한국에 와따!

I made it to Korea!  After taking a short flight from Burlington, VT, I flew 14 hours non-stop from JFK to Incheon on Korean Air.  The flight actually didn’t seem that long -  I’ve been on so many flights to Korea, as well as flights to South Africa and Australia that I think I’ve just gotten used to it now.  The flight was at an awkward time: it left New York at 1 am and arrived in Korea at 3 am.  The airplane food was surprising good – I opted for the Korean selections of 비빔밥 bibimbap and 녹차죽  nokchajuk (綠茶粥 green tea porridge), although since I had already eaten 3 full meals during the day, I wasn’t really that hungry.  Nevertheless, being the pig I am trying to get my money’s worth I ate it all anyway.

So Nyeo Si Dae (Girls' Generation) greets me at the airport!

I was originally going to store my bags at the airport and then go around Seoul looking for a hotel until I could find a more permanent place to stay, but one of my aunts was gracious enough to let me stay at her place for a few days.  She lives in Goyang City, which is about an hour northwest of Seoul.  She lives with her uncle and has a son and a daughter who are both my age, just slightly older.  I call her my aunt but she’s not really my aunt – her grandfather and grandmother are my great-grandparents.  I’m not sure what that makes us in English but I know that in Korean she’s technically my 오촌 ochon (五寸).  I took a bus from the airport and arrived at my aunt’s place around 6 in the morning.  It was a little early, but fortunately everyone was up already since my 누나 nuna (nuna literally means older sister but it is used to refer to any older female relative or close friend) normally goes to work around that time.
 

I was super exhausted because I hadn’t really slept in 24 hours; I dozed off every now and then on the plane, but I’d be awakened by a meal service or turbulence so I wasn’t able to get a good night’s sleep.  Despite being really tired, since I arrived on a Friday I couldn't sleep right away because I had a lot of things to get done before the weekend started.  The first thing I did was to try to find a place to stay near Sogang University.  I checked out a place called the Coco Livingtel first.  It’s fairly close (about a 5 minute walk) to the university, is cheap, and past Light Fellows have found it a good enough place to stay for a semester.  Despite my fears of talking to strangers on the phone in Korean, I finally managed to muster up enough courage to call them.  The first conversation with the manager was…um…interesting.  It went something like this:

관리자: 여보세요?                                                                                        

Manager: Hello?

저: 네, 저는 방을 구하고 있는데 혹시 빈방이 있나요?                              

Me: Hi, yes, I’m looking for a room.  Do you have any rooms available?

관리자: 누구세요?

Manager: Who is this?

저: 네?  롱벤자민 라고 합니다.

Me:  What?  My name is Ben Long.

관리자: 외국인이세요?

Manager: Are you a foreigner?

저: 네.

Me: Yes.

(He hangs up on me)

Apparently my pronunciation needs some work, if it was that obvious to him from the beginning that I was a foreigner.  I ended up calling back, and it wasn’t so bad the second time.  I figured he was just worried that he would have to talk to me in English.  He told me that there was in fact one room available and that I could stop by to look at it later in the day.  I visited the place, and although the room was small, it was clean and had all of the essential amenities (desk, small closet, private bathroom, TV, mini-fridge) for only $390/month, so I decided to live there.  I didn’t even bother to look at other places because other Light Fellows didn’t seem to have any problems living there.  Worst case, I can just move to another place after a month since I only have to pay for the room month-to-month without a contract or a security deposit.  I'm scheduled to move in tomorrow (the 23rd) since I'm leaving Korea on 12/22.  Koreans don't like to prorate housing payments.  

The next thing I did was register for what I thought was going to be an Alien Registration Card (ARC) so that I could open a bank account and set up a cell phone contract.  Just submit an application and my passport, and get my card in 2 weeks – sounds simple enough, right?  Well I got there and took a ticket to meet with an immigration official to apply for an ARC.  After I waited 40 minutes, the immigration officer told me that since I had an F-4 (재외동포 overseas Korean) visa, I would have to apply for domestic residency instead. 

Side note: I was able to get the F-4 visa since my mom was a former Korean citizen.  It’s much better than the standard student visa because it lets one stay in Korea for up to 2 years, and allows one to seek employment.  I don’t plan on working this year because the Light Fellowship is funding my studies, but I figured I might need the F-4 should I decide to come to Korea after I graduate.  It basically grants me all of the rights of a Korean citizen, short of voting, so it’s a pretty nice deal. 

They also told me that since the address (my aunt's) I had listed on the application was in Gyeonggi-do province, I would have to go to the Gyeonggi-do immigration office instead of the Seoul one.  This was annoying because the Gyeonggi-do office is actually much further away.  It's like telling a Manhattan resident that instead of going to Jersey City, they would have to drive to Albany since that's where New York's government offices are.  Fortunately I knew some other relatives living in Seoul proper and I was able to list their address.

So I filled out another application and waited another half-an-hour in the domestic residency line, before the immigration officer told me that I had to present a copy of my mom’s passport, Korean family registry papers (? I think that was what they were asking me for), my mom’s US naturalization documents, and documents proving that my mom renounced her Korean citizenship.  I thought this was strange because I had already shown these documents to the Korean Consulate in New York when I applied for the F-4 visa.  Luckily, my mom was still awake (around 1am her time) and was able to fax me a copy of her passport and citizenship renunciation/naturalization documents, but I still had to go to an office across the street to get my mom’s family registry papers.  When I got there, they gave me a form to fill out, but I barely understood any of the words on it.  Unlike the immigration paperwork, this form was only written in Korean, I’m guessing since not many foreigners try to get copies of their parents' Korean family registry.  Despite only filling out half of the form (because I couldn't understand the rest), they were nice enough to get me a copy of the document and I was finally able to successfully apply for a domestic residence card (after 4.5 hours!).  I just have to wait 2 weeks in order to pick it up. 

Later that night, despite being exhausted from travelling and trying to register at the immigration office, I met with some of my old Level 3 classmates and our former teacher.  Out of the roughly 14 students in that class, 2 were still working in Korea, and 4 others just happened to be visiting Korea at the time.  Some of them were leaving Korea the day after, so we had to meet that day.  We went out to a nice 삼겹살 place and had 팥빙수  patbingsu (팥氷水)afterwards.  I don’t eat pork, so I tried the duck meat version of 삼겹살 instead and it was pretty good.  I didn’t have my camera at the time, so I wasn’t able to take any pictures of the food L, but believe me, it was delicious.  I got back home around 11pm, and I was so exhausted that I was completely out during the hour-long bus ride back to my aunt’s place.  I don’t know how, but I somehow miraculously woke up just as I got to my bus stop – otherwise I could have spent the night at the bus depot. 

After seeing another friend and sleeping most of the second day in Korea, I spent the third day with my two cousins (whose apartment I was staying at) since they were both off from work on Sunday.  One of my cousins, 경미 누나 Gyeongmi nuna, went shopping with me and helped me pick out some new clothes.  I managed to get 2 long-sleeved shirts and a t-shirt for only 19,000원 ($19), which is a bargain considering some places sold T-shirts for almost $30 and discounted blue jeans for $80 (!).  Later, I went with 경미 누나 Gyeongmi nuna and 정진 형 Jeongjin hyeong (hyeong is what you call close male friends or relatives who are older than you) out to a really fancy 샤브샤브  shabu shabu place.  Shabu shabu is my favorite food of all time.  I know it’s not really Korean food – it’s a variant of Chinese hot pot – but I just can’t get enough of it.  I only discovered it near the end of my stay in Korea last year, so I've decided that I'm going to try to eat as much of it as possible this fall.  The place we went to was special because it didn’t just serve shabu shabu – it had a buffet included which had at least 20 different offerings from sushi to 튀김 (twigim - fried stuff)' and salad.  It was without a doubt the best meal I’d had in months.  Seriously, someone needs to open a restaurant like this in New Haven. 

Today I met with one of my other cousins who I hadn’t seen in 3 years.  She’s a vocal music performance major at Ewha Women’s University.  It was nice to see her again because the last time we met, I couldn't speak Korean at all.  It was really cool actually being able to communicate with her.  We had (you guessed it) shabu shabu for lunch and looked around Ewha University for a bit.  It is THE prettiest campus I’ve ever seen.  There are trees and flowers everywhere, and there is a really interesting shaped building (see below) which houses a library, restaurants, bank, performance hall, and eyeglass store, among other things.  Something that fascinated me was that my cousin 경주 누나 Gyeongju nuna made a reservation for a table in the library so that she could study for the TOEIC (English) Exam later.  She just went to a kiosk outside of the library and reserved a chunk of time later in the day at a specific, numbered table in the library.  Amazing!  I really wish Bass Library had something like this.  There have been countless times where I have wandered through Sterling and Bass Libraries trying to find a place to study,  to no avail.  This would solve a lot of problems.

Interesting building at Ewha Univ. http://www.arcspace.com/architects/perrault/ewu/ewu.html

 

Tonight for dinner I had a special meal with my aunt/uncle/cousins in Goyang.  Today was the anniversary of my uncle's grandfather's passing, so we did a 제사 (jesa 祭祀) ceremony.  Jesa is a ceremony to the honor the dead, and typically a food offering is made with family members performing a 절, or bow.  We then enjoyed the meal afterwards.  It was delicious - my aunt is such an amazing cook.

제사 (Jesa 祭祀) offering  

I have about a week before classes start.  I've heard from other people that Level 5 is significantly harder than the other levels, so I decided to go to the Sogang Bookstore and purchase the textbooks ahead of time and go through as much of it as possible before classes start.  Although it seems daunting, Level 5 is supposedly the level where students undergo the greatest improvement, so hopefully it'll be a challenging yet fruitful experience.  I still have a long way to go...I think the biggest challenges for me now are to increase my vocabulary and improve my consistency.  I've found that how stressed/tired I am significantly affects my Korean speaking ability.  I've also noticed that my listening comprehension depends a lot on who I'm talking to.  When 경미 누나 Gyeongmi nuna speaks, I can usually understand about 85% of what she's saying, but when 정진 형 Jeongjin hyeong speaks, I can only understand about 50%.  For some reason, girls are much easier to understand than guys.  It seems like guys slur their speech more and talk faster - I'm not sure if this is the case in English as well.  It gets worse when I'm talking to older people - I can only understand about 30% of what my aunt is saying, and just 5% of what my uncle is saying, probably because they're using older or more formal words.  I've heard that the Level 5 class includes a lot of Korean drama and news program watching - I'm hoping that this will help improve my listening comprehension.

Sometimes I find it amazing that although I'm a foreigner, I'm related to these people.  The other day when I was at my aunt's place in Goyang, one of my aunt's friends stopped by her apartment.  When her friend saw me, she was completely shocked, and gave me a 'What the hell is this foreigner doing here?' look.  I tried to explain to her that I was related to my aunt, but she wouldn't believe me until my aunt explained it all.  

I move into my new place tomorrow, so wish me a good move-in J While I'm excited to move to Sinchon, I'm really going to miss staying with my aunt/uncle/cousins in Goyang.  They're some of the nicest people you could ever meet.  I'm going to miss my cousins' company and my aunt's amazing cooking.  Fortunately they said I could come over as often as I wanted.  I'll definitely take them up on that offer!

My uncle, aunt, and two cousins.  I'm all dressed up because we had just finished the 제사 ceremony.  

My cousins!  I'm going to miss living with them :(