Pre-Korea Shenanigans

So here I am, 18 days before I depart and what a rigamarole getting prepared has been. I'll start from the very beginning. Way back in like November, I couldn't decide what I wanted to do with my life so I thought that going abroad to teach would be a year well spent. After doing A LOT of research on companies, I decided to apply to the popular and well-recommended JET Program. It had everything I was looking for but I thought that it was a bad idea to put all of my eggs into one basket so the hunt continued. There are a lot of crap companies out there and I (and probably some of you) have heard real horror stories about people who have to steal their contracts back so they can leave the country, end up working as a custodian or have to travel really far to get to their work. So with this in mind, I was being very picky. My friend Rachel recommended that I check out the Queen's Con-Ed website where overseas headhunters advertise for Queen's teachers and that's where I heard about Canadian Connection. They were pretty much the same as JET, but were located in South Korea. I contacted them, had an interview at Queen's and got hired all really quickly. Even though CanConX was a safety net job, I ended up accepting their offer for financial reasons.

Once I graduated, the real work began. Seriously, getting all my papers together was like having a full-time job (and required a full-time income to fund). I had to visit the doctor, a lawyer, the police, my professors... it was just too much. In retrospect, I was way too stressed about all these applications than they really required. The "hurry up and wait"-type schedule doesn't sit well with my nerves. But after many trips to the Korean Embassy, I finally have my work visa, my contract, and my plane ticket so I guess that you could say that I'm ready to go... logistically ready, anyway.