Planless planning

I applied for the exchange program of my university in June '12. I was nominated in July and after that nothing. Yes, there was this short email in October telling the International Office of my university that I had to wait until December to receive further information. So I waited, and waited. It became Christmas, it became New Year and still no reaction whatsoever. It was time to do something. Some of you probably now how long it can take to acquire a visa and I was planning to go on vacation in Japan, before arriving in Korea. Last week I had four weeks left to get the ball rolling.

So I wrote an email to the lady who is in charge of my at my university. Guess what, she was on vacation. (,,#ﾟДﾟ) I was getting really really nervous. Luckily I could reach somebody else of the Office of International Affairs and this woman reached out the Korean university by email. And my worst nightmare at that time became reality. At that time they hadn't sent the documents but assured me they would send it out the next day. It was send on the way two days later. Of course not to my place but to my university.

The process time of the visa is clearly the bottleneck. All the other things are easily and rapidly achievable. But I couldn't complain. Finally I had some dates on hand and was able to book the flight. I am going to fly to Tokyo, Japan at the start of February for the cost of 893€ (1167US$). It would have been much cheaper booking the flight more than one month in advance.

Until today 4:40pm German Time I wasn't sure if I was gonna get the Korean documents in time. Maybe there was a tsunami, blizzard or evil postman disposing of my important letter. You know that's likely to happen when you really really need something badly. (ﾟｰﾟ)(｡_｡)

This afternoon I finally received the email I longed for. The documents made it safely to Germany and I can go and get them tomorrow. You can bet, that my letter to the embassy will also leave tomorrow.

Finally I want to say that I am no more upset about the International Office in Korea, because since they started contacting me last week they helped me out a great deal and are eager to give me everything I need.

So finally I can feel a little at ease about this matter.