Applying for a Chinese Visa

After booking my flight to Beijing, I filled out my visa application. The plan was to drop it off at the Chinese consulate in Busan, then head up to Seoul for a week, then back to Busan to pick up my visa and take off for China the following day. However, when I took my application to the Chinese consulate, I was told my US permanent address was insufficient; I need to provide my address in Korea, too.

Ummm…that’s a bit problematic. My sister doesn’t even know her address – she uses the address of the school where she teaches (which happens to be right next door). I figure I should probably figure out her address, though, since the visa application is an official document.

So I head back to my sister’s place; when I reach the appropriate subway station, I find the area map, then jot down the name of the street — in Hangul (Korean characters) — she lives on, figuring I just need the street number and I’ll be set. When I reach her building, I realize there’s no building number – unlike the building that houses the Wooribank on the adjoining block (#44).

OK. Option 2: Go to my sister’s school and ask someone there what the address is. Fortunately, one of the assistants spoke English well enough to figure out what I was saying, and she gave me an envelope with the school letterhead. She also checked my sister’s address, so she wrote down the address for me. It looked like this:

707. ________________. 1641-2. _______________, where the first blank is the name of the building and the second blank is the district/borough in Busan. The information for the second blank is the same as that for the school that’s listed on the envelope, so that was easy to copy. However, my sister’s apartment is in a different building, so I asked the assistant if she knew the name of the building. She told me to find the name on the front of the building. This is what the front of the building looks like:

Um, yeah. Option 3: Go through the mail of other people who live in the building to find the building name. This was very much a process of elimination, as I mentally crossed out the Hongul characters for the country, city and district/borough. That left me with the Hongul characters that, when read aloud, sound kind of like “dee-bah-(r/l)ee-bee-tah.” So I jot that down, then go back out to look at the front of the building and realize it’s the bottom line of the banner on the building. So obvious.