We’ve been in Korea for a little over 2 years, and we’re not sure how long we’ll still be here. Since we’ve bought our motorcycles  we decided that we should probably make the effort to get our Korean Drivers licenses. Getting the normal license was pretty easy. All we had to do was go to our embassy with our drivers licenses from our country of origin. The Embassy made a copy and gave it a stamp to authenticate it. Then we took our original license, the copy from the Embassy and our Alien registration Cards and 4 photo’s to our local licensing office. Our local office wasn’t as local though, since we live in a really small ‘rural’ city, we had to travel an hour and a half to Yesan where we exchanged our original driver’s licenses for a Korean license. Luckily the Koreans do everything ‘bali-bali’, which means fast-fast…. While we were applying for our license cards we quickly wrote a theory test… got our results immediately, then we waited 10 minutes for our drivers licenses to be printed. We didn’t even have to do a practical test.

The motorcycle license is another story all together. For this we had to do a practical test. They scheduled our test for the next Wednesday at 3 o’clock, but since we work during the week we had to change our date and went for the test in Seoul ( they do tests on Saturdays). Unfortunately the test is much harder than first anticipated. We watched a lot of Youtube videos on the test, since its said to be quite hard. We even painted some lines in a vacant parking lot and practised for 2 weeks before doing the practical test and we still failed. I don’t have a lot of motorcycle experience so its no wonder that I failed but my husband has been driving a motorcycle for more than 20 years and he also failed the test. 🙁 They do however give you a big cruiser bike that you can’t even take for a test drive before the test.

Therefore we decided to go through a Driving Academy in Seoul. They show you how to do the test and then you practice on the test course for 10 hours with the bike you’ll be using for the test.. you also get to do 3 hours theory to prepare you for driving in Korea. We’ve finished most of our hours and will be doing our licenses in the next 2 weeks… Wish us luck!!