The End and Beginning

It’s Quiet.  I sit here in a chair in my living room of the house in which I have lived from 5^th grade on, listening to the noises:  a fan blowing, a cricket chirping, Oliver the dog licking his paw, and that’s it.  This silence, open spaces, nature and lack of tall buildings everywhere has been the biggest thing for me to get used to since I’ve been back in America.  As my brother was driving along route 6 & 11 on Sunday when I got back I couldn’t help but wonder if it was always this open, always this ‘empty.’  At night I can’t get over how wonderful it is to lie in bed and listen to crickets sing me to sleep.  I feel as though I am in a poem.  It’s a vast difference from Korea where I live on the 5^th floor of a big apartment building, surrounded by many other buildings and people and NOISE.  A walk down the street has me assaulted with noises of people, cars, and music; sights of flashing lights, tall buildings, many Korean people; and smells of roasting squid, hot asphalt, and fresh fruit/veggies/fish from the market.

While I love the nature, love the quiet, love being able to walk out the side door barefoot to look at the full moon with no one else around, I still miss being in a city.  This yearning for city living eases my mind as I know I will be in Seoul for another year.  City life is easy with public transportation and large amounts of things to do.  I think when I come back to America for ‘good’ I will want to try my hand at living in another city closer to home so when I want to visit friends and family it doesn’t require 23 hours on a plane.

My goodness I haven’t written anything in a long time.  Warm months get busier with birthdays, people heading back to their homelands, and just having more things to do with more sunlight to do them in.  I also attribute the lack of writing time to a new relationship that I am in, which is pretty amazing.  I met Mike one night at the end of May when I went to the foreigner area of town to see some live music I could understand and get into.  I went to a few places, saw some okay people, then went to another place with some friends and saw a handsome bearded man playing guitar on stage.  Mike ended up playing a song by John Prine, which excited me to the point of yelling, then he and I chatted all night after he was finished playing.  I’m thankful for our serendipitous meeting, and of course, for John Prine.

And now on to the ‘most excellent adventures’ portion of this blog post, brought to you by my friends Bill and Ted.  I’ll try and sum up some of the more interesting things I have been spending my time on since April.  Jeez Louise. 

Korea is infamous for having seasonal festivals, as they are a very seasonally inspired country in general.  The markets around town consistently showcase fruits and vegetables that are in season, and when out, tend to disappear.  In the middle of April some friends and I went to the Cherry Blossom Festival in Southern Korea, and it was amazing.  I had pictured a small street lined with sidewalks and cherry trees as cherry blossoms fell and engulfed me while I rode my bike down the road, flailing my arms to catch the blossoms.  This is one of the few times in my life that I have set a high expectation that was actually met.  It was magical, beautiful and took my breath away. 

Towards the end of April we took another trip outside of the city and went on a ‘DMZ/Bungee Jumping’ trip.  There is an organization here called ‘Adventure Korea’ that arranges trips for foreigners that takes the stress out of trying to book a big weekend outing in a foreign land.  This trip took us (and a bus full of other foreigners) to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea.  The high point was
donning a hard hat and going underground into the 2^nd infiltration tunnel, and getting 100 meters away from North Korea.  The ‘line’ between the two countries was well blockaded and North Korea had a camera on their side, trained on the South Korea side.  It was an interesting trip that helped me learn a lot about the history between the two countries and understand more of what the conflict entails.

The following day on this trip entailed bungee jumping.  Even as I type this my palms are beginning to sweat, my heart race is increasing and my breathing is becoming shallow.  It was the most terrifying thing I have ever done; looking down from a high bridge into a shallow river below, knowing that you have to jump.  I’m glad that I did it, and I will never do it again.

Once April was over, a good friend left and then some birthday celebration times started.  My friend Ada had a birthday later on in May and it was fun to celebrate it with good friends in a foreign land.  It’s a different mentality from other birthdays I celebrated with people in America – overseas you almost feel a deeper sense of comradeship so you go above and beyond for friends’ birthdays.  For Ada’s we had a North American breakfast, a boat ride/river hang time, and then went to a Lantern Festival, which was right in downtown Seoul.  The festival was a parade on
Saturday night with lots of delightful lanterns lit, monks carrying them, big floats with beautiful
Korean women adorning them, and even some fellow foreigners we met on the DMZ trip.  The following day we went to another part of the festival that had lots of tents, crafts to make and or buy, dance performances (including some stellar break-dancing Korean men), art to purchase, food, and monks.  Living in a big foreign city that has differing customs proves to almost always be entertaining in some sort of fashion.

I am going to end this now so I can actually post it.  I’ll work on the rest during some more of this free time I have while at home on vacation.  It’s amazing.

Hope everyone is well.  If I don’t get to see you this time that I’m home, I’m pretty sure that when I come home next it will be in a more permanent state of mind.  Happy August.