Chrissy Renae

The bad news is that I’ve been really busy so haven’t updated in 6 days (how are you surviving??) but the good news is that I have internet in my house now!!! So it’s Sunday afternoon, and here I am sitting on my bedroom floor updating my blog. Dream come true.

From the beginning of this Korea decision, it seems like I’ve done evvverything the hard way. Most people got their placements within a matter of about two months and had relatively no hangups in getting here. My process took well over 6 months. It was all definitely a test of my patience, but I’m really glad it all worked out like it did, and I just kind of assumed it would all run smoothly once I got here. Except hellooooo it is ME and I can’t just do anything the easy way.

Last Saturday my cell phone (my beautiful, high tech, full of awesome gadgets cell phone) was stolen from a club in Hongdae. It was my fault for being so careless with it, but I was still frustrated that it just disappeared so quickly. On Tuesday Sophia took me back to the phone place to get a new one, and the whole experience was beyond frustrating. Clearly I can’t speak any Korean, so the guy was explaining everything to Sophia and gave me all these different options and different cost scenarios and then she would try to translate it to me and it was all just making NO sense and I was tired and I felt like my head was going to explode. It was by far the worst experience I’ve had since I got here. I was mad at myself for losing the phone, mad at the cell company for making it sooo complicated to replace a phone (do people just never lose their phones here? i don’t get it), and mad at the weather for being so freaking cold.

Luckily we got it all worked out and by the time I got home I was feeling much better… but of course the complications couldn’t stop there. Once we left they called and said there was a problem with my bank account so my phone couldn’t be activated yet. Soooo Wednesday I went to the bank to fix my account (they needed to add my alien registration card id number to the account so it would match the cell phone… or something. who knows. being a foreigner sucks.) and I did it all by myself! Sophia didn’t even come, yet I was able to find a clerk who spoke English and got me all set.

Friday the internet guy was scheduled to come in the afternoon, so I left school early and stopped by the atm on the way home to pull out the cash deposit I had to pay (another reason being a foreigner sucks). Buttttt of course– my atm card wouldn’t work. So I jumped into a taxi and raced across town backkk to the bank, and they had to reissue me a whole new atm card. AWESOME.

So the point of all of this whining and blabbing is to demonstrate that my tally now looks like this:

• 2nd month
• 3rd cell phone
• 2nd bank account
• 2nd atm card
• almost 2nd camera cuz i lost it for a day, but then found it in my friend’s fridge. weird…

Nope, can’t do ANYTHING the easy way. I’m hoping that this concludes the annoying “getting settled” part of moving to a foreign country, and that now I can just proceed as a normal person.

Honestly everything else about living here has been amazing and flawless and I love lovvvve it, but maybe I just needed this week to shake things up a little and remind me not to take the good days for granted. Because this could be an awful experience, I could be homesick, I could have no friends, I could have a bad school and bad students, I could question my decision to come here. All of those things would be muchhh worse than having to get a 2nd phone and 2nd bank account, but none of them are problems at all! So despite the fact that this week has been super frustrating and stressful, I’ve never once questioned my decision to be here, and to me- that feeling of content is priceless!