#berridge

I am sitting in La Vita, a faux Italian diner on the top floor of Narita International Airport near Tokyo, Japan. I have three more hours to kill before my red eye flight to Doha, Qatar where I will cross my fingers and hope that two hours is enough time to navigate a foreign airport with questionable wifi and English signage to my next flight, a mere 8 hour flight after the 12 hours to the Middle East, and on to the more familiar airport in Joburg. I’ve just eaten my last “pretty sure that was seafood but not sure what exactly it was” meal unless they surprise me with something on the airplane. I’ve hopefully bought and sold yen for the last time. A quick log-in to the airport wifi tells me it’s 28 degrees in Durban and I caaan’t wait.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The first leg of my journey is complete and I am here to document its success. I have a few photos and videos that limitations of wifi and battery life prevent me from sharing right now that will corroborate this tale.

After an ousting from the apartment my school rents for their foreign teachers upon the arrival of my replacement on the 1st, I packed everything I owned into 3.5 bags and took a bus to Wonju where my gracious and beautiful friends Kim and Kari live. Kim has accepted my staying on his couch for four days before my flight to Japan and Kari has accepted half of my worldly possessions staying with her for five months while I am globetrotting. They have saved my hundreds if not thousands of dollars and are far and away the people I would choose to spend the final days of this Korea experiment with. We ate pizza and my final Korean food made in Korea, we played Magic, I bussed too and from Seoul to wrestle with the world of international banking alongside a kind teller or government official who speaks a tad more English than I do Korean, I lay on the couch for a day and only moved to change which device I was using to stream Netflix because they are at work and I AM ON VACATION. Besides an inability to find a bank that had the ability to sell me yen, pounds sterling, and rand everything got done in time for me to catch my plane *cough* except for returning my phone which Kim did for me after I left because, if I haven’t mentioned it before, he is both gracious AND beautiful.

Actually, my financial escapades deserve a little bit of the spotlight. Since I had to be in Seoul to do my final bit of souvenir shopping, I aimed to visit the international headquarters of my bank, Kookmin Bank, since it would give me the best chance of finding the foreign currencies and an English teller. But due to a variety of unfortunate events, i.e. spending Monday on the couch and having a leisurely start to Tuesday, I wound up outside the first KB branch I found at 1530 with their closing hours posted for 1600. So I walk in and stammer to the clerk at information that I need help in English and am trying to send my worldly wealth from your computer to a Canadian computer and it has to happen today. I sit down with the manager and tell them that I want to send almost exactly everything in here to Canada, I’ve never sent money before, and I also want some pounds sterling, yen, and rand. They have no rand, but after a check in the back of the money drawer they find a handful of bills that will do fine. So begins the form filling (always fun since the space for my name and signature takes up eight times as much as it would in Korean with their spiffy tamps) and proffering of swift codes, bank names, and bank addresses. This requires some use of the translation phone service where you can call someone who speaks both languages to help you out, but not as much as I had thought. There was a fair bit of waiting for a clear line, but not with the translator, with the international representative at another branch. By the time the front of the bank is closed and everyone is tallying up for the day, she passes the phone to me. This is what I gather the problem was - it could be totally different, but by this time completing the first part of my banking needs is all that matters. Apparently, due to the time left on my visa, sending funds to a foreign bank was fine, but it was illegal to do it in conjunction with withdrawing foreign funds. I ask if there is anything against me withdrawing the won at a later date and changing it at the airport. Nope, that is fine. Great. Papers are signed and filled out, money is sent, and my foreign currency finding mission is postponed. A solid victory in my books anyway, especially since getting my second hand Sony Vita fixed took 30 minutes instead of three days, only cost me 60,000 won for a completely refurbished unit, AND they let me charge my phone for an hour. First and only experience with those folks. I highly recommend buying broken second hand equipment and getting it replaced no questions asked.

The bus to Seoul was a great deal easier than my first one out. I got to leave one gigantic backpack in Wonju and cut down the one I was taking with me from 35 to 23 kilograms. Boy was that fun. A fair bit of what I’d made room for in my suitcase on the way to my new life in Korea I had barely used and needed to go home with me. Ended up cutting most of it. The joys of taking so many planes home is they all come with their own baggage limits. I could get from Seoul to Johannesburg with 30kg, but from their to Durban and onwards I could only take 23. Spent a good chunk of my new found freedom putting the gracious and beautiful Kim’s luggage scale through its paces. At any rate, made the bus from Wonju to Seoul, took the train to the airport, checked my bag, made it to Haneda in Tokyo on a flight with the best individual viewing screens I’ve seen and the worst selection of movies, got my Magic cards inspected at security, got my baggage looked through upon arrival, checked my bag through to Kobe, found a place I could peacefully remove my shoes without offending anyone, and settled down to kill a few hours before the final jaunt to Kobe and Mr. Sean. Oh, and since I had only managed to secure some yen before leaving Korea, I set about turning the won I had brought with me into pounds. This was more difficult than I thought, since I had to first buy yen (partly forgetting I had an envelope full of yen and partly unwilling to spend it since it had to get me from Kobe to Tokyo still) and THEN buy pounds, which took a bit of confused pointing and calculations on both mine and the tellers part. But I got my bills so all that was left was the rand, which I procured a few hours ago by converting the last of my yen.

But, YET AGAIN, I am getting ahead of myself. I am, after all, supposed to be recounting my excellent time in Kobe. And I shall. But I’ve been nursing my cup of coffee for long enough, the restaurant is filling up around me, I’ve typed far more than I expected to, and I really have move on. Sorry Sean, your time is coming, I promise.

So, next time, my long weekend in Kobe with Mr. Sean, in which I do everything in my wildest dreams and say goodbye to Asia properly.

~Dave