Post in Korea!

Sending post in Korea is relatively cheap and easy for foreigners. At Hanyang there is a post office conveniently located beside Hanyang Plaza that can take care of anything you want to send back home.

If you are interested in sending letters or postcards it costs approximately 780 Korean Won (KRW). The letters and postcards I have sent have taken approximately 2 to 3 weeks to reach their destination in Canada. If you are interested in sending packages homes, the post office has all the materials you could possibly need. They have all sizes of boxes, all costing less than 2,000 KRW, tape, scissors, glue, and sharpies. Just take any of the materials from the cupboards and put the money in the clear box on top of the counter. Once you have packed up your stuff, take a number and wait to be called up to the counter, where the postal worker will then weigh your package and charge you by weight. Note that typically you are charged for Air Mail. Which takes about 2 weeks to reach your destination. But you can choose the cheaper option of having your package go by surface mail, which can 8 weeks to 3 months to reach your final destination. This may be a good option if you are shipping a lot of things home because of post semester travel plans. Below are the prices by weight (kg) of mailing packages:

Receiving packages here is a little bit trickier. As an exchange student you are told to get your post sent to the Office of International Cooperation in the FTC (Fusion Technology Center) Building, through your coordinator. This is how I have been telling my friends and family to addressed mail to me:

[Your Name]

Coordinator: [Coordinators Name]

Office of International Cooperation

Hanyang University

222 Wangsimni-ro, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, 133-791 Korea

This has been successful in getting mail to the Office of International Cooperation (OIC). However, since the OIC is extremely busy during the semester, sometimes the office fails to notify us when we have mail, so make sure to double check your mail and simply not just wait for them to contact you. You may have to petster the office if you know you have mail coming but you haven’t received it. Don’t rely on e-mail communications, go into the office periodically and check. If you have been waiting for what you know to be too long, you can visit the postal distribution office in the parking garage of the Hanyang Institute of Technology (H.I.T.) Building (the parking garage next to I-Café) and ask them about your package. However, it will be a lot more beneficial if you have a tracking number for them to enter into their system. For me when I was waiting for my Foreign Registration Card in the mail, I showed them my tracking number and they were able to show me the person in the OIC who had signed for the letter. They were even nice enough to photocopy the form proving that it was in the OIC and call the OIC and tell them it was in their office. My biggest advice it to get your friends and family to tell you every time they send you mail, otherwise you may never get it; if they have a tracking number for a package it would be helpful if they told you that also.

Article by Lindsay from Canada