Two Years

(by Brian)

[Note: I wrote this about 4 or 5 hours ago, before we got Internet. Also, this post mostly deals with everything that led up to being in Korea.]

I’m listening to cars driving on the highway. If I had grown up in a city, I would say that I feel like I’m home. From where I sit, on a dormitory bed, I can see apartment buildings, trees, and cars driving on the right side of the highway. There’s a bridge near the sea that fades into the morning fog.

But I’m not at home. I’m in the dormitory of the Daeyeon Campus of Pukyong National University in Busan, South Korea, and a dorm room is hardly home to a full-time student, much less to someone who will only stay there for a week. But in eight or nine days, Ashley and I will move into an apartment, and I will call it home.

We got to the university around eleven last night. For those of you in America, that’s somewhere between six and nine in the morning, depending on your time zone. The journey was long. We started traveling before five in the morning and arrived at the dorm 28 hours and 14 time zones later. But the journey started two years ago. Ashley and I found out about EPIK (the English Program in Korea) when Isaac Lee handed us a flyer advertising the program at the Andrews University International Food Fair. We had been engaged for a month or two. We didn’t have any plans. And we both liked the idea.

We didn’t decide on Korea right away. We thought about jobs we could get in the States and places to live. Ashley briefly considered becoming a registered dietician, and I thought about getting a PhD or getting a job in some company’s shipping and receiving department to make ends meet for a few years before resigning myself to the glamorous life of an adjunct composition instructor. Ashley could never stay away from her true calling in English, though, and she has enjoyed tutoring Korean students via webcam over the last few years. Me, I just really want to eat Korean food.

I have some right now. Well, it’s a beverage, but it’s Korean. It’s the first thing other than water that I’ve consumed since my arrival in Korea, and I think it’s called 잔치집 식혜 (janchijip sikhye). It’s a rice beverage I got from a vending machine for 600 won (54 cents), and it tastes pretty good. I even get a grain of rice to chew on sometimes, which is good, because it’s serving as my breakfast. Ashley and I were too tired and lazy to make it to the cafeteria on time.

So what kind of journey has it been? For the sake of brevity (if that’s possible) and because of my body’s demand for rest, I’ll give you a list of what we have had to do to make it here. (It’s very long and tedious and I will understand if you want to skip it.)

• Research EPIK and other overseas teaching opportunities.
• Decide EPIK seems like a good decision.
• Apply in early summer for August intake. Includes an 11-page application and two scanned letters of recommendation.
• Get fingerprinted ($15 each) for state criminal record checks ($30 each)
• Get rejected for August because positions were already filled.
• Apply as soon as applications are accepted in early autumn for February intake.
• Pass webcam interview and receive instructions for submitting official documents.
• Get fingerprinted ($15 each) for national (FBI) criminal record checks ($18 each) because of a new Korean immigration law requiring national-level record checks.
• Mail FBI CRC requests and return envelopes Priority Mail ($20 total).
• Have Ashley’s MA and BA, my BA, and our state criminal record checks apostilled ($1 each document) for international recognition. Involved a trip to Grand Rapids, MI.
• Mail documents to Korea ($80 for FedEx shipping because positions are first-come-first-served based on receipt of official documents and EPIK wanted tracking numbers; joint application means we used one envelope for the both of us thank goodness!):

1. Two copies of signed applications
2. Apostilled copies of diplomas (and copies of the apostille)
3. Original hard copies of letters of recommendation (and copies)
4. Apostilled state criminal record check (EPIK allowed American applicants to submit these while waiting potentially 13 weeks for national record checks to arrive from the FBI, and we can submit the FBI record check when we arrive in Korea). Oh, and copies.
5. Passport-type photos (free because we made some on our own)
6. Copy of passport photo page (“free” because we already had passports)

• Wait.
• Wait some more.
• Join a Facebook group of people who are applying and have other people to wait and be anxious with.
• Receive FBI CRCs in the mail. Turns out we’re not criminals.
• Mail FBI CRCs ($20 total for Priority Mail and return envelopes) to the US Department of State to be apostilled ($8 each).
• Receive apostilled FBI CRCs in the mail.
• Receive Notice of Appointment (NOA) and a copy of the contract in the mail!
• Apply for E-2 (teaching) visa ($45 each, plus $20 Priority Mail shipping with return envelopes):

1. Visa application page
2. NOA plus copy
3. Signed contract
4. Passport
5. Photocopy of passport page

• Receive phone call. Contract not valid because of a stamp that says “This contract will only be valid upon submission of the following document(s): FBI CRC.”
• Try to explain to the Korean Consulate in Chicago that EPIK doesn’t need the FBI CRC until we get to orientation.
• Contact our EPIK coordinator, who tells us (thank the LORD) that so many people had problems with the Chicago Consulate that he’s sending new contracts (sans invalid stamp). Saves us the $80 to ship FBI CRCs pronto and wait for new contracts.
• Receive new contracts and ship them Express to the consulate ($14 – I put both contracts in one envelope but with cover pages for each so they would find their appropriate application).
• Buy plane tickets despite not having visas yet, because prices are going up ($1425 total).
• Receive visas.
• Go to Grand Rapids again to have my fresh-off-the-press MA apostilled ($1).
• Panic. Freak out. Come to terms.
• Pack. A lot. Including the original and a copy of pretty much every document we have.
• Go to Chicago Midway Airport (thanks, Dad and Grandpa, for driving us there).
• Get on a plane to Detroit.
• Get on another plane to Tokyo.
• Hear my name called IN JAPAN by someone I’ve NEVER MET BEFORE. It’s Kyle, a guy on our Facebook group who recognized me and who knew we shared his final flight to Korea.
• Meet a few more people from the EPIK program.
• Get on yet one more plane to Busan.
• Clear customs.
• Exchange US dollars for won. Feel like a MILLIONAIRE.
• Take a taxi (my first taxi ride ever and it’s in another country).
• Almost get lost because our driver understands “Pukyong University, Daeyeon Campus” but not “dormitory.”
• Finally find the dormitory (after a student pedestrian looked at a printout we had of the campus with the dormitory circled that EPIK had on their website). Taxi cost: 30,000 won ($27.19).
• Check in. Cost for an extra night for early arrival: 36,000 won ($32.63).
• Total cost: -$350. EPIK will give us 1.245 million won each as flight reimbursement. That comes out to $1,128 for each of us. The total is $2,256. The cost of application and postal expenses is $481. That cost plus the $1425 for our flights is $1906. So we will actually make $350 just for applying to EPIK and showing up.

It’s been rather fun. As long as our flight was (the longest was 13 hours), it wasn’t that bad. We had two meals, a mid-flight snack, and there were four movies on. I also had my iPod and some books to read. And I slept some.

Meeting people in Tokyo was strange. Ashley and I were headed toward our gate and passed a coffee shop when I heard someone say, “Brian?” I knew that not many of the Japanese people walking in our same general direction would be named Brian, and I also knew that Kyle was going to be looking for us.

So I turned. Kyle wears a hoodie on Facebook, but I could still tell it was him. “Kyle?” Yep. A fellow EPIKer, Zach, was getting coffee and we all decided to stick together. After we moved to our gate, a couple more people showed up. Jason and Zach went for a smoke and a girl named Rachel came up to Kyle and asked if we were all teaching for EPIK, prefacing her question by saying that she wouldn’t normally walk up to a stranger and ask them why they’re on a certain flight. A later revelation told us why she had seemed a bit apologetic in approaching us: she didn’t know about the Facebook group. She just saw a few non-Japanese people sitting at her gate and wondered if we were like her, if we were EPIK teachers.

And we were. We are.

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