korea: a year in retrospect

here i am sitting in the incheon international airport looking at a nice fat seven hour layover until my flight to san francisco (and then on again until i reach cincinnati). i've just finished a rather taxing 4 week run through much of south east asia, which will have to wait for later updates when i have time to upload photos and collect notes and thoughts; and so i thought i would use this ample opportunity to write a little something on what this past year has meant to me.

hoo boy, that's a doozy. i imagine i'll still be trying to figure that out several years from now even. but i guess first i would have to think of the reasons i went to korea in the first place. i, unlike many people my age, had secured a job in my desired field. i had a nice apartment in a good location and was close to many of my friends. i had made decent inroads to what many would consider a start into a healthy career. and yet, like so many people my age, i was dissatisfied. perhaps i was selfish, but i wanted more. different. at the time i was feeling a bit ill to my stomach, convinced of ulcers or lactose problems. now im convinced it was something altogether different. something more in line with the psychosomatic effects depression can have on someone. so what did i want from korea more than anything? i think it was probably an escape. a way to make me feel significant about myself. to throw myself into something so completely different that it would be impossible not to feel differently about myself as well.

living in another country for a prolonged period you obviously learn quite a bit. you learn about different culture and customs. you learn about different histories and language. art forms and ideologies. you learn that, while for you it may be unthinkable to just throw your trash in a beautiful stream lining a rice paddy in some idyll countryside, to others its just not that important one way or another. and, while to you it may seem inconsequential to spread your feet out in a place of worship, to others maybe its a sign of grave disrespect. these are little, easy things that anyone can catch onto. the big lessons are what you learn about other people, and ultimately, as you will often find in any number of travel literature, what you learn about yourself. i'm not really talking about some kind of 'eat, pray, love' shiat where i go off to find myself through a big bowl of spaghetti. i'm talking more about stepping outside the normal day-to-day and thinking about myself apart from what the past 25 years have suggested i am. that might mean making friends that i normally wouldn't associate with back home. that might mean doing things that might typically seem lame, or stepping outside of comfort zones so you don't spend the next 12 months of your life friendless and trapped in a tiny cubical apartment. less elizabeth gilbert, more jim carrey's 'yes man'. and once you do that, it does seem like some of the ideals and beliefs you held back home were pretty flaky; in how you saw other people, and how you worried about other people saw you. but a large part of that has to do with the people you end up meeting. the foreign community i met, despite the inevitable sizing-up that happens when you first meet people, especially at something like an orientation where you need to quickly divide people into groups ('potential friend', 'weird asian fetish dude', 'potential more than friend wink wink', etc.), were a welcoming and largely non-judgmental group. and koreans, in general, are simply amazed by the fact you are not also korean. which is to say its not exactly like the states where judgment is a type of cultural currency exchanged back and forth and without end, the non-stop one-up-manship that dominates everything from credibility to education to experiences, etc etc. as my buddy sean has been so militantly expressing lately, all you have to do is log-in to facebook, as i'm sure you do, and be overwhelmed at the lives of others. and yet in korea this was largely a non-issue. others were either back in the states doing what they were doing before you left, or they were in the classroom doing what you were now getting paid to do. perhaps i felt that i was one-up and so it wasn't a bother, but really i just didn't care as much. if someone was in japan for the weekend and i was stuck inside watching korean television it just gave me the impression that next weekend i could just as well go to japan, too.

and maybe that's another important thing i took away from korea: possibility. simply, that things are possible. that i can go to japan for a weekend. that i'm not forced to keep wanting the things i want, rather i can go and actually do them. that disatisfaction is unnecessary. this isn't the most promising time in the world. i may have been in korea but i also have a subscription to the new york times on my ipod. i read things. scary things about the global economy, about republican presidential candidates who disregard science in favor of a vote earned, about overpopulation, undereducation, poor distribution of wealth and resources, the public outrage, the restless youth...its a hard time to remain optimistic. and yet, i find that despite of it all, i somehow am. perhaps all it will take is a few weeks back in the harsh realities of america to crush it, but for now i feel empowered by this sense of possibility. that if you do the research, put in the work, take the risk and the effort, then you can find something. something outside of that disatisfaction. maybe that also comes from the news. from places like the arab spring.

ultimately, its hard to distill an entire experience into just a few ideals. i met so many wonderful people, made so many friendships that i hope will somehow last longer than this year, experienced such a weird range of things...it was the breath of fresh air that i so desparately needed. in my six-month review i closed things off questioning not the past but pondering the future. what will i do? how will i move on from this? 6 months and a kick around asia and i'm still not too sure. but at that point i was filled with uncertainty and a midway malaise that made things seem tainted. this seems wildly out of touch with how i'm feeling now. less dilemma, more challenge. less worry, more possibility. it's also easy to feel this way when i know that, if nothing else, i can always just go back to korea (or some similar program) and save a little more money before trying to go at a 'real job' again. i don't really see that as a failure. i don't see it as falling back in the rat-race as maybe i once would have. and i think that's what korea has given me. confidence? is that the word for it? i'm pretty confident it might be...

it's now 1:30pm KST and i have another 2 hours before i can board the plane (i had lunch and read a bit between starting and finishing this post). when i land i'll have a whole new set of obligations and responsibilities but im kind of excited to start over again. to see what happens. i just hope i don't have to live with my parents for too long.

coming soon:

my family visits korea

thailand, malaysia, singapore and indonesia, oh my!

and so many photos...