영국사람

Fun times!

It’s been an interesting few weeks. I attended an SBS recording some time ago, as my Father-in-law was invited on to compete in a sushi competition. I’ve decided to use my better judgement here and simply say that the Father-in-law lost to a chef from an expensive Gangnam restaurant who arrived with a huge entourage. Despite “losing”, they still went with my Father-in-law’s sushi for the publicity shots, commercials, and to lead the show. Yeah…

도전자! 초밥계의 살아있는 전설! 故박정희, 전두환 전 대통령이 반한 그 맛! 경력 46년의 김성태(64) 도전자!

Whilst I was pissed at the editing, I did like that they called the old man a “Living legend”. Yeah… that pretty much sums him up. Perhaps one day, my wife would let me tell his story here.

Although we spent a few hours recording, and the cameras were in my face every time I bothered to say or do anything, they limited me to a 2-second cut where I mangled some Korean. I didn’t really want to say anything in Korean for the cameras as I know the Korean TV shows love to make us foreigners look like arses, but hey… it made the family happy!

I also did an interview for the Midnight Runner Podcast a few weeks ago, where I spent a little time talking about AFEK. Despite a few Ringo gags, people seem to have responded well to it. The Midnight Runner invested in a few facebook ads, and there has been a huge influx of new members since. That podcast was largely responsible for adding 20% to our numbers, so a BIG thank you to Mr. Midnight Runner for that!

I am so happy right now!

A few months ago, I posted about the issue of my daughter’s family documents missing something that I considered very important… my name! The issue was something I was committed to following up, but a few other things got in the way… most notably a libel case that I wanted to be able to give my full attention when it was required. I expected that to go away within a few weeks, but the damn thing took a few months before I was even called in to be questioned!

Anyway… Professor Benjamin Wagner weighed in on the post recently with an awesome suggestion. Rather than fight the issue myself, fusion-baby should bring the case to court in her own name, possibly as part of a class action. It was an amazing idea! I threw the idea around friends in similar situations, and there was some interest in bringing it to court.

Now, that is not necessary. Roboseyo sent me an email today. It was unexpected because, as much as I like Roboseyo, we are not in any kind of regular contact. The first email I ever received from him concerned the ATEK series on Hub of Sparkle earlier this year, and so did the last one I received from him. Anyway… the title asked me if this was the news I had been waiting for, and it contained a link to a JoongAng Daily article that made my year!

Court eases foreigner registry rules

The Supreme Court said yesterday it will revise regulations to allow foreigners married to Koreans here to have their nationality and foreigner registration number recorded on the family relation registry starting this month.

To date, the registry has only carried records of genders and dates of birth of spouses and children of Koreans who have yet to acquire Korean nationalities. For this reason, those Korean families have had difficulty dealing with various situations here.

“The rule change will resolve inconveniences that foreigners who have families with Koreans face. For instance, when the spouse of a Korean wants to open a bank account on behalf of his or her child, he or she must be tested by a notary public to prove his or her relationship with the kid or bring along his or her wife or husband,” said the Supreme Court in a statement.

The family relation registry has five different types of certificates, depending on their usage: default certificates, family relation certificates, marriage relation certificates and adoption certificates.

The certificates are issued either over the Internet or by local district offices. The family registry system replaced the hojuje, or a patriarchal family registry system in Korean, on the first day of 2008 following persistent claims that the long-standing system was based on a patrilineal lineage system.

According to the revised rules, those who want to have their nationalities and foreigner registration numbers recorded in the family registry can file an application with local district offices.

By Seo Ji-eun [spring@joongang.co.kr]

So: Thank you Professor Wagner for giving me some awesome advice. Thank you to guys and gals at AFEK for giving me your support, and thank you Roboseyo for sending me the link which caused a wave of instant relief. I feel even better today than I did yesterday after the wife booked me some Guns N’ Roses tickets!

A Korean Holiday…

With the daughter being so young, we have decided to skip having a real vacation this year. A few weeks ago, the Sister-in-Law called and suggested that we go visit a pension (a home in the country that you can rent much like a hotel room) with her boyfriend, and Sister-in-Law 2. It seemed a good idea, and SIL’s BF is a great bloke who I get along with (he is a Korean English teacher), and I love the Korean countryside, so we agreed to go with them.

Now… What I didn’t realise is that SIL’s BF had the weekend off because just about everybody in Korea has the same weekend off. And he wanted to go visit a pension because just about everybody in Korea goes to visit a pension. The traffic was nasty!

We left Seoul just after 7am, and hit the expressway. 5 hours later I looked at the map and said out loud “Please don’t tell me we are still in Gyeonggi-do”. We were. In fact, we were Expressway 50, heading towards Wonju services. SIL and I got out and walked.

We stopped for lunch at the services, and as soon as they were finished (and I mean AS SOON as they were finished – I was still eating) some old women told my SIL’s to move. They did. They then told my wife to move. She did. They then told me to move. “Fuck off!”

I let the wife go do wife things with her sisters and I entertained baby. I’m surprised she left me alone with her in such a playground, as my wife likes to protect our daughter from any potential danger, no matter how slight the risk may be. Having left my wallet in the car, I cadged ₩1000 from the wife and set about having fun with my daughter. First I took her to the water fountain. It was a hot day, and she enjoyed watching the kids running around in the jets of water (she was yelling a constant stream of “Hiya” to anybody under 3 foot tall), and so I took her in for a splash. She had a great time, and I was sure I could get her dried out before the wife had kittens. But still… there was work to be done.

I made my way to the baby rides, dropped her in place and made sure she had at least one hand on the wheel, and dropped in the ₩500 coin. I expected the initial shock, and so when her froze I was prepared for that. Phase 2 was going to be screams and waterworks, or sheer pleasure. Thankfully it was pleasure. Her ride lasted a couple of minutes and at the end of it she had her arm in the air and was spinning the wheel like a nutter with the free arm. Success! When it stopped she started shouting at it, so I dropped another coin in and let her go.

Then I heard the wife: “Oh my god!!!!!”. Shit!

Once she saw that baby was having a blast she was ok, though she was a little pissed at me for plotting it.

We went about our uneventful journey and at 4pm I decided my suggestion of the last 4 hours should become a demand: “Get off the expressway here!”

I played navigator and directed SIL’s BF along the national roads to get us to our destination. Not only could we see the slow moving ‘express’way as we went along the roads alongside it, we also managed to enjoy some much nicer scenery.

We finally arrived just after 6pm. 11 hours to travel around 200km.

The Pension itself was nice. It was a 2 story wooden thing, with a nice veranda which housed a convenient barbeque.

My favourite feature was the abandoned beehive hanging from the roof.

Although we had experienced a beautiful day whilst cooped up inside the car, the weather gods obviously decided that we needed a further pissing on, and so the rain arrived shortly after we did. We never let it spoil the food or drink though, and we had a good time for the next 5 or 6 hours.

The next day we decided to make use of the stream, and so after we checked out at 12, we headed upstream for a swim. The wife had another litter of kittens when I took the baby for her first paddle, though after 90 minutes it was time to leave. As good a time as we were having, I didn’t want to arrive home after midnight.

SIL’s BF and I made a decision to drive to  Seoul using only national roads. We left at 2, and after stopping for an hour for lunch, and a few smoke breaks on the way, we managed to get back home just after 8 O’Clock.

Much better!

Moved!

We made it into the new place with ease, despite so much potential for last minute problems. The woman moving into our old place had hinted at there being problems with paying the 10 million deposit that was coming to us. Thankfully, that never turned out to be as bad as it could have been, as I was preparing to camp out at the old place until it was paid. She delivered our cash as we were leaving.

The removals people that the wife had booked were fantastic. They arrived at 8am and set about packing for us. We had not done a single thing. They brought a woman along who set to packing our frozen and chilled food into ice boxes, and she then cleaned the fridges and freezer, as well as the cooker and toaster oven. The men were busy putting all of our belongings into boxes, and to make their job easier, I took the baby out for a walk. I had a coffee at Dunkin Donuts and got back around 10:30.

Everything was packed, and was being lifted down the 12 stories to ground level on the outside of the building. When I saw my guitars being loaded onto the lift I had visions of one of them (my telecaster) being blown off. I gave out a sigh of relief when one of the guys jumped onto the lift and went down the 12 stories holding it steady. Nutter!

We were ready to leave just before 12. The removals people made sure the apartment was clean before we left, and wife and baby got into the removals car whilst I rode on my bike.

I arrived at the new place just after 1, looking quite pink. The sun had burned me nicely! The rest of them were still at least 30 minutes away, but the guy who was leaving was still loading up cars so we had to wait for him to go anyway.

When the removals team arrived,  the woman got straight to work scrubbing the kitchen area. The men gave the floor a once over and then started moving things in an unpacking them for us. My job was to entertain the baby whilst the wife told them where to put things. Once done, we were asked to wait outside for a few minutes whilst they made sure the floors were all mopped clean. By 3:30 they were done. They had unpacked everything and we were in our new home feeling far less stressed than I though possible.

We have somehow managed to find ourselves a very nice compromise. As much as I hate Seoul, I am happy with this place. It feels ‘country’ despite being less than 10 minutes from the subway station. The air is pretty clean, though you notice the difference when you get 5 minutes up the road.

The living room has a window that gives a view of the mountain, and behind us is a nice Buddhist temple. My only gripes are the nasty hill leading up the street, and the lack of elevator, and the huge increase in mosquito bites I get this close to the ground. Still… it’s a nice new place (less than 1 year old) and there is no traffic noise thanks to the trees that act as a nice noise filter. The wife is happy too, as she has just a 20 minute walk to visit her sisters.

There is a nice temple behind the apartment, which adds a some much-needed colour to the area, and there is a nice park opposite with water-jet displays and other assorted oddities. I plan to take the baby there this week as I am sure she will get a kick out of them.

My next task is to find a place to work… I have a few interesting interviews lined up that should allow me to maximise my earning potential thanks to the luxuries of my visa type. I am interviewing for a job tomorrow that I hope I am offered, as the salary is great and the hours are fantastic. If it works out, I will be earning around 40% more than I did in my last job. Good times… or it would be if I ever saw any of it!

A little something about AFEK…

As some readers may know, I maintain the website for AFEK, a site for F-visa holding expats. It seems that some people (The SeoulPodcast) consider AFEK an extension of this blog. That is not true. This blog is my blog. I started it long before AFEK was formed, and though I took a break after the birth of my daughter, I had always intended to return to it.

Zenkimchi thnks that AFEK should be pushing for social change. AFEK is a social networking site for F-Visa holders in Korea. It is not an advocacy group. There are no plans for AFEK to embark on political campaigns, publish press releases, or push for any kind of change in Korea. That is not the point of the site.

Here is what the AFEK forum is about:

• Networking and finding people in a similar situation in YOUR area.
• Living in Korea: Banking, Visa issues, buying cars, furthering your education, Family registration issues, getting passports for children.
• Working: Job opportunites and advice (teaching and non-teaching), setting up a business, publishing.
• Travelling.
• News.
• Socialising: Family days out (a kids picnic could be on the table soon).

The other areas of the site include:

• A Chatroom
• An F-Visa relevant wiki (which will be public at some point in the future)
• A library of guidebooks and legal documents (in multiple languages where possible)
• A gallery to share family photo’s

AFEK is not “old school”. We are family guys (and gals) who are trying to network in order to create a base of friends with similar circumstances in the country we have made our home. My wife is happy about AFEK, as she now has Korean women with whom she can bitch about me and they will understand her complaints. I now have foreign friends who can advise me on bringing up my daughter in Korea.

Some people (actually… that will be the SeoulPodcast group again) think that AFEK is an anti-ATEK group. Again, this is not true. I have been anti-ATEK, but the number of vocally anti-ATEK people who are also AFEK members can be counted on one hand. Most people are fence-sitters, though some are pro-ATEK. Whilst I still fit on the ‘one hand’, I have kept myself out of all ATEK discussions since my last posting on the matter, which was on this blog, and now consider myself a fence-sitter too.

What I find most amusing is that The SeoulPodcast, always quick to admonish the Korean press for their lack of fact-checking has not bothered to contact AFEK to find out what they are about. Joe Zenkimchi is eligible and could have joined up. Instead, he jumped to the conclusion that anybody who has a Korean family and wants to network is a paranoid schizophrenic who is in cahoots with Anti-English Spectrum. Had he contacted me and made that allegation, I would have forwarded the comment that was made on this blog by a member of that organisation in which the sick fuck named my daughter. I could have shown him the post that was later removed (after I cooled down) in which I call out that particular shitbag, and I could have told him the name and the address of the PC Bang that was used to type it. As it is close to the town that Joe lives in, he could have visited it and asked the prick himself. If he had a pair.

But no… I said some bad things about his friend, so that means that all F-Visa holders are bad. And he thinks the Korean media should be held accountable for their yellow journalism? Twat!

NOTE: These comments are the opinions of the author, and are not to be mistaken as official AFEK policy, as AFEK has no official policy.

House-hunting in Korea (Continued)

I thought I would post a quick update as to how people can overcome house-hunting woes in Korea. After we decided to simply stop paying rent, it was amazing how helpful our landlord became. Within a few days of informing him that the rent had been stopped, he had a replacement lined up for us. We pay the finders fee (expected) but it has cost us nothing more than that. We get our deposit back the day we move out. Happy days!

The bank was not quite that simple… More »

House-hunting in Korea

Right now, I live in an apartment block in Dongducheon. I live here because I got married whilst working in a public school in Uijeongbu, and they refused to provide anything more than a 1-room officetel for myself and my expectant wife. We decided to get our own place, stumped up the deposit and paid our own rent.

I eventually quit my PS job a few months into a 2nd year contract because they were acting somewhat nuts. I found a great job in a hagwon that I totally enjoy. My boss is awesome!

Unfortunately, a month or 2 ago, my wife was hospitalised. After she came home, and I had been caring for the baby alone (thanks to a very understanding boss who gave me a week off with 2 hours notice), I decided that I should not sign another year here, and we should look at moving to Seoul where her sisters will be on hand to help.

So, the fun begins. More »

I’m back, and I’m pissed!!!

So it’s been a while… It seems I have not had much time to do anything for myself lately, though my situation is about to change for the better. Over the past few months I have been a slowly drawn into a number of things that have happened (and are still happening) in Korea, and I need to vent! With my own super-speedy domain, and time that I have had to free-up for some extra-curricular activities (more on that later) I figured that I now have the time to dedicate to some serious ranting.

Anyway… here’s your starter for 10:

What did the Korean government do back in September when I made the ridiculous request of having my name added to our family documents?

What’s that? They relented? I thought so too. Nope. They lied!

I discovered this after we needed to get a copy made of the paperwork in January. There I wasn’t! My wife was distraught. Our daughter will be viewed as somebody from a one-parent family. By extension, that makes my wife a whore – and that is how she expects to be treated as schools in future.

Thankfully, the Korean Government have a nice website set up so that people can make complaints about government legislation, and petition to have it changed. More »