I am finally an alien!

Sure I feel like I am on another world sometimes, but that is not what I mean. I finally received my Alien Registration Card. So now I can join the ranks of South Koreans everywhere and buy a cell phone. Before you deride my decision as sheer frivolity, I want you to think back to a time before cell phones. How did you communicate? How did you meet people out? How did you navigate a new city in a foreign land? How did you video chat? How did you watch Korean dramas in HD in the palm of your hand? (And before you ask me about the land line option, I want you to congratulate you for finding this blog using your computer and mouse-thingy, welcome you to the internet and the 2000's.)

I have the benefit of living in a time where we decided what to do in the pre-cell phone era and had to actually make a plan and stick to it as well as living now when the ubiquity of a mobile device has made solid planning a thing of the past. My friends and I have done quite well without phones, but as teachers here are slowly getting phones, I find myself in need of one, whether I am lost in a land without street signs, if people aren't where they said they'd be or if I need to send a text that I've jumped on an earlier train and will be there 10 before we'd arranged.

I have been without a cell phone since I cancelled my US contract at the end of January. As much as I thought it would be liberating and freeing for me to be without a phone, it has not been. I feel more naked now than I did at the jimjilbang. Being without internet and a cell put me into a state of panic...clearly Korea is not my Walden Pond.

So I have decided on getting a smart phone. In the US I got a regular cell phone, one that could barely take pictures. Here the smart phones are actually smart. The internet on the phones blows the fastest US home internet lines out of the water. I can text in 2 languages and there are more apps than I know what to do with. Here is a dirty little secret: While the US is excited for the latest iteration of the iphone, Korea has a few phones that are better and cheaper and faster. They work on the subway, and in the elevator. They have GPS for me to show cab drivers who don't know where I live. They make toast and shoot lasers. The only thing they don't do is dry your clothes. That is all Korea is lacking: a decent clothes dryer.

Besides being able to get a cell phone, I don't know what benefits I get by being an official Alien Resident of Korea. I will keep you posted...