There I was at 6:30am in my wonderful private hostel on Geojedo, turning off my alarm and frantically trying to get myself out the door by at least 7 to catch a local bus to the bus station. Dogs were being walked, countless teens and tweens were on their way to school for the day, and an overcast sky hung above us to conceal the sun. After 40 minutes on the local bus, I got off at the intercity bus station, bought a ticket to Busan, and jumped on 10 minutes later.
As you may have noticed, this entry is a little out of sync. Half this article takes place before Wando. I’ve never been one to shy from flashbacks or flashforwards in my storytelling so long as they serve a purpose, and there’s a reason I’m jumping around here. These events did quite a bit to recontextualize my trip but, not only that, in fact my time in Korea itself.
Why a bus to Busan? Well in Korea they have this fantastic app called Naver. I have found that, for most purposes, it is superior to Google maps, particularly when it comes to UI. It does not, however, do everything well. In an effort to go from Geoje to Wando, Naver suggested I go to Busan first for a bus, and then take a bus from there to Wando. I hadn’t had an issue before and so I decided to listen to its directions.
For whatever reason, I was a minute later than Naver planned for me to be, so its original bus recommendation wasn’t viable. There was another bus in only 7 minutes, however. Otherwise, two hours. I paid for my ticket and hoped on sooner rather than later, and this is where things went awry.
I’m on the bus for around four hours, making my way literally from one end of the country to the other. My ticket tells me to get off at a place called Yedang Bus Stop where Naver then suggests I buy another ticket bound for Wando. I hadn’t had time to check any of this before getting on the bus due to the rush, but I check the streetview and this is what I see:
I get a little freaked out. There’s no discernible bus station or kiosk for buying tickets I typically find. I can’t read Korean and so I’m unsure what it says. I decide I’ll be able to figure it out once I get off the bus. When I eventually did exit, the driver asked to see my ticket to triple confirm this was my stop.
I get off and there isn’t anyone. It’s around 2pm, so that could be expected, but I mean not a soul. Tons of stores closed, there isn’t anyone inside the one “convenience store” across the street, things are in general just quiet, and there really isn’t anything to do. According to Naver, my next bus should be there within 20 minutes, so I’m running around to figure out how I’m supposed to get on it.
Luckily, two high school boys walk into the shop and shout for the clerk to buy a soda. They don’t seem interested in me, and once the lady does come out, they pay before I start using my translation app. This clerk doesn’t speak any English. This clerk – who was quite advanced in age – doesn’t even own a cell-phone and doesn’t know how to use mine. She flags down the two boys who sort of scoff at what’s going on but use their translator to tell me:
“There is no bus to Wando.”
I panic and look to the clerk who shrugs and nods. I start sweating and think I’m going to break down. Instead, though, something unexpected happens.
I am unequivocally exuberant. A smile bleeds its way slowly to my face, my eyes widen, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up. My breathing quickens and butterflies flood my stomach. I am alive in a way I have not been for some time.
I am faced with the possibility I have no way of leaving the most boring town in Korea. While I am sure there are smaller villages out there, coming from Seoul this is a hamlet and my brief investigation shows no signs of anything to do except look at goats or search for street cats. I literally can’t find any demographic data or anything except geographic information on this place. I have been in remote jungle villages constructed of reeds that were easier to learn about than here! Furthermore, no one speaks English so far, and there are no signs of lodging. A list of problems to be solved, and a challenge that requires me to think.
I start searching the dimly lit shop filled to the brim with merchandise they probably only need to restock once a month. The clerk and highschoolers seem taken aback at what might seem a manic episode. I find a piece of paper on the wall that looks like a schedule and recognize the writing for Wando. I point it out, the boys laughingly try to tell me again there is no bus before actually reading the paper. They ask the lady and the answer changes. Now the bus comes at 5:15. Problem one solved.
But now I’m faced with sitting on a curb for 3+ hours for a bus. This route doesn’t match my energy and there’s always the chance that bus simply passes by, so I started looking on the traitorous Naver for things in the area. The sea is “close.” The larger city of Boseong is a $60 cab ride away – and as I see Boseong, I’m reminded of something I can’t quite put my finger on – but it turns out there is a train station in this town. I like those chances more than I like sitting and doing nothing, so I rush over to it.
The station is small, like one cavernous room and tiny bathrooms adorned with squatty-potties off to one side. It is filled with about six grizzled construction workers doing some sort of maintenance. There are no readouts on the wall about train information. There is, however, an officialish-looking man at a foldable table typing away on a laptop. I prepare to break out my translator when he greets me in – with the exception of his extremely heavy accent – pretty flawless English. Train will be here in six minutes. Next one is two hours away.
What followed was a short trip on what is essentially commuter rail, a navigation from the Boseong train station to their bus station to buy a ticket, and a reflection on why exactly I feel so excited at having to think myself out of this situation, the sort of which I have generally tried to avoid in Korea up until this point. In the meantime, I also recalled why Boseong sounded familiar to me.
Whenever I would look at “Top 100” or “Top 25” or even “Top 10” lists of what to do in South Korea, there was frequently this advertisement for a Boseong Green Tea Farm. Previously, I had always thought it looked cool to visit, but based on basic research figured it was too much of a pain in the ass to get to from Seoul. Mark this mindset for later, but also know I’ve found random people agreeing to the sentiment on the internet. For now, understand that I was delighted to discover the farm was only $10 away by taxi from the bus station. Without thinking, and in a departure from ingrained habit, I headed off.
As I exited the taxi carrying around 60lbs on my back, it began to rain. I smiled and headed for the tree-covered path. I bought a green-tea ice cream and devoured it. I marveled at the fields from under branches as it down poured. The rain became a sunshower and I decided to trek through with my mini umbrella. I snapped picture after picture. When it stopped raining, the humidity came to such a point that not an inch of my body was without sweat. As I reached the apex of the tea fields, able to look out beyond the hills and mountains to see the ocean just in the distance, I realized this was the happiest I had been on the trip thus far. Perhaps the happiest I had been since I first arrived in Korea.
Now, why was it this unexpected detour enthralled me so? What about having my original itinerary obliterated brought me such joy? Where had this energy been the past 16 months?
I’ll need to fast-forward, now, to a time following Mokpo and the first few days back in Seoul to close out some of my accounts. I had around three days to try and cancel my phone plan, transfer all the money I’d made in Korea out of it, and extract my national pension money while doing all the paperwork that came with that. I assumed these would take significant time, but in reality, everything only took maybe a total of an hour and a half. This meant I was afforded the opportunity to see several friends one last time, see Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse, and even find the chance to take one last trip.
On Tuesday afternoon, with a plane on Thursday, I was bored. Seoul was fine, but expensive, and everyone I know had work. Nearby Seoul, however, is the city of Suwon. It’s very high on the list of places one should go in Korea when you visit, and it’s only around an hour or two away. In the 16 months I’d lived there, I had never visited. For better or for worse, I’ve long been the type to shirk or avoid the “popular touristy” places when having them suggested to me, and Suwon fit that bill a little too closely. With time to kill (and cheaper lodging for nicer places), I headed there once I finished with my pension work.
Suwon is famous for a lot of things, but the Hwaseong Fortress is by and far the biggest draw to the city. The fortress encloses about half a square mile (1.3 sq. km), the area includes a palace, a large shrine, a smaller mountain-top shrine, and I believe a monastery. It’s not really as old as I figured it would be – built from 1794 to 1796 – and the walls are touted as a walkable experience. Inside the fortress has become a hotspot for nightlife and cultural events, but they have not strayed from the aesthetic forged over 200 years ago. I spent several hours walking around the entire fortress before going off to meet Thom from the playgroup who works down there. We had good ramen, saw the closed palace, drank some coffee, and departed so I could handle a few chores.
It’s important to establish that the forecast claimed all day that it would be raining the entire day, and not a single drop had fallen on me from the sky. With that in mind, I left my hotel without my umbrella for the first time on this trip to do laundry as everything was rather smelly. I got there okay. I got through the washing okay. I was 10 minutes away from getting through the drying when the sky broke open and unleashed what seemed like an ocean’s worth of water from above. I even waited an extra twenty minutes – around 11pm – for the rain to clear up, but the weather app informed me continuing such a route would be in vain. I then spent about 15 minutes running back to my hotel on the inside of the fortress as this downpour flooded the streets.
And I smiled the entire time. As I weaved in and out of the shelter provided by various store awnings, I smiled. As my feet splashed in the puddles strewn about the roads soaking my socks, I giggled. When I found shelter under the north gate to the fortress mere yards from my hotel, I instead chose to rush back into the rain, exuberant. As I returned, I found my clothing was still dry after getting them into a plastic bag on the way; I, however, was anything but. I stripped, set my clothing into positions to dry, danced for a time, and went to sleep. It’s one of my favorite memories from Korea.
Suwon was beautiful, with an endless amount of charm crammed into every corner I visited. I fell in love with the place mere minutes after arriving. The history was very well presented, the people were exceptionally nice, the aesthetic was picturesque, and the memories I made were happy ones. Around the time I left to meet my friend Thom it struck me: Suwon was so close, and yet I had never taken the time to visit. In over a year, an area but an hour away was avoided, along with all the joy it had brought me, merely because it was slightly less convenient to get to than my routine. That might be hindsight, but it helped me stumble upon something important about how I’d categorized my time in Korea while living there.
I suppose I should then get to the point. Why was it that finding myself trapped in the “wilds” of Korea or trapped in a downpour with freshly dried laundry brought me such glee? Why was my regrettable avoidance of Suwon so important to recognize?
“Journey before destination.”
Those savvy fantasy readers of you who have made it this far on my blog will recognize this as a quote from Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive. It is, beyond a doubt, my favorite novel series out there. The reasons behind this preference are multifaceted, but I want to focus on that quote and how it rang through my skull as I reconsidered Korea and the approach I had taken in my time there. The quote can mean a great deal of things – inside and outside of the series – but here it was a pretty literal interpretation of the words.
In this blog, sincerely referred to as a Journey, you have read about me being cornered alone in the jungle by an alpha macaque, spending the afternoon with an excessively poor family who refused compensation for roasting me clams, getting rabies shots in four different countries, dodging fireworks on the banks of the Neckar River, fleeing across Europe from COVID, entering Kosovo last minute while studying Chinese online as a major COVID wave shut down borders for three months, and many other adventures that required a willingness to embrace life and the chaos it threw your way. When I finally found a position in Korea, I had every intention to continue discovering adventures and continue expanding the compendium that was The Journey.
Then it took me four months to write anything, in which I mostly recanted upon the adventures I’d already left behind. By that point I’d constructed a routine structured mostly around playing Magic on the weekends and working a dead-end job I hated throughout the week. It took me another six months to explain anything about my own time in Korea. I was shocked, then, to discover just how much I disliked my own life. Looking forward to the end of work, looking forward to the end of the week, looking forward to seeing my friends and playing while dreading the coming work week. Life passed me by day after day after day. Despite having done fun things with fun people, no matter how hard I tried I could not shake the thought I was wasting my time. Life would continue to pass me by as I did little but look forward to the next step and the reprieve reaching my minuscule goals would afford me. There was a very real fear that I was wasting my life, even if parts of it were filled with things I enjoyed.
It was then, atop the tea fields of Boseong, that I realized I’d spent my entire time in Korea doing nothing but seeking my destinations. My trip to Suwon – and being confronted with the fact that I had previously seen the destination as little more than a step on an endless series of distractions instead of somewhere I could explore and discover – put this flaw in my approach to life in Korea on display.
There were times I’d gone out and had fun. Down the road, across town, on the other side of the country. I nearly always had fun, but not one of those trips had I taken in earnest. Not one of them did I take without considering what came after and how it affected the trip in the present. It got to a point in Korea that I was forcing myself to go out and do something somewhere new, not as an adventure to immerse myself in, but as something to do before doing the next. I’ve found it hard, these last few years, to write in this blog, my passion for the things I did fleeting for some unknown reason. I feel strongly now that it was because I considered them mere bullet points on the timeline of subsequent events that did little more than build to the next.
I was not reveling in my Journey as I feel fervently we all must do, merely preoccupied with its destination.
The discovery was somewhat earth-shattering. I had indeed wasted my time in Korea, in a way. I wasn’t appreciating every moment that came my way or that could have had I not been so distracted with what came after. I couldn’t help but recall lessons from my time with the monks and the book The Art of Happiness that really turned my life around when I first read it. They explained that attachment to anything can create unintended suffering if not controlled. They also explained that focusing on the future, imagining a future and the events that haven’t come to pass, can create an attachment to that imagined future.
That future is, of course, not real. You can’t control the world or how it shapes the future no matter how many times you imagine it, no matter how likely the result may appear. Never-the-less, one’s attachment to the permutations they might construct influences how they behave in the present, robbing that person of both their opportunities and their freedom to truly engage with a myriad of situations. We should not spend our time in the present shackled to a fabrication over which we have no control. One should be mindful of the future, but never at the expense of the moment.
It is a lesson I have learned before, and it is a harsh lesson that I have unfortunately had to learn again. I did in fact ignore many of the opportunities presented in Korea, and it is most likely a major reason for why I viewed so much of my time there with such angry contempt. I did – in a lot of ways – waste my time, my life.
But my time in Korea was not a waste. I met a lot of good people, I did a lot of great things. Simply because I was too distrait or numb to enjoy it fully does not invalidate the joy that the people and experiences brought me. In the end, I was able to look back and recognize my shameful disposition, look ahead to a future full of hope, and recognize in a content manner that it wasn’t where my focus should lie. I committed, then, to being more mindful of the now and accepting what could be as the chances came to me. In those last few days there in Korea, I gained some of the most tranquil experiences I had in country.
The Journey has finished with South Korea. The next stop will be back to Shanghai, China, where I made an exceedingly pleasing life prior to the creation of this blog. What chances it holds, I don’t know, and I don’t care to consider them; I am consciously instructing myself not to do so. Where I find myself now is a challenging place to practice my refound “live in the moment” mentality – I love my home town for what it is, but there isn’t much to do, and most of the few people I have left to interact with here have given up on much of life themselves – but I have little doubt it will serve me in days to come.
The Journey will continue, and I’m excited to see what it brings.
