Being thrown headfirst into a different culture was a cathartic and bizarre experience, with all the prettiness and shock and excitement and anxiety and shiny-shiny twinkling lights all squished up and rolled out together like one mighty long existential kimbap.
Before I’d blinked, a month had passed. Then two. Then four.
I realised quite suddenly one morning, waking up a little clammy and lethargic in the Korean heat, that I was really quite thrilled to be alive. I was thrilled to see the kindergartens tugging at my sleeve every morning, even on the days that Social Studies stole Bunny the teddy bear and hid him under a pile of books (and then told me that he’d died), or when I looked down to behold several 5 year old boys from my Cafeteria class lying on the floor giggling exhuberantly as they looked up my skirt.
I was thrilled to jump on a bus or train every few weekends and go on an adventure into an unknown district to converse with an as yet nameless stranger and take photos of mysterious fluid imaginings that would always take me by surprise and never be quite what I was expecting.
Swimming in the Pacific, staring astounded at a temple complex teetering on the edge of an ocean cliff, touching the hand of a hareubang and drinking too much soju under the bright lights of Seoul on a Saturday night… crying at the lady selling baby bunnies on the subway, and the time I saw a woman skin an eel alive and chuck the squirming dying pink body into a bowl of a hundred others just like it; chatting up boys on a night out in Itaewon, getting spanked by a naked lady halfway through a body scrub at the jjimjilbang, or the time I stripped off in the little hours of the morning in Busan and ran into the sea, only to have a giant wave soak me up to my shoulders then have to sit in a cab for 20 minutes dripping and covered in sand while we headed back to the hostel. All in all, some decent memories made.
And the best bit was knowing that I was ONLY four months through, with just as much to come and more… and being oh so very ecstatic about that.
Autumn next...
