I had to open a bank account today and man was it a long process. I am so thankful that my supervisor took me because it would have been impossible for me to understand all of the foreign paperwork.
The one part that took forever was when they told me I had to write my name, address, and school address in complicated Kanji characters. I felt like I was writing in hieroglyphics and I was gruelling slow. My characters looked wobbly like I was in the first grade practicing letters. I had to repeat the process for four different forms. I messed up once and had to restart the longest form. I felt like a horrible gaijin for making my supervisor wait while I filled out these forms. But I did it and now I have the Kanji for my address and school engrained in my muscle memory. Good thing I decided to start learning Kanji last week, I had some familiarity with the characters and I could pick out patterns to make the characters easier to draw. I was impressed that what I had learned actually stuck.
Oh, and another thing that impeded the speed of the process was that my name confused everyone. First of all, my last name baffles them because it doesn't sound at all how it looks, and second, Japanese people don't really have middle names and I have two of them. The bank teller kept mixing up the names and having to resubmit forms because no one understood which one was my first name. Yikes!
Tomorrow I am going to get my phone, which I hear is another long process, but I think that my supervisor can fill out some of the forms so it hopefully won't take as long.
I am almost a real person again with an address, a bank account, a job, and tomorrow a phone!
The one part that took forever was when they told me I had to write my name, address, and school address in complicated Kanji characters. I felt like I was writing in hieroglyphics and I was gruelling slow. My characters looked wobbly like I was in the first grade practicing letters. I had to repeat the process for four different forms. I messed up once and had to restart the longest form. I felt like a horrible gaijin for making my supervisor wait while I filled out these forms. But I did it and now I have the Kanji for my address and school engrained in my muscle memory. Good thing I decided to start learning Kanji last week, I had some familiarity with the characters and I could pick out patterns to make the characters easier to draw. I was impressed that what I had learned actually stuck.
Oh, and another thing that impeded the speed of the process was that my name confused everyone. First of all, my last name baffles them because it doesn't sound at all how it looks, and second, Japanese people don't really have middle names and I have two of them. The bank teller kept mixing up the names and having to resubmit forms because no one understood which one was my first name. Yikes!
Tomorrow I am going to get my phone, which I hear is another long process, but I think that my supervisor can fill out some of the forms so it hopefully won't take as long.
I am almost a real person again with an address, a bank account, a job, and tomorrow a phone!
They have hipster glasses at the bank you can use if your vision goes cross-eyed from trying to write in Kanji for too long, or you just want to try to pull off the nerdy-librarian-chic look while you wait for your bank card.
No, this isn't a souvenir from Disney, it's my bank book! Everything is so darned cute in Japan.
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