Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Hello

It is official we are going to be moving to Daegu, South Korea in about 7 weeks!

The application for the EPIK program was long, the interview was fairly short and relatively easy. Then came the visa documents. These were complicated, time consuming and sometimes expensive to obtain. The most difficult were the apostilled university degrees. Apparently Ballarat University is not recognised by the government so Brenton's degree had to be certified before it could be apostilled. Mine should have been a little simpler, La Trobe was recognised as a university, but my degree lacked a specific women's signature so all I had to do was send my degree back to uni and get this women to sign it. To further complicate the matter this women's signature should have been on the photocopy of my degree not the actual degree-thanks for telling me that before I sent it away and got the signature. But after Brenton had made 4 trips to the passport office (government department that does apositlling), got his degree certified by a lawyer and my degree was sent to La Trobe for signatures twice we finally had all our visa documents together!

We sent our visa documents of to our recruitment company the day after North Korea shelled Yeonpyeong Island, so our fingers were crossed that the north and south were not going to full blown war! A week or so after this Brenton was asked to interview for a sweet job at Microsoft, so after all the hard work Korea was on hold. By mid December we were cutting it close, Brenton had done 3 interviews with Microsoft and we still didn't know if he had the job. For Brenton to have some time off before going to South Korea he needed to resign within about a week. Unfortunately Brenton didn't get the Microsoft job and since the tension hadn't increased further between north and south we decided to go full steam ahead with moving to South Korea.


So this is where we are at now. We have a lot to do in next 7 weeks: spend lots of time with family and friends, attend 2 weddings and multiple bucks and hens nights, pack up our apartment and work out where we are going to keep our stuff, get our South Korean visas etc...