one does not simply walk into south korea. annnd i'm done. lord of the rings reference tossed about like a plastic bag in the wind. where is my shame? but then, the past six months have been nothing short of hollywood magic. the espionage, the mystery, the fast cars and the faster women...but where to start? where does it always start? with a girl...
i'll call this girl jen, because that's what she said her name was. jen's a recruiter for an agency based out of canada called footprints. they connect silly americans like myself with earnest asian peoples looking to push their children so that they might one day take over the world. after an initial phone interview, where i gracefully played up my minimal interaction with the rest of the world and my equally non-existent teaching experience, i was added into their roster of hopeful english-speaking emigrants. from there it was a mad dash of paperwork.
had i been unemployed, or even a part-time employee, this would have been easy enough - collect transcripts, write essays, acquire signatures, seals and stamps. but as a full-time employee, an employee who valued their job and didn't want their employers finding out one of their own was potentially flying the coop, i had to do all the paper chasing after hours and on the hush-hush. i felt like i was living two lives: one, the diligent and faithful 9 to 5er, and two, the man with something to hide. it's no way for a man to live! how does don drapper do it...WWDDD? unfortunately, this caused a bit of rushing and sloppy work on my part, which in turn caused some of the papers to be returned to me due to not following the guidelines (missing signatures, papers, dots on i's, crosses on t's, etc), which in turn made everything take longer...
then i had an interview with someone from the korean office at EPIK (the english program in korea - try to guess what they are). it can be difficult understanding non-native speakers of english as is, but i'm fairly certain my interviewer had a nasty cold, so most of her sentences sounded as if mashed together into unintelligible blobs of letters. like she just drank a glass of milk and ate some peanut butter crackers and decided to have a phone conversation. i guess my point is that a good amount of the interview was her repeating herself and me answering questions that were not being asked. still, somehow i passed the review and was even complemented on my application essay. how this happens, i don't know, but it was yet another person made to believe my farts smell like roses.
then, just as one pile of paperwork was wrapping up, a new one began. i had to file for a visa. which meant background checks and notaries and something called an apostille. even more sneaking around. even more deceit. even more lies! meanwhile positions were filling up. there went busan and ulsan and jeju. there went dreams of the coast. and just when i thought a new york background check was going to ruin it all, everything fell into place. i sent my papers in and i secured my position. after a month or two of waiting around to hear where i would be placed i finally found out i would be heading to daegu, the fourth largest city in south korea.
that was about a month ago. since then i've been slowly making final preparations: informing work that i would be leaving them, sending more papers out to the korean consulate, completing my teaching certification, and so on. work was busy but the days still seemed to crawl along at a snail-like pace, as if time knew i was trying to cram in as much as possible in the remaining days. and then all of the sudden it was my last week at work. and then it was my last week, period. and now it's my last day. i'm flying out tomorrow. i've been to parties with family and friends and everyone asks the same question: are you nervous? well hell yeah i'm nervous. how can you not be? i've read books and watched videos but nothing will be like actually landing and walking out into a world where everything is foreign to me. i've never done anything like this, so there's plenty to be nervous about. but then they also ask me, "are you excited?" well hell yeah, i'm that too. like i just said, i've never done anything like this, so there's plenty to be exited about as well.
the next post you read (it might be awhile, since i might be busy, you know,
adjusting) will be from south korea. guh, how weird is that?
