The Journey Before the Journey

        “You never plan anything, but it always works out for you at the last minute.  This time, it’s all gonna go to hell.” –Isaac, my 18-year-old brother.

  Charming kid, right?  Anyway, maybe he’s got a point.  Sometimes, I take things down to the wire, and sure, sometimes I get a little lucky.  Take this trip, for instance.  I can’t even count how many times I was told it would be impossible to go.  My first application was flat-out rejected.  Then I was wait-listed.  And even after I was accepted (about ten days ago), I was told the visa couldn’t be done in time.  Well, I got my visa and my plane ticket three days before the flight, and now I’m on a plane to Korea.  Here’s how the impossible happened.
First obstacle: criminal background check.  I knew it was gonna be hard to convince them that the charges were bogus and that I’d been set up.  But seriously, I had to round up like 1000 documents and ship them to every corner of the US.  I had to wait for documents to come back so I could then send them off again to get apostilled in Washington.  Only then could I send them to the Korean Consulate in Chicago.  Sound complicated?  It was.  Adding up all the mailing and processing times, it should’ve taken about 2  months.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have two months.  I had six weeks.
So I went to the police station and asked to have my prints taken.  They sent out a pretty tough looking 50-year-old dude who had a briefcase in one hand.  I gave him the fingerprint page I’d printed off.  He looked at the page like it was a dog turd.
“What?  You printed it out on this?  You ever heard of cardstock?  This is terrible.”
“Umm…I can go print it out on something else, I guess.”
“No, we’ll just use this,” he said.  “It’ll probably get ruined, but what do I care?”
Then he unlatched the briefcase and pulled out his ink kit.
“Get behind me.”
“Umm…” I took half a step forward.  This guy wasn’t really in the mood to waste time, though.  He just grabbed my arm and pulled me in.  At this point, I’m almost rubbing up against him and naturally, I’m feeling pretty uncomfortable.  I tried to keep my arm forward and the rest of me back, but he was set on pulling me closer.  Finally, he dipped one of my fingers in the ink and made a print, but clearly I was doing something wrong.
“Loosen up your wrist for god sakes.  You never done this before?”
(I kinda wish somebody with no idea what was going on had walked in right at that moment.  IT’S NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE, I SWEAR)
Anyway, I tried my best to make my wrist go limp, but there are bones and muscles and shit in there, so it didn’t quite work.
“Christ,” he said.
After I finished the day at the police station, I started the mailing game.  I overnighted the shit out of those packages.  I made friends at the post office, UPS store, and Fedex.  Honestly, all the waiting and not knowing was the worst part of the whole thing. But in the end, I miraculously got the documents in two days before the deadline.  Yikes.
The very minor second hurdle:  getting rejected.  Yeah, can you believe it?  After all the hard work I put in with the police officer, it turned out that another portion of my app (the mock lesson plan I’d made) wasn’t up to snuff.  In early July, I got an email that basically said “We’re not even going to review your app because the lesson plan sucks so much.”  Fortunately, they let me redo it.  Unfortunately, by that time they’d already given out all their initial acceptances.  Enter the waiting list.
I was pretty bummed, and as it got later into July I figured there was no chance.  Then, in a stroke of luck, I met up one day with a good friend of mine for dinner.  She’d recently been on a waiting list of her own, and she’d gotten accepted off of it.
“Just be like a stalker ex-girlfriend,” she told me.  “Call them, email them, show them you really want it.”
I’m not sure I made a very convincing stalker, but what the hell, I figured I could at least send them an email letting them know this would mean a lot to me.  I don’t know if the email had anything to do with it, but I week later I got accepted.  One problem: the program started in a week and I didn’t have a visa.
So I called up the Chicago consulate and asked them if they could get it done in time.  Answer: no chance in hell.  It’d take at least a week.  I asked if I could arrive late to the program then, and they said they’d call up the director in Korea and see.  Fast forward to late on a Sunday night, and I get a call from Korea.
“Hi,” said some woman.  “Send in your visa application.  You’re going to Korea.  We will take care of it.”
Korea comes through in the clutch!  I imagine their conversation with Chicago went something like, “Sure, we rejected the kid, and yeah, maybe we waitlisted him, BUT WE NEED HIM RIGHT NOW, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?  WE NEED HIM ON THAT LINE!”
Since everything was super time sensitive, on Monday I ended up sprinting a couple miles to Walgreens to get passport photos for my visa app (no car, of course.)  I had my wallet in one hand and a folder with visa documents in the other. Then it started raining.  I remember laughing and thinking, “My life is completely insane.”  They’ll probably make a movie about it someday.

It was exactly like this, except without the muscles and the Jesus

I got my visa three days later.  Now, I’m only a couple hours away from Seoul.  I realize that I had a ridiculous string of good luck, but it also wouldn’t have been possible without help from family and friends (Awwwww!)  Seriously, they gave me advice, drove me around, and were always kind and helpful.  Pretty lucky if you ask me.