Fukuoka Visa Run

Before the start of our 2nd semester at Sogang University, I had to get a student visa in order to legally stay in the country any longer. To do this I had to go to a Korean Consulate and the closest one to Seoul is located in Fukuoka, Japan. The trip was fairly uneventful so I did not take many pictures but Kim thought that I should still post the ones that I did take.

I arrived in Fukuoka on a Wednesday morning and went straight to the consulate to submit my application. After that I spent the rest of the day watching TV in my hotel room since it was boiling hot out that day but I did explore the neighborhood later on that night. Unfortunately, I did not take my camera so I did not take any pictures.

Since I cannot speak Japanese and there was not much english on the restaurant menus, I had to rely on displays like the one below in order to decide what I wanted to eat. I did not choose to eat at the place pictured below but this was the only photo that I took of the restaurants. I did find a delicious sushi restaurant but I was unable to eat some of the famous Japanese Rameon that I had been hearing so much about from the Japanese students in my class. Maybe next time.

The next day after I picked up my visa, I decided to kill the time before my flight walking around one of the biggest malls I have ever been in. It even had a canal going through the center of it.

I had a 4pm flight back to Seoul so I did not have time to do anything else. I do hope to make it back to Japan sometime in the future. I am sure I will enjoy much more with Kim there to share in the adventure.

Shady recruiters, teacher workshops, and sunny beaches

Overall, our time working has been good. The director of Poly and her staff seem to be pretty fair and honest. Despite the long work days, we haven't really experienced any of the hagwon nightmare stories that seem so prevalent on the ESL teacher message boards. 

So, basically our experience thus far has been very good EXCEPT...

Our experience with our recruiter, Appletree Recruiting. Mark and I would not recommend them to anyone for any reason whatsoever. First of all, the staff we interacted with could barely speak English. Not a good thing for a company whose sole source of income is placing English speaking teachers in Korean schools. Also, once they placed us at Poly School they just sort of faded out of the picture. They are responsible for helping us secure our visa's so we can work, but they provided no assistance or advice to me in securing my F4 visa. And as for Mark's E2 visa..................

When we first applied at Poly through Appletree, we made it very clear to both institutions that we intended to arrive in Korea about a month or two before we started working. So in order to get the visa cheaply through the Chicago office, Appletree would need to start working on the E2 visa application ASAP. Mark sent all his paperwork to Appletree's Colorado office via priority mail and we waited.... and waited.... and heard nothing. Finally, about a week before we were supposed to leave for Korea, Mark contacted Appletree to check on the status of the visa. Many excuses were given, but bottom line was they forgot about it. They told us not to worry and that we could just take care of this in Korea. Not ideal since it would require a visa run to China or Japan, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Once we got in Korea, we had a little correspondence with Appletree, asking Mark to send and resend copies of various visa paperwork - yeah, they needed copies of the stuff that he already sent a month prior via priority mail, we figured they were pretty disorganized at this point. 

Mark is now approaching the 90 day limit on his tourist pass to Korea and needs to secure his E2 by April to stay here. So last week we received word that there was a mistake on his visa issuance number. It's an American number, so a simple trip to Japan or China won't work. And there's not enough time to get another number. So Mark is heading off to the nearest American territory, which would be Guam. Of course, this is a more expensive trip. He was able to convince the school to foot half of the bill since this mistake is on their recruiter's side. (Though Appletree called Mark the other day to berate him and basically place the blame on everyone else under the sun besides themselves: Mark, Poly, their grandmother's dog... talk about a professional organization.)

Anywho, there's a bright side to this. Mark is leaving tonight (Thursday) at 9:30 for this paradise. I think it's 80 degrees right now. I'm insanely jealous. His flight back to Korea is Sunday morning at 4am. I'm not jealous of that. :)

And the best part (for him) is that we have a mandatory all day teacher's workshop on Saturday for Poly. So while I'll be sitting in boring day-long presentations, Mark will be relaxing on the sunny beaches of Guam...

I've tasked him with taking a lot of pictures so we can all live vicariously through him. So hopefully there'll be a gorgeous blog post to come in the near future! Stay tuned!