Health check, banking, and immigration in South Korea (Cheongju anyway)

This was the only shot that I got of the hospital we visited for the health check. Sorry it's blurry!

I realized earlier in trying to get my thoughts organized that we've missed several important things to discuss about our arrival. Shortly after we arrived in South Korea, a week after we had just arrived here, our boss took us to the hospital to have our health checks completed. Despite knowing what was going to be done I was still all nerves because of the fact that I'm not a huge fan of hospitals and I've never had blood drawn. 

Why the extensive health check process? Well, South Korea wants to make sure that you don't have any diseases you can pass along to the kids you're teaching (or adult students, whatever age you may be teaching). So they check you for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, drug use, extensive alcohol use, hepatitis, etc. and then shuffle you onward to immigration once you pass the rigorous exam. Having said that, if you do have one of the above, you will not be able to teach because Korea is very protective like that. 

Nerves aside, it was a pretty quick process. We had to take additional passport pictures with us (if you ever come to Korea, bring extras, they are extremely useful) and fill out some paperwork first. Our director isn't very clear with explanations since her English is okay, but not great, so we filled out two forms first and she had us fill in the wrong blanks and she ended up rewriting it anyway. We were slightly irritated because the health checks were 68,000 won each and she didn't forewarn us so we didn't have enough, so she ended up paying for them (only to have the money taken from our paychecks later). 

After the paperwork was submitted we were sent upstairs to immediately have our blood drawn. Zach did fine, but after they drew the two vials I got light headed and they stumbled me into a room with a small bed so I could rest. Once my head stopped spinning it was time to pee in a cup and then move on to the next thing. We were then sent down a hallway and had chest x-rays done (it's fun standing awkwardly against a plastic box), blood pressure check, had our height and weight checked, and had our vision checked. Then we were free to go and were shuffled onward by the director to the bank.

We went to our bank KB* and spent some time filling out more paperwork. This surprised me because I thought that you had to actually have your health check done and have your alien immigration card before you could open bank accounts, but I guess that's not the case. So we filled out the paperwork and were issued these small booklets and assigned 2 PIN numbers to them so we can withdraw and deposit cash. It's an interesting process. All I know is that to withdraw money you use the second option, followed by the second option, and then enter your PINs and choose how much money you want to withdraw. The end. I hope I can remember all that. 

It makes sense to discuss the immigration office too since we went the following day because our health checks had already been completed in that time frame. We were good to go! So our director drove us to immigration in Cheongju and had us start filling out paperwork only to find out that she had left our passports (which she had kept after the health check and bank visit) at the school. So she went to go get them and we stayed and filled out our paperwork. After we got to the point in the paperwork that we couldn't finish without passports we sat down and waited for our number. We arrived at a good time though since a huge group of Chinese college students arrived and were going through right after us. Our director made it back just in time and we got in and she spoke to the lady, we had our fingerprints taken, paid our 10,000 won, and headed back to the school. We were told that it would take 2 weeks for our alien immigration cards to be processed, and we have them now at this point.