Shin Han Bank

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Jul 29, 2017 · 4 min read

The other top thing to do with my ARC was opening a bank account.


Leaving olleh and looking around

After partly succeeding on the SIM card mission, I walked around a little more by Suwon Station instead of heading straight back. I figured I didn’t want to waste the opportunity to explore the stores a little bit. I didn’t actually shop that much or eat in any of the restaurants, but I liked seeing what was up.

The one store I did stop in was Market A. It looked cool on the outside. Most of the stuff in the store was clothing related, but there was a random section with notebooks. I hovered over that section for so long before deciding to buy a couple of them. It was great because they had little unlined notepads. I specifically wanted little notebooks to try following the advice of generating daily ideas and becoming super pro at thinking of ideas, but they were the same price as a bigger type notebook with more pages that looked promising for drawing. I struggled with the cost effectiveness of buying the pack of five little notebooks.

The building design drew me in

In the end, I bought two of the bigger notebooks and that pack of five little ones. They were all the same price of 1000 Won — a tad strange to me.

After Market A, I decided to turn around and head back to the bus station area to catch a ride home, but as luck would have it, I passed by a Shin Han Bank while walking. I knew in my mind that I needed to open a bank account, but I had already accomplished one thing which ticked my productivity urge, so I hesitated.

Bank account mission is a go

As the existence of this article may suggest, I gathered my courage and went inside to open an account. The security guy asked me what I wanted, and there was a moment of awkward hesitation before I said I wanted to open a bank account. He must have understood, because he pressed the button for me to get a ticket number and indicated that I wait on the far side of the bank.

I had to go to work in the afternoon, so I was slightly worried about how long it might take. I think there were about 5 people ahead of me in the ticket number queue. The wait lasted about 25 minutes, which wasn’t too bad. The teller called their English helpline for me after I told her I didn’t speak Korean. The woman on the phone asked me why I wanted to open an account with them, and then if I had my employment contract with me to show the teller.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have it, but I was informed that she could still open an account for me at that time. It would simply have some lower limits on transferring and withdrawing until I brought my employment contract. Similar to what happened at the phone store, she only asked for my passport, but I gave the ARC with it. She did make photocopies of both, so I feel like it was good to have presented it.

The things I needed to fill out on the forms were my name, birthday, passport number, address (luckily I had that saved in my phone) and phone number (also super happy I got that sorted first). I also wrote and signed my name on all the papers as instructed. Most of the process went completely over my head. I had no idea what she was typing or doing. My role was simple: print and sign my name.

The minutes kept ticking by and I was getting increasingly worried, but it wrapped up with enough time for me to go home, change, sketch something, and then walk to work. I was plenty relieved when I saw the bank passbook and the ATM card being pulled out. The teller apologized to me for the process having taken so long, and I apologized for being a complicated case. It was funny and super considerate that she felt bad about the length.


Two days later, HR at work sent me an email with proof of employment, asking me to quickly open up a bank account and give the front desk a copy of the passbook. I’m glad I am a little ahead of the curve by opening an account already. I still need to pop over to another closer Shin Han branch and show them my employment contract, so it’s nice timing because I’ll have a Korean document to hand over as well.

I brought the contract and the other Korean paper to the bank with my passbook and hoped the teller would understand what I needed to do. The woman also needed to see my ARC. She called the school to verify that I worked there. I had to fill out a form with my name, signature, birthday, address and phone number; and signed another form. Then I was done.

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Written by

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traveling, teaching, struggling; just my life happenings

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