Ok! So, several people have been asking me about what is going on in my life now that I live halfway around the world. I have decided to solve this bombardment of questions with a blog. I will write about my life and you can come and read about it if you choose. Also, if you have questions, feel free to ask and I will try to answer them as best as possible. The funny thing about all of this is that I have actually been kind of keeping a journal of sorts since I got here because I wanted to try to remember things they way they were and how I felt at exactly the time when they occurred.
Enough rambling and on with my story...
Monday May 10th, 2010, 3:00AM, Anyang, South Korea:
(At this time I was very much jet-lagged and wasn't able to sleep through the whole night, which is why I wrote this at 3AM!)
I received an email from my sponsoring company, for teaching English abroad, on April 29th saying that I needed to be in Korea on May 5th. Now for those of you who are not good at math (Kasey!) that is only 6 days; less than a week. At this point, I had been expecting to be there in the middle of May but wasn't sure about the actual date. When I received this email, I began to immediately freak out. I had been planning a short trip that weekend to see my family. Hector was taking a trip there to see a friend and graciously offered for me to ride along to visit with my family. I had wanted to spend about a week with the family before I left, but I had figured that I had time and that it didn't have to be right away.
I got the email at 5:30PM on Thursday evening. I immediately made a phone call and found a storage facility where I could keep all of my stuff that was only about 5 blocks away, but the man told me I had to hurry because they closed in 30 minutes. I had begun to pack up the house that I was currently living in but not nearly enough and my stuff was still everywhere. I went to the facility and got a unit in time. I took 2 loads that evening and 3 or 4 the next day. Luckily, they had massive carts and an elevator otherwise it would have made for some heavy lifting! It was kind of hectic because I not only had to pack all my stuff for storage, but I had to sort through and determine what I would need to take to Korea and pack that separately, plus there was the issue of my cat. She likes to hide when I leave the house because she thinks that I am going to take her to the vet. She hates the vet! You have to be tricky in order to get her to come out. Treats don't even usually work! HAHA!
Everything was packed and we left Kansas City at about 5PM on Friday evening. I also still had to take a trip to Chicago at some point because I hadn't done my Visa interview with the Korean Consulate. When I called to make an appointment with them to do the interview, the only time that they had available was 10AM on Wednesday, May 5th. My passport with the Visa in it would be completed and ready to pick up on Friday at 3PM. I relayed this information to my company and they booked me a flight on Friday evening out of O'hare, in Chicago, at 6:20PM. That gave me about an hour to make it through Chicago's awful traffic, right about rush hour time, to the airport in order to check in a couple of hours in advance for an international flight.
I stayed in Bonne Terre until Tuesday evening. I said goodbye to the family and told them all to download Skype so that we could talk for free. Then I began the long drive to Chicago. On Wednesday morning I prepared for my interview with some of the questions from the Consulate website that were to be asked of me. I had my answers pretty well memorized only to be completely and totally shocked. First, when I got to the Consulate, the woman at the front desk was very rude and asked me if I had paid attention to her when we talked on the phone because obviously I hadn't; I was missing a page that was required for the interview. Eventually, after the lecture from her, she handed the form to me and it took less than a minute to fill out. She was hyped up for no reason at all. I went in to my interview which lasted 45 minutes and the man didn't ask me a single question that I had prepared for. Later, I found out that these interviews only last about 5-8 minutes at the most, so my sponsor concluded that he must have really liked me! Afterward, I went to a Mexican restaurant with Natalie to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, and ended up awake all night, being sick out of my mind, throwing up that nasty Mexican food (I seriously did not drink one drop of alcohol!).
On Friday after I picked up my passport with my worker's Visa in it, I headed straight for the airport through massive amounts of traffic. I made it with only 1 1/2 hours until my flight. When I was checking in at the ticket counter, there were problems with my ticket (OF COURSE!). Apparently, when flying in and out of some countries, you have to have both tickets already purchased, basically ensuring that you are not going to stay in that country permanently unauthorized! I had a one-way ticket into the country but not out! The attendant did some maneuvering after I told her that I had a worker's Visa and got my boarding pass ready. When she asked how many bags I had, and found out that I had 4, she told me that I would have to go stand in another line because I had too many suitcases for her line apparently. I think that she took pity on me and finally agreed to help me. She checked all 4 bags, one of which was overweight, without saying anything and without charging me extra.
On the flight, I got a window seat and sat next to a Korean man who said absolutely nothing to me the whole 13 hour flight! When I got to Korea, it was 6AM Korean time, and I had my very own driver with my name on a sign waiting at the airport, just like you see in the movies! The only difference was that his sign said, "Keagon Turner." LOL. I assumed that was me, gathered my things, (in Korea, those airport carts are free to use, just something I thought was really cool) and hopped in the car. The driver didn't speak a word of English, but that didn't deter him from trying to be a sightseeing tour guide as we drove for 45 minutes.
I got to my apartment at 7AM Sunday morning and met the director of my school. She showed me in, told me to rest, told me that she got enough food for me for a day or so, and that she would be back at 9:30AM the next morning to take me to school. All of this lasted less than 5 minutes and then she was gone. I looked around for a while and thought that I was in Hell! There was a bed, a couch, a small ground table, and a mini fridge. There was no oven, no microwave, no TV, a very small closet with only shelf space, very few cooking supplies and no utensils.
I decided that I was tired so I laid down to sleep. When I woke up later I decided to check Internet reception. I realized that none of my electronics had been charged in over 24 hours and that they were all dead! How was I supposed to know what time it was? Luckily, I remember that I brought with me my volleyball officiating bag that I had mostly cleaned out minus a few of the smaller compartments. In one of those small compartments was the wrist stopwatch that I had purchased for last season. Thank you volleyball!! The only problem now was remembering whether I had set it forward for daylight savings time. Korean time is 14 hours ahead of central time, but only in the spring. It is 15 hours ahead in the fall and winter. Needless to say, I was ready over an hour ahead of time for my ride the next morning.
That is enough for today! To be continued...
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