smoke. A quick shower later I was on my way to class, feeling all excited and like I wanted to accomplish great things that day.

Once I arrived at my university, I was initially dismayed to find out that my class seemed to consist of mostly Westerners. Don’t misunderstand me,  I have nothing against them, but they do tend to learn slower than Asians and seeing as how I am a very advanced level 1 student, I was afraid they’d bog down the class and make it unbearably draggy. Once in my classroom, I met some of my classmates for the 9AM writing class. I sat down opposite a Western guy who I later found out was an English teacher named Charles who’d been in Korea for 4 years and whose Korean was similarly good as mine was. A Western girl, Tara joined us. I was surprised to find out she was half-Korean – she looks all white to me, personally. Rounding out our table (at Sogang, you sit together around tables with your classmates instead of in a circle around the teacher like I think they do at Yonsei), a 29-year old Singaporean woman joined us. Class could begin!

My teacher for the first period is named Kim Ji Eun, and she looks a lot like the actress Jeon Ji Hyun – though, of course, she is slightly less prettier and older than her, but the resemblance is definitely quite striking. I immediately liked this teacher – what I liked slightly less, however, was the content of the first class.

The horror, the horror! Basic hangeul classes! We spent about 20 minutes reading and pronouncing ah, eo, oh, uh, eu and i! How very annoying – what was even worse was the fact that eveyone in the class clearly already could read and understand some basic Korean! I was pleased with the fact that my classmate do appear to be on a similar level as me, but as a result all of us and not just me were severly bored the first period.

Second period started and the other students who aren’t taking the extra writing class from 9-9:50 arrived, completing my class. All in all, in my class there are:

– 4 Japanese students (2 older (to me, older is everything above 25 ;)) females, 1 young female, 1 young male)

– 2 Singaporean women, one 29, one in her 30s

– a pretty and young Vietnamese girl

– an American woman, Tara (22)

– A Canadian guy, Charles (30)

– two young white guys, one from England, the other from I don’t know where

Too many white people for my taste. But I do know that beyond level 1 there are barely any white people left so this might be a level 1 thing for now.

Anyways, the teacher for our second period entered – and I don’t mean to be sexist, but I was slightly surprised that the teacher was a man. I consider a language teacher to be a highly feminine job, so I’m pretty sure there are very few male Korean language teachers at these institutes, yet I had the pleasure to be assigned one. He taught us reading for another hour (more hangeul – how mind-numbingly boring!) and the class was over soon. Next, our main teacher, our conversation teacher who has us for 2 hours a day, entered the classroom.

Like all my teachers, I also had a good impression of her. Her name is Seo Yoo Kyung and she seems like a good and competent teacher with a nice sense of humor. However, we did not do any talking at all in our so-called conversation class and instead finished up learning hangeul, actually managing to cover the whole alphabet in one day. I’m glad that that’s over with, freeing us up for other areas, and I do have to admit that though it was very boring for all of us, if any of us hadn’t been able to read Korean already, it would have been very fast-paced and probably difficult to keep up with, so I think I’ll forgive them for boring us with hangeul classes. But just for this first day.

Now about the teaching methods themselves: I’m not sure how I feel about them, yet. Basically, the teaching style at Sogang is like this: the teacher explains a concept (in this case, hangeul) and the students do tasks to re-inforce what they just learned in groups of 3 or 4 (in our case, ordering, reading and quizzing each other on word cards with hangeul on them). That’s how it was done, over and over again. While I do appreciate the practice time, I do have to say that speaking Korean with other foreigners and practicing it with them is a rather useless skill – they don’t have proper pronunciation (although mine isn’t perfect, either, I can hear and it does bother me to listen to badly accented Korean) and you run the risk of imitating their accent (something I tend to do – I used to speak English with a Brazilian friend, and would sport a Portuguese accent myself when talking to her!). The games were also rather monotonoues, but that’s more the schedule’s fault rather than the teaching system’s – there’s just a very limited number of variations of how you can practice reading with your classmates, and reading was all we did today. One other thing I’m not too happy about is the age of my classmates – except for 22-year-old Tara and a Japanese man who I think is in his early 20’s as well (and has an anime hairstyle like I’ve never seen before! I’m so going to post pictures of him!), all the other student are quite a lot older than me. I was warned that the average age of students was higher at Sogang than it is at Yonsei and that seems to be true.

Oh, and a drama references for my readers from Korean drama boards: when we learned the Korean word for coffee, I spontaneously blurted out, “Coffee Prince!” (the name of a popular Korean drama) which made all the Japanese students laugh. Heh.

Anyway, class was not too bad and I have to say that, overall, despite being dead-tired from clubbing all night, I was probably the most active and motivated student (go me!) and right now I feel an immense desire to go study Korean! I think when I finish this entry, I’m going to study ahead.

Overall, a very interesting day! I’ll report more on Sogang tomorrow.

I finally came around to uploading some photos, 30 all in all.

 Check them out here: http://www.neavanille.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=6 The photos include me and my boyfriend in hanboks (traditional Korean dress), Insadong, Seoul by night, the photos from the beach trip I promised an eternity ago and a few general pictures of my room. Yay!

 Story behind some of the photos: yesterday, I went to Insadong, which is seen as the cultural center of Seoul. It’s basically one long street cramped with shops selling souvenirs, art galleries, traditional restaurants etc. It wasn’t really that impressive but it did make for a nice date. Still, for tourists, Seoul is kind of bleh – Japan, Thailand or China have a lot more to offer for the avid picture-taker and traditional culture lover.

What follows is rather personal ramblings, so I’m not sure who’s going to be interested in it, but I’ll write about it anyway. My boyfriend (who is under the unfortunate delusion he’s good at games, when he really isn’t) bought an online adapter for our Playstation 2 so we can play Winning Eleven online. This game seems to be very popular in Korea – it’s a Japanese soccer game and everybody and their grandma seems to be playing it. I’m not very good at it yet, but a lot of it seems to be based on luck rather than skill anyway. I spent a lot of days this August staying indoors and playing Playstation because it was just too damn hot to set one foot outside of the door.

Um, can’t really think of more to ramble on about. XD

Tomorrow is my first day of class. I CAN’T WAIT. XD As much as I love vacationing, I’m starting to get bored – I need a sense of purpose, some ‘work’ at the moment, so I’m really really looking forward to starting at Sogang University tomorrow morning.

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.