victory and obstacles

The trip out to the Customs office was easy enough; I ended up taking the subway, then doing the kilometer-long walk in the biting cold (without a hat or scarf) to the government building, which looked like a typical Temple of Bureaucracy. As soon as all the random staffers saw my foreign face, they knew right away that I was there to get a new PCC number, so they all helpfully pointed the way. I had to skip over one building and go up to the second floor. Once there, I filled out a single form and was allowed to retain my old PCC number, which I didn't think was possible when you switched passports (my new passport has a totally different, alphanumeric passport number, unlike the previous passport, whose number was nothing but numerals). None of this cost anything. Oh, and despite my attempts at being friendly, none of the ladies in that office had a sense of humor.

I decided to go off track and celebrate at the nearest Burger King, so I mapped a walking route to it. But about two-thirds of the way to Burger King, I saw a Shake Shack. Shake Shack has been in Korea for a couple years now, so it's no longer clogged with long lines of curious people eager for the Newest American Thing. It was 11:30 a.m., the burger joint had a huge interior, and things looked mostly empty. Of course, the moment I walked in, twenty other people decided to walk in with me. Fuckers. 

Realizing I had no idea how things worked at a Shake Shack (the last one I'd been in was at Incheon Airport in 2018), I first stared at a wall-sized menu to figure out what I wanted, then looked around for a muin (lit. "no-person") kiosk to type the order in. A staffer behind the counter pointed vaguely behind me in that late-teens/early-twenties way of sullen youth who don't want to be there; I turned and saw the two (just two?) kiosks and lined up to use the right-hand one. I was the second or third person in line. 

I got a burger, a hot dog(!), a Coke... and forgot about the damn fries because I ordered à la carte instead of by "set" (the Korean equivalent of a value meal is the "set menu"). It took a second to figure out which touch-screen button was for us old-school troglodytes paying by debit card, but I finally found the button. The next layer of confusion was the stupid customer-call system that this branch used: there was a stack of vibrating beepers next to each kiosk, and I was too dim to figure out what to do with them. Did I have to grab a beeper and just take it, or did I need to sync the beeper up with my order number so that it would vibrate when my order was ready? I shrugged and just grabbed a beeper, which glowed with a "47" on its screen but was otherwise inert.

As it turned out, when my order was ready, a staffer leaned over the counter and waved at me. The beeper, which I'd done nothing with, never went off, probably because I'd failed to activate/sync it to my order number. My burger and dog were both fairly simple but good; I'd ordered cheese and bacon with the burger, and while that was some of the better fast-food bacon I've had in Korea, it still wasn't crisp. I recall Joe McPherson rolling his eyes and telling me that crispy bacon was nearly impossible to find at Korean restaurants. And there are weird Americans who like their bacon a little limp. What the hell is wrong with you people?

I cabbed back to my place and immediately tried to update my Coupang information with my new passport number, but I'd forgotten there was a password that I needed in order to edit profile data. In looking at the password field, I saw seven asterisks, but I don't recall ever making a seven-character password. So I'm stymied. Since my new PCC number is my old PCC number, I might still be able to order international products with no problem, but it's also possible that I need to tie the PCC number to my new passport number. So I skipped away from Coupang to work on registering my new passport number with Immigration. It's not going so well. There are at least two sites that offer passport-update services: visa.go.kr and HiKorea (hikorea.go.kr). The first site didn't work for me: I inputted my information correctly, but the site told me that my records didn't exist. So I went over to HiKorea, which is the site I'd used last year to get a date to visit Immigration. It seems that February is all booked up, but the site helpfully offered an e-application option, which I was able to fill out about 99% of the way. I'm stuck now, though, because the last part of the application involved uploading, and I'm getting a Spinning Wheel of Death that's been going on for hours...

Update! I switched from navigating the site in English to navigating it in Korean, and guess what: I uploaded the images of my old and new passports just fine. All I needed to do was switch to the Korean version. See, this is one of the reasons why life as a foreigner in Korea is often nonlinear: as my boss and Charles both remarked, each in his own way, the country doesn't really consider foreigners' needs, so if you're an expat, and you get stuck in an eternal loop while navigating the poorly designed English section of a Korean website, well, tough titty. You should know Korean (which is normally my attitude)! I can slog my way through the Korean version of the HiKorea site, but it's slow going, so I prefer to do it in English. Well, all it took, as of a few minutes ago (i.e., 6:30 p.m.), was to switch over to the Korean-language side of the site for everything to go smoothly. This is what desperation pushed me to do. And that's a lesson for language learners: sometimes, the best way to learn the target language is to put yourself in situations where you're forced to use it. That's certainly how I got fluent in French. I've been lazier about Korean.

Anyway, I've now submitted my information to Immigration. I don't know what kind of confirmation I'll be getting, but the site says it can take 3-4 business days to process an application. I won't update any mailing/shipping information until I get some kind of confirmation from La Migra, as buddy Tom likes to call it.

I forgot that I need to visit the bank tomorrow and give them my new passport information. Yet another thing to do. The paperwork never ends.

Two ways you don't want to be found dead: (1) with your underwear around your ankles and porn plainly visible on your phone, and (2) slumped over a pile of fucking paperwork. God, if I die either of those ways, I'll kill myself.

(And what if you die while whacking off to paperwork?)