KGSP Adventures

Another thing I would like to mention is that it’s been almost 2 months and I do not have my Alien Registeration Card yet... The process is incredibly slow.... In Seoul getting an ARC usually takes 2 weeks maximum. I am waiting for it quite impatiently especially because I am having problems with my phone and would like to take this occasion to buy a new phone and get an actual phone contract registered with my ARC! Having a phone registered with your ARC can be quite beneficial especially if you plan on buying online as a lot of website use the identity check through phone registeration!

So... one thing they did not tell us until last minute before we arrived in Korea was that since the moving in day for dorms was a week after we were going to arrive, we would not have our rooms until then. The moving day for Chonnam also happened to be the day NIIED decided we would have our orientation on...

Which means the moving day was absolute hell. First of all, no one had told  us we were expected to clean the rooms we were in or that when arriving we should have repported if the rooms were dirty.... The staff that were inspecting the rooms had also not been informed that we had been there only for a week nor that a lot of us did not speak Korean.... it was incredibly stressful. We only had 2h to move our stuff and come back to take the bus to go to the NIIED orientation. I personally was moving to a building which is 15 min walk away from the one I was originally in and had to move 2 huge suitcases... When I got to the building the staff had also not been informed that KGSP students were on a tight schedule and had to wait to get my key because they had to “check things”. The passcode they gave me for the door also turned out to be wrong..... which I found out only when I came back from the orientation the following day. 

We arrived at the orientation late and therefore were not provided dinner as we were supposed to.... We had also been told by the staff at our school that we would have free time when we arrived.... And well yeah.... we had free time.... for like 2h because they had a curfew at NINE PM.................. Quite a few of us had made plans with seoul friends etc. and were in total panic when we arrived and were told we had to be back in by 9pm. As I was running to meet a friend i managed to loose not only my id but the key-card to unlock my room.... which I had to pay 20 000won for. While the facilities at NIIED were really modern and nice, we did not have access to wifi which is a shame if you’re going to ask the students to be stuck in their rooms doing nothing from 9pm on...

Alright so a lot happened since the last time I posted here ahah. I’m probably gonna have to split it up in different posts. First of all, I arrived safely in Korea and I’m writing this from my dorm room in Chonnam National University! Now let me tell you how I finally got here ahah.

I left Quebec city on the 22nd of August. I didn’t really sleep but anyway I had to leave for the airport around 3:30AM so... My plane left at 6AM as scheduled and I had to wait for about 4h in Toronto to take my 14h long Korean Air flight. I landed in Incheon on the 23rd at 3pm but then had to find the people from Chonnam and wait another 4h until everyone was there.

 They had rented a bus for us that took us directly to the dorm in Gwangju. And it had some funky lights in it ahah.

 It took almost 4 more hours to get there... needless to say I was dead tired. When we got there around midnight they just told us they would explain more tomorrow and to just try to get some sleep. Luckily my roommate was not already asleep so we got to talk a bit and I got to set up my wifi router (there is only cable wifi in the dorms...)

The day after they took us to the building where our classes are going to be held and a KGSP 2015 student answered a few of our questions while a Korean student was doing the paperwork for our bank accounts. On the 25th there was nothing planned so I rested a bit and explored the campus. On the 26th was the orientation from the language education center and the placement test which turned out to be an interview only without any written section.... and made me freak out because my spoken Korean is terrible compared to my written Korean! In the end I explained I had already completed 3 levels at Yonsei university and they simply asked me if I wanted to be placed in level 4 so I said yes ahah. 

Since the following 3 days had no schedules I decided to go visit friends in Seoul. We found a small tea house in Hongdae I had never been to before. It was really nice and calm and the tea was actually prepared properly aka not bitter at all and super tasty!

Being in Seoul also means I got to visit the new Hongdae branch of my favourite cafe... Bonita Di Cafe! Which is a... raccoon cafe :) They had new babiesand they were so so so cuuuute. Next post will be about moving dorms, NIIED orientation and the medical check up.... (as well as the worst day of my life ahah). But till then have some raccoon love:

So I received 2 e-mails in a row today. The first e-mail, from NIIED, announced that they were only starting to send out flight tickets... Chances are I will have to wait another week -or even two- before I receive mine. :(

The 2nd e-mail was from CNU’s language school coordinator. He said I had not sent my application files for the dorm yet... Which made me freak out real bad, not only because I had already sent the documents TWICE but especially because I made a special request for my room... and I know the announcement regarding who was able to get a room in the dorm (for general students... not kgsp scholars) was uploaded yesterday... which means if they did not receive it.... they might have assigned the room I wanted to another student. 

Sooo... I re-sent an e-mail along with the requested documents for the THIRD time... and also sent a facebook message to our coordinator since he added us all on FB (he also made a group for KGSP scholars taking Korean classes at Chonnam for 2016-2017)! He replied quickl and -luckily for me- he said he sent that mail to my address by accident and told me not to worry about it. He did receive my application and required documents last time I sent them AND he already fowarded my request to the administrators of the residence halls, he will update me when they reply.

Since he seemed to be online, I asked a couple more questions about our class schedule as well as the included health insurance... It seems we will not be only kgsp students in our classes! Classes will be devided according to the level we test in. Therefore, depending on my level, my class might be mostly kgsp students or mostly non-kgsp students. Depending on how many classes of each level there are, our classes might be in the morning (9 to 1) or afternoon (1 to 5) for a total of 4hours per day, 5 days a week.

The coordinator sent me the above graph to give me an idea of what the insurance paid by CNU covers. As you can see, however, it is all written in Korean... I made a rough translation so it would be easier to refer to in the future, and decided to share it on our FB group so other people could use it too! In the end, after taking a look at the graph, I think I won’t need to buy extra insurance... Quebec national health insurance - RAMQ - usually doesn’t cover overseas healthcare expenses if you stay abroad for more than 180 days per year BUT they make an exception if you’re going there to study. I just need to send a proof that I’m studying full time, along with the receipt stating how much I had to pay (aka whatever is left that was not paid by the school’s insurance) for them to pay back. The reimbursed amount depends on how much money a similar service/treatment costs in Quebec... If what I end up paying is lower than the fixed price in Quebec... 100% of the amount will be given back to me! If it is more expensive, then they will still give me back the amount coresponding to Quebec’s local price... The only reason why they would not pay back is if the treatment is one that is usually not offered back home or not covered by healthcare even locally. (By example, dental care or optometrist appointments are not covered...)

Visa application process is made easier for KGSP scholars... It seems some people had trouble because their Embassy did not follow the instructions sent by NIIED or because they had to re-take medical tests to apply for the visa (requested for some countries...) However I was lucky and everything went just fine!

The only things I needed were the invitation letter sent by NIIED, my passport, a passport-sized picture and the visa application form. The only thing that was a bit confusing was the form because I wasnt sure what to write as my occupation or as my sponsor but the lady at the consulate helped me out.

Chonnam National University finally sent us information about the dorms and even though they posted about having single rooms available for students for the fall semester, it seems they are not offered to KGSP students...