One Year in South Korea

It's officially been one year since I arrived in South Korea as part of the EPIK program to teach English in public schools. When I boarded the airplane in Toronto one year ago I was nervous and excited for what was to come and the coronavirus was barely on the radar.

While the year has been stunted and stunned by the pandemic, and we are all waiting and wondering about the vaccine, I've had many unique and memorable experiences and plenty of absurd encounters and challenging obstacles.

I am now comfortable with my surroundings and have a basic routine. Still, I sometimes have surreal experiences where I can't believe I'm here. I might be sitting on a bus, surrounded by Koreans, and I realize that I'm all the way in Asia on the way to work. It's a feeling of being in a different world, so far from home. I smile and wonder how I got here.

The biggest disappointment of the year was that I wasn't able to travel beyond South Korea and I had limited opportunity to explore Korea apart from my city of Busan. Thankfully, Busan is a vibrant city with ample sightseeing opportunities and several beautiful beaches to enjoy. Hiking was a saving-grace during the lockdowns and social distancing. Brief jaunts to Jeju island and Seoul were welcome respites and highlights of the year.

Another disappointment is my failure to learn any of the Korean language during the year. True, I studied for a few months in the spring and completed an online undergraduate course in Korean, but I haven't retained much of what I studied and had little need to speak Korean in my daily life. Having the ability to communicate in Korean would have helped me to avoid several awkward situations this year, but the surprising prevalence of English-speakers in Busan made communication easy, most of the time. 

Relatedly, I haven't fully given Korean culture a chance. At least, not to the degree that I could have. I understand very little about Korean food and cultural traditions apart from what I happened to pick up at school. I regularly eat kimchi, even at home, which is about the only Korean thing I have consistently adopted in my everyday life. Most of the festivals and cultural events have been cancelled or cut short this year, so I had little opportunity to participate, unfortunately. With the pending COVID-19 vaccine, I hope to change this in the upcoming year.

An accurate representation of how I simultaneously fit and do not fit into Korean society is a recent experience I had while shopping for shoes. I entered the store not expecting the staff to understand English:

I tentatively asked, "Running shoes?"
The female staff person answered, "Over here we have our collection of men's running shoes."
I was very pleased and thought to myself, "I guess this is going to be easier than I imagined."
I told the staff my shoe size while showing "295mm" on my phone.
"Oh, we don't have your size here", she answered.
I asked for clarification, "You mean you don't have my size in this entire store?"
"Yes, that's right. We don't have your size at this store," she replied.
"Oh", I said, " Do you know another store I could try?"
"No, we don't," was her definitive answer.

That was the end of the interaction and I walked out emptyhanded (i.e. shoeless) yet impressed with her communication skills. Still, it was perplexing because usually when I am able to fully communicate with someone in English, I can achieve my goal. Here, it was a total failure.

Homesickness has been a challenge but regular video calls and chats have helped lessen the impact of being away from family and friends. It hasn't been easy to make friends here, although I have a few, so staying connected is important. I tried to send letters and postcards, as I always do when visiting a new country, but standard mail is not available from Korea during the pandemic, only expensive express mail. I have a stack of postcards ready to send out as soon as the postal service is back to its regular operations. Writing this blog has enabled the sharing of my thoughts and feelings this year. I hope it has been entertaining for my readers and I think it will be fun for me to re-read these accounts years after I've left Korea. 

So, was it worth it? Was coming to Korea worth giving up what I had in Canada? It's a very difficult question to answer and I suppose it's impossible to know for sure. I constantly second-guess my decisions and imagine other possibilities for my life. But when it comes down to it, yes, if given the chance to do it all again, I would choose to come to Korea at this point in my life. True, it would have been better without a worldwide pandemic, but I've had a good year and appreciate all that I've experienced so far. No matter what happens next, this first year has been incredible.