Farewell

Stripping down the walls and wiping out the drawers. Sending off the clothing and heirloom bottle openers and Thom Yorke posters. Change of address, phone cancellation, key pass off. Tomorrow I must leave my apartment of two and a half years, my palace on F Floor, the one room to house them all for more time than most take to get a graduate degree. In other words, this shit is real, folks. Korea is definitively over and it finally feels as such. Months of planning and preparation for a some day which is finally today.

Only one tear-jerking moment as of yet: 2 weeks ago my students threw me an early farewell party. They taped balloons and a message on the board. They insisted that I eat the entire cake alone (After much debate about whether they should contribute to its consumption by merely picking the white chocolate shavings off the top or each taking a sliver of the cake itself, in the end they opted for both). The part that realy choked me up though were the letters claiming that they'd "never forget" me and thanking me for being a "great teacher." Hold it down, be strong, you can cry on the boat across the Atlantic. After all, what more will you have to occupy your time?

I've spent my last month in the way I love best: eating all my favourite foods, singing my heart out at noraebang, and introducing everything I love about Korea to the fresh eyes of replacement teachers. Between meals, playlists, and tours, I've spent my nights for the past several weeks bidding a fond, inebriated farewell to my haunts, my neighbours  my hometown, and all my friends. I don't use "my hometown" lightly here: I'd hate to be one of those foreigners who comes back from abroad and feigns a closer connection with a country after 2 years than after 20. However, since my family has left my hometown of Georgia, I've been faced with a unique dilemma. All the people I love are in one state, and all the places with which I am familiar are in another. It takes both people and locale to make a hometown, and now I don't have that combination anywhere in America. Until Korea empties of close friends, this is the most "hometown" I've got these days.

To all my friends here, thank you. There is little in my short years that I could describe as "stand out," but Korea has been an experience that will change me for life. I've experienced great happiness and tragedy here, and to the people who've shared either with me I am indebted. To everyone back home, it has been too long. Many will have to wait a bit longer, but I'm coming around the long way. Whether I see you before or after my trip this winter, I'm looking forward to the relationships in my life that I've always been able to count on, regardless of time or distance.

A coworker asked me this week what I regretted about my time in Seoul. Though a fair question, I didn't have an answer for him. Were I to be asked now I might say, "I wish I studied the language harder," or, "If only I could have made more local friends," but in absolute honesty there's nothing I would do differently. I came to travel, and I did a great deal of that. I came to hone my Korean, and I'm more than satisfied with where I've gotten. I came to bolster the resume and make paper: done and done. All the goals were accomplished without sacrificing comfort, experience, or fun. Korea has been good to me, and it will be under my skin during the foreseeable future.

너를 사랑했기에 후회 없기에 좋았던 기억만 가져가라 I don't regret having loved you, so carry with you only those memories which were good.

~Big Bang

Speed Update

I could be back in the states at 5:35 pm August 31st! Maybe. Stand-by is 1/4 of the price, but the uncertainty makes up for the other 3/4.

Summer Vacation

In an effort to take a last spin around Korea and keep things cheap on the eve of a much larger trip, I used my summer vacation last week to scrape west along the southern coast of the peninsula. Busan, as usual, under-performed, but it did make for a nice springboard into Jeolla Province, a collection of largely farming communities and islands in the south west.

The first stop in Jeolla was the historical capital of the region: Gwangju. Unlike Gyeongju in the southeast, Gwangju's history is much more modern. Rather than the seat of the ancient government, these citizens boast the birth of the modern one. Although "democracy" in South Korea was established after the war in the 50's, it didn't really take root until the 80's. To spare you the boring details, after 2 decades of "presidency," Park gets assassinated and the military wipes out the interim government. General Chun becomes the new "president" of the "democracy" and on March 18th the people of Gwangju start demonstrating. The "communist rebellion" is violently put down however, and in what Koreans consider their own little Tienanmen Square, somewhere between 127 (government's claim) and 2000 (most extreme estimate) civilians were killed. Visiting the memorial grave site left me with both the awe of meeting a celebrity (for I had studied this event when I was at Yonsei) and the humility of being faced with sacrifice (especially for something Americans hold in such high regard).

Jeolla is known as the bread basket of Korea, and the food there doesn't disappoint. The highlight meals were the barley bibimbap (substituting steamed barley for plain white rice) and the massaged duck (massaged in sugar-vinegar-red sauce!), but everything right down to the barbecue or steamed pork was fantastic. The surprising thing was that it didn't rely on any "specialty foods" that couldn't be procured in Seoul, like Andong did. It wasn't even that the seasoning was more brilliant or complex. By and large, the stand out difference in the south west cuisine was freshness. Be it vegetables, rice, or meat, every ingredient tasted like it hadn't been packed up, cooled, preserved, or shipped, probably because it hadn't.

Compensating for the regions lack of vast cities, Jeolla's natural wonders were both breathtaking and expansive. I took the time to get up a mountain once I arrived in Mokpo, Jeolla's primary port. In contrast to the sprawling, tawny mess of spray-tan tourists that is Busan, Mokpo was the most quaint I've ever felt from a Korean town. A combination of the quiet atmosphere, the islands throughout the bay, and the wreath of mountains gave gave the effect either a hot version of Hokkaido or some Michigan lake town that was miraculously also in Appalachia. As wikitravel could tell you, there's not much to do here beside eat ray or leave, but somehow you don't care. Scaling Yudal mountain in the late Friday morning heat was not exactly agreeable, but it turned out to be one of the few times I've gotten a sense of gratification from a climb. For me, altitude doesn't add much to nature, but peering out into what looked like a mountain range sprouting from the ocean was terribly impressive.