And I think it's gonna be a long, long time

Let's have some fun with math!

According to TimeAndDate.Com, it's been 1,497 days since I moved to South Korea (I'm rounding up by 20 minutes or so because dumb man am bad at numbers). It's been slightly longer than that since I sat down to write this very anxious post the evening before my flight. I initially planned to stay here for one year, so I overshot my original target by 1,132 days.

1,497 days is 35,928 hours. 2,155,680 minutes. 129,340,800 seconds. Want to put that in perspective? The movie Paul Blart: Mall Cop, for example, is 91 minutes long, which means that if you started watching it the day I left Canada, you could have watched it exactly 0.5 times before jumping off a cliff.

I could go on but, mercifully, I won't. My point is that holy hell, it's been a bit! From the day I wrote that first post I knew I'd be wrapping this blog up eventually but now that it's here...damn. It's a strange feeling. Leaving Korea feels a lot like when I first left Canada, like I'm getting ready to go on a long vacation somewhere. But I'm not. I'm going home. Right? So why does it feel like I'm leaving home and going somewhere else? Where do I belong now? Who am I? What am I?

So...I have a lot on my mind. To distract myself, I thought I'd use this final post to engage in Teacher Mode™ one last time and write myself a report card, do a little self-evaluating on how this grand life experiment played out. Kind of a letter back through time from present-day Justin to that guy four years ago, weighing his luggage on a bathroom scale and hyperventilating into a paper bag because he doesn't know how he's gonna order a cup of coffee when he gets there.

Hey, Past Justin: It all worked out.

Things You Did Well

This is a tough section to write, because I rarely ever talk myself up. I'll try to be objective here in any case. Oddly enough, the first one to come to mind was "Looked out the window a lot." I took a lot of trains and buses and cabs here, and I feel like I did a good job of observing cityscapes and countrysides through which I traveled. I noticed a lot and appreciated a lot. I'm glad I did that.

I did a lot of cool new stuff, too! I traveled a lot, just like I wanted. I saw countries which I never thought I'd get the opportunity to visit. I explored Seoul so thoroughly that I could draw a map of it from memory. It would be a terrible map and you would definitely get lost, but I could...you know, draw it. A lot of this was thanks to Chloe, but I'm glad I never shied away from an opportunity to see or try something different.

Hey, you know what? I think I represented my country well. That's not something I thought about until now, and I never imagined I would have ever cared about it, but it turns out I kinda do. I worked with a lot of people from various places around the globe, and my friends and coworkers would joke that I was the stereotype of the "overly polite Canadian." Nice compliment, eh? Always made me smile at least.

The biggest one though is that I learned a lot. I learned far more about Korean culture and history than I had any idea existed. I'm not an expert by any means, and my education will continue for a long time after I leave this country, but what I have learned has profoundly altered the way I see the world. I learned a lot about myself as well, my morals and values, how I respond in different situations, what my priorities are as a person. I'm sure these things will change in the future, just as they change throughout the course of anyone's life, but the way in which they will change has been fundamentally molded by my time here.

Things You Did Poorly

I didn't study Korean enough. I've made some major strides in the last year and my skills have improved dramatically since I started sitting down and digging into some textbooks, but the first three years here...I shudder to think where my skill level would be if I'd been as committed from the beginning. The worst part was that I wanted to learn, and I'd become jealous of other people who came after me yet seemed to be learning more, but never did anything to fix it. There's a lesson in there somewhere, I'm sure.

I put weight back on. And then lost some! But mostly just put it back on. Food and drink in Korea are just too damn good and cheap so it's not like I had a choice. Well...I mean I could have tried some portion control and exercised more. I guess.

This contradicts what I wrote above a bit, but I do think I could have gotten out more, made more plans, gone on more trips. There were a lot of days when I'd just decide I wanted to be on my own, in my apartment, just relaxing from a long week of work and watching TV or something. I don't regret a single time I ever went out exploring, but I regret those wasted days.

And I didn't update this blog enough. Gotta mention that.

Pleasant Surprises!

Obviously the biggest and best: I got married here! Before I left Canada, I hadn't given more than a couple seconds thought to the concept of even dating someone here, let alone meeting someone and actually getting married to them! And really this should be the headline on every great thing that happened to me here, because none of it would have been possible without Chloe. Past Justin, you have no damn idea how lucky you're gonna get.

I've mentioned this before and often, but: food and drink. I'd never actually tried Korean food before moving here so I had no idea, but there was virtually nothing I wouldn't eat again. Plus soju! And makgeolli! And too many amazing soups to list, the names of which I cannot even spell!

But of course, it was the people who were the biggest surprise. People who went out of their way to try to make things easier for the huge, dumb foreigner who kept mispronouncing words and knocking stuff over. The people who welcomed me into their groups and wanted to hang out with me despite my having the vocabulary of a three year old. No one ever shamed me for not speaking enough of the native language, or not knowing enough of the culture to get by. I was never ostracized for my differences, I was never treated as the Other. I was always welcome, always part of the group. There's a lesson here too.

Biggest Heartbreaks

Work wasn't everything I hoped it would be. The internal conflicts and nature of the Hagwon system itself made it as difficult as possible to actually be a teacher the way I always envisioned I would be. I'm proud of myself for never just giving up and compromising my principles though. It would have been much easier for me if I had, but my soul is intact. That's worth it.

And there were a lot of hard goodbyes. That's the nature of living and working here: you meet people, you get thrust into situations where you end up spending time with some of the coolest and most interesting people you've ever met, and then they leave. Or you leave. And it's not like moving to a new town where you might still have the chance to connect from time to time. It's moving to a new timezone. A new continent. And nothing is certain. 

So there were a lot of hard goodbyes. The hardest ones came at the end.

Final Thoughts

There's so much. I didn't even get into a lot of the minutia, like discovering a love of sci-fi literature over the last four years, or learning about the magic of podcasts, or playing Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. That all happened here as well. What else am I forgetting? When this post is published and this blog is concluded, what more will I remember that I'll regret adding? Where am I? When am I?

So still a lot on my mind, it seems. But I think I can definitively say that everything turned out well. I always did my best, or tried to at the very least. And if not, I think I know how to be better. I know how to work harder, to be smarter, to take initiative. I know how to look out for myself better than I used to. I know how to detect a lie when I hear one. I know how to stand up for others when they need it. I know how to approach new situations, and how to consider things from perspectives that would have been unimaginable to you, Past Justin.

Past Justin. Ah you lucky, lucky man. You're gonna change in ways you can't even conceive of yet. You're gonna leave Canada as a living pile of anxious, sleep-deprived misconceptions and return with a tattoo on your arm, a wedding ring on your finger and maybe 10% of a second language in your head. And I don't know what's gonna happen to you next, but I know it's gonna be great.

So don't panic. It all worked out.

The last title:

It's raining again: Travels in Jeju, Yeosu and Suncheon

Chloe and I got back from our rain-soaked tour of south South Korea on Tuesday, and holy damn it was fantastic. I've been hearing about how beautiful Jeju is for years and it absolutely did not disappoint. For this post I'm gonna write a short day-by-day description of what we did and saw and ate, accompanied by just a whole bunch of photos. I will try and fail to make it somewhat enjoyable to read along the way. So here we go!

Day 1

After a short one-hour flight down from Seoul, we took a taxi to the southern half of Jeju. Our first stop was at a gigantic green tea field and museum for Osulloc, one of Korea's most famous tea companies. We proceeded from there to a nature park and hiked alongside a river to view some gorgeous waterfalls. Jeju is a volcanic island and over time the rock formed into some really interesting geometric shapes through a process called "I Don't Know Please Don't Ask Me." We also visited a teddy bear museum with a pretty huge collection, including one that had been auctioned for over $200,000. Dinner that evening was probably the best of the entire trip: Cutlassfish which was nearly as good as the steak we ate in Florence.

Green tea field

$200,000 bear

It was so incredibly good

Day 2

The next day we traveled out to a new AirBnB and got to hang out with the nicest dog ever. We visited a few volcanic rock beaches which showcased more beautiful rock formations and tropical foliage. Jeju Island is essentially what Korea would look like if it were filmed on location in the Philippines. It was really interesting to see a culture that I'm now so familiar with but in a completely different natural setting. This was also the day that I discovered Jeju's best beer, which is oddly not nearly as popular as its counterpart made by the same company. I spent a lot of time seeking it out and hoarding it after that.

Day 3

This was my favourite day of the trip. We first visited a famous rock formation in a bay along the shoreline before heading up to our next hotel near Seongsan Ilchulbong, a volcanic mountain about 180 meters tall. We hiked to the top in about 20 minutes and enjoyed the most gorgeous views of Jeju Island of the trip. At this point we had been battling the rain on and off, but we got a nice break in the weather during the hike. The top of Seongsan Ilchulbong is a very well preserved caldera and the whole mountain looks like some sort of medieval fortress. The hike to the top is a popular activity for visitors to Jeju and it's pretty easy to understand why. We also hiked up the coastline that evening to enjoy a delicious spicy fish soup for dinner. I ate far more seafood on this trip than I would have thought myself physically capable in the past.

Seongsan Ilchulbong

Jeju Island from the summit

Day 4

Today was our day for some outdoor hiking so naturally it was also the day it rained pretty much nonstop. At this point we became aware that a pretty major typhoon was approaching Jeju Island and we had begun seeing the early effects of it. We first visited the dark forest, which grows so densely that about ten meters into the treeline it becomes as dark as night. We hiked some trails through the forests that grew on top of a series of inactive volcanoes and lava tubes. These were a bit hard to see due to the heavy tree growth and the inclement weather, but it made for a fascinating hike. We climbed a separate volcanic hill out in the countryside and saw some spectacular views during a few short breaks in the rain, and finally walked along a volcanic beach before heading home for the night.

At this point, unfortunately, Chloe was making some last-second changes to our flight and travel plans, as it became clear to us that we would have to get off Jeju Island before the weather became much worse. We had plans to meet our friends in Yeosu, but many of the flights throughout the weekend were already being cancelled. Thanks to Chloe's planning we managed to get out early, but this ended up being our final day on Jeju. Truly a beautiful island, and one I'm looking forward to seeing again in the future.

Day 5

Our flight to Yeosu was by far the shortest, emptiest flight I've ever taken. Yeosu is just over 100km from Jeju island, and more than half the plane was empty. All told the flight took around 40 minutes; I had barely started reading my book when the captain announced that we had begun descending into the airport. We took a short rest when we arrived in Yeosu before heading out in the evening to visit Yi Sun-Shin square. I learned that during the Imjin war, Yeosu was where they had built the turtle ships that helped Admiral Yi defeat the invading Japanese navy. There was a full-scale model of a turtle ship near the harbor which normally allows people to enter and explore, but was unfortunately being renovated while we were there. We later saw on the news that Jeju had taken a pretty huge beating in the storm, and we were grateful to have gotten out when we did.

Day 6

On the sixth day we met up with our friends and toured around Yeosu, which was how we discovered that nearly everything had been closed down due to the approaching typhoon. We still managed to see some pretty cool stuff and the weather wasn't too bad throughout that day. One of the reasons I wanted to visit Yeosu in the first place was because of a song by the Korean group Busker Busker, titled "Yeosu Night Sea." They have a beautiful coastline and harbor and it was really great to get to see it. I spent a lot of this trip marveling at a lot of Korea's natural beauty, which you don't always get to experience when you spend most of your time in Seoul. That night I also learned about a traditional Korean card game called "GoStop," which I originally thought I was quite good at until I started an extremely long losing streak. Really fun game though. I just suck.

Day 7

Almost there! Day 7 was Chloe's birthday, so after celebrating together with out friends we headed up to Suncheon, our final destination for the trip. Suncheon was an oddly quiet city, and it actually felt a little eerie to travel through. I had this nagging feeling the whole time we were there that I should have been seeing more people than I was. People were probably just staying in as a result of the weather at the time, but it still felt a bit odd. But we had a great time exploring the city and visited an enormous garden not far from our hotel. It was a bit late when we went, but we still saw some gorgeous floral arrangements and exhibits. My favourite thing there was the Bridge of Dreams which crossed a river connecting the east and west halves of the garden. The wall was covered in small drawings done by students throughout the area. There must have been thousands, possibly tens of thousands, and each drawing was unique. It was a really interesting concept.

Later that night we also discovered that Suncheon is pretty famous for its cooking, and we had dinner at a tteokgalbi restaurant that was so good we made a point of returning the next day for lunch.

The Bridge of Dreams

Day 8

And so we came to the last day of our trip. Our first stop was to a small village that had been constructed as a film set, and was the former shooting location for a number of Korean dramas. It was incredibly detailed, and felt like wandering through an actual ghost town at times. There was a large section that looked like a low-income community set atop a small mountainside, with roads and steep stairways connecting individual houses. Afterwards we traveled out to a large wetland preserve on the coast of Suncheon bay, which was the home of a number of unique plant and animal species. We hiked to the top of a mountain observatory, and over the course of the 3 or more hours we were on the trail, we didn't see a single other person. For a while it seemed like we were the last two people left on Earth, as even the staff who ran the wetland preserve had gone home by the time we got down from the mountain. It actually got so spooky that we started playing "500 Miles" by The Proclaimers just to make the atmosphere a little less tense. Nothing bad could happen when that song is playing, right?

It was an amazing trip, and I am endlessly grateful to my wife for organizing and planning everything. My final days at work were pretty stressful, as can no doubt be inferred by my previous entry, and during that time I wanted so badly to get out and see the rest of the country. I'm thankful every day to be married to someone who works so hard to make these things possible for me.

Chuseok just concluded, so I'll be spending my last week in Korea getting ready for the move back to Canada and reflecting on my time here. I'll be concluding this blog soon, with one final post to come after this one. I'm not sure yet how to put a lid on this whole thing but I'll do my best.


Today's title:

The dog days are over

"Hi, I'm Justin Tisdale of the Quit Your Job and Move to the Country Caucus, do you have a minute to talk about quitting your damn job and moving out to the country?"

So begins the final, relatively short chapter of my life in South Korea. Chloe and I moved out to Gapyeong on Saturday, and we'll be living here with her parents until my flight back to Canada on September 20th. We already have a lot of awesome stuff planned for the intervening time though, including a trip to Jeju Island next week! I've never been before because I've been a lazy ass about planning it for four years, but my wife is decidedly not a lazy ass. So we're finally going and I'm stoked. After that, we're going to meet up with some friends to explore Yeosu and Suncheon, a couple cities in the south-western area of the country. Then I might just hope a boxcar train to wherever the hell and drift around for a few days, eating beans out of a can and playing the harmonica until people pay me to leave them alone.

As of Friday at 10pm, my fourth and final year-long teaching contract ended, so I'm officially on holiday! I just realized typing this out that this is the only time I've lived in this country without  having a job. From day one I was in training and since then I haven't had any substantive time off, apart from the few holidays and short amount of vacation time I was given each year. It hasn't really sunk in yet that I'm not on a schedule anymore, there's not any pressing need to catch a train back to Seoul later or anything like that. I'm excited to take some time to really enjoy living in this country outside of the context of "You have about a day and a half to have fun in this place and then you've gotta get home."

I have a lot of mixed feelings about my career as an English teacher in this country coming to an end. I'm sad about it, but not for the reasons one might expect. I'm gonna try to be as diplomatic as possible with what I'll say here because I'm not trying to burn bridges or anything, but I had some...let's call them positive-deficient experiences with my employer over the past few years. The people I worked for had, hmm...I would describe it as a creative interpretation of the truth, which lead to some pretty challenging and frustrating working conditions. This past term was particularly difficult because it was revealed to me that my manager had done some...let's say "interpretive math" with the number of vacation days guaranteed by my contract, so I ended up having to spend most of my days off working to make up for the difference. Combined with an already busy schedule, challenging material, high number of students a month-long summer intensives period lead to me spending the last three months too exhausted and stressed to really enjoy the end of my time in Seoul. In fact it got to the point where I was so frustrated that I set up an app on my phone to count down to the exact second my contract would end, and I would just stare at it from time to time willing the numbers to go down faster.

So I was sad because I wasn't sad, if that makes sense. I was excited to be done, relieved to no longer have to work for those sorts of people, thrilled to be free. That's not the way I wanted it to end, watching a timer count down to the very second my contract expired and then audibly cheering when it did. I wanted to not want to leave. I loved teaching, and I loved being in the classroom and helping my students, teaching lessons, making things fun, making a positive impact, all that stuff. It was truly amazing, and I always thought that when it was over I'd be regretful, that I'd need someone to talk me out of just signing on for another year even though I couldn't. Instead I practically sprinted out the door so I could go celebrate with my wife and our friends.

Imagine you're in a noisy room, and the sound is coming from a hundred different sources. You've been in there so long that you've gotten used to it, to the point where you don't even really notice or think about it anymore. And then, over the course of a day, someone just slowly switches each one of those sources off, until everything is quiet. So you suddenly feel like you can actually hear yourself think again, and you're not just vaguely uncomfortable or annoyed anymore. That's what my last day was like. And I'm kind of sad about that too.

But that's life, and I can either dwell on it or move on. I feel like with time, when the anger and the hurt subsides, all I'm going to be left with are memories of the good times I had and the great people I worked with. The weather is a bit cooler today, so I'm sitting outside writing this on the porch in Gapyeong, hanging out with the family dog and watching the clouds drift down a green valley, and right now everything is great. You know, if not for my job I never would have met my wife, never would have experienced this beautiful country. So it was a small price. A small, small price.


Today's title:

That's Amore: Honeymoon in Italy

In the single week my wife and I were on our honeymoon in Italy, I took over 1,600 photos. So forgive me if I'm having a little trouble knowing where to start this post. I will do my best to keep it brief but I have absolutely no intention of promising that I will do so. 

Wow, Italy. From the very first day we set out to explore Rome, we were overwhelmed. You can hardly turn a single street there without seeing something that makes you stop and stare and want to take a picture (hence: 1,600 of them in a week). There is always a beautiful old cathedral to look at, or a statue, or an ornate marble fountain. Even just the side streets with their cobblestone roads and endless rows of close-built three story buildings looked straight out of a classical painting. After a few days Chloe and I came to the same bittersweet realization: no amount of pictures we took could possible replicate the experience of actually being there, of seeing the actual scale and detail of everything. A lot of times we'd take a few photos and then just sit there, trying to just absorb as much as we could. I'm honestly not sure how the people living there don't go mad just running around trying to fully appreciate stuff.

This dome in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore is absolutely colossal and every inch of it contains an extremely detailed painting. And this is only one dome in a cathedral in a country with approximately six billion cathedrals.

I could go on but again, even a photo is inadequate to capture everything, so instead I'll just try to catalog everything we were able to see and do while we were there. On the first full day we went directly to the Colosseum for a tour (stopping a couple times along the way for some absolutely fantastic pizza). Funny story, actually: the tour guide we had booked actually ditched us at the Colosseum and never showed up to the way point we had been provided. We were there for about an hour trying to contact them and they never answered the phone, and though we both searched the entire area thoroughly we never saw another person from that company. The website we booked the tour through even tried to contact the tour company itself with no success until long after the tour was scheduled to start. We ended up joining with another company called Grayline (I Love Rome) and were given a fantastic tour of the Colosseum as well as Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum. Standing in the Colosseum itself and seeing what remained of the walls still rising remarkably far up into the sky was the first of a number of breathtaking moments on our trip. 

My amazing wife and I sporting our single blue earphone and short range radios that all the locals wear

After our tour, we also visited the Altare della Patria, Trajan's Column, saw the outside of the Pantheon and stopped by Trevi Fountain at night on the way back to our hotel. My wife and I travel a lot together and we're always able to pack a lot of stuff into a short amount of time, but this trip really took that to another level.

The next day was an early tour to Vatican City. The only way I can really describe that tour is to ask you to imagine you're walking down a long hallway, the walls are covered with screens which are all playing a different movie at the same time, and after three hours try to remember what your favourite part was. It's indescribable. If you could somehow magic away all the people and then spend a week  wandering the halls, you might just start to get a handle on the sheer volume of stuff. We had three hours. I don't have any photos of the Sistine Chapel as they were strictly prohibited, but if you're ever in the mood to have a quiet stand in maybe the most fascinating room on Earth, it should definitely be at the top of your list.

The ceilings in the Vatican were covered in thousands of these detailed carvings, except they're not carvings, they're paintings designed to look exactly like carvings because [head explodes]

I think this was called The Big Church or something?

After two full days in Rome, it was off to Florence! Once again, our first full day there was all go. We saw the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella first, and after a quick tour we began exploring the rest of the city. The best thing about being a tourist in Florence is everything is pretty close together and easy to find. We also went up to Piazza del Duomo that day, and just before sunset we made it up to Ponte Vecchio and Piazzale Michelangelo and...well,

Yeah. Just go to Florence.

Damn I'm only up to day 3 or so? Okay gonna really start hustling through the rest of this. Next day was our bus tour throughout Tuscany! This might have been my favourite day of the entire trip, but it's also tied with every other day. We first visited the town of Siena, followed by a trip out to the Famiglia Mazzarrini winery for a really fantastic lunch and not a small amount of wine sampling. After that we were off to San Gimignano where I took the below photo of the Italian countryside (itself, somehow, also a deliberate work of art). We also had "The best gelato in the world" there, though there were two gelato places both making that claim and they were directly across from one another, so I'm skeptical. It was very good though. And then a visit to the Leaning Tower of Pisa before heading back to Florence. Just typing this out is making me both physically exhausted yet also strongly desiring to go back. 

The next day we got to go inside the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the first picture on this post) before heading up to the Uffizi to explore on our own. Again, I do need to stress that I have literally thousands of photos of all these things and could write about fifty pages on each one of them, and the only reason I'm not doing so here is because I've already been writing this for an hour and I still have like three more days to cover and definitely no one is still reading by this point. 

I became really interested in Emperor Trajan both because of this trip and because he's a playable leader in "Civilization VI". This bust of him is really cool.

Whoa, I haven't even mentioned the food yet. The food! Oh my god the food in Italy, and specifically the steak in Florence. I don't think I can ever have steak again. Every meal we had was incredible and we tried quite the variety of dishes. Every restaurant had its own house wine which was invariably fantastic and I'm not sure if I've stressed this enough, but you gotta just go there and eat some food. Chloe came up with a pretty great system that lead us to a lot of excellent places: if they don't post pictures of their food outside, odds are it's gonna be good. Hell, the best pizza place we went to didn't even have labels on the pizza they sold because the old guy who ran it probably just makes whatever he feels like making that day. Find those places. Go to them. And for the love of Christ go to Florence and eat the steak.

DO IT

We left Florence and headed back to Rome the next day, but before doing so we managed to squeeze in some time at the Central Market and then popped over to the Galleria dell'Accademia to see Michelangelo's "David" in person. I don't think I was ever made aware that the statue of David is five meters tall before going there, so needlessly to say I was pretty stunned. There are things you'll notice about the statue that you can't really appreciate from photos so, once again: you just gotta go.

Back in Rome, we had some time to actually go inside the Pantheon and visit the tomb of Raphael, who I think was some sort of famous artist before he became a Ninja Turtle. We stopped by the Piazza Navona afterwards for lunch, and of all the things we did on our trip, this is the one I think about the most. We were seated at a small table outside, right next to the street and not too far from another gorgeous obelisk-topped fountain surrounded by intricately carved marble statues. We ate some pasta and pizza under gorgeous late afternoon sunshine while a band set up and played a medley of Italian music just across the street from where we were sitting. This is the place I go to the most in my mind now when the stresses of everyday life start to get to me.

Alas, the final day. Our flight was scheduled to depart at 7pm so we managed to visit the Bocca della Verita (the Mouth of Truth) and did some sightseeing near the Circus Maximus across from Palatine Hill. We kind of dragged our feet on the way to the airport, neither of us really prepared to go. We packed up our bags and laughed at how we were just 500 grams below our maximum luggage weight limit now that we had loaded up on souvenirs to bring back home. We talked constantly about everything we had done and everything we would do when we returned, as we were already certain we would. 

And I can't think of anyone I'd rather see the world with than this amazing woman.

Today's title:

Cherry blossom ending (벚꽃 엔딩)

I'm at work right now, so I figured I'd type out a quick update while I'm waiting for my students to show up. Chloe and I will be leaving for our honeymoon in Italy this Saturday ("Fuck yes!" as they say in Italy) so I'm sure I'll be writing a long post about that, probably several weeks or months after actually returning to Korea. You know, one of these days I'm going to go through some of my old posts on this blog and just be super duper embarrassed about how many times I make the "I DON'T UPDATE A LOT HA HA" joke.

It's early into summer yet and this will be my fourth full summer season in this country so I'm just about ready to dig myself a nice cave in the side of a mountain and hide there. I've been walking to work pretty much every day since the beginning of spring and it's been fantastic. I got to watch the cherry blossoms emerge on the trees along the way and then change slowly to green. It's a pretty relaxing way to start the day, and one of the few things about my job for which I remain thankful is that it affords me the time to do this every day. Plus all the extra walking and biking has caused me to slim down a bit in the past few months, so that's a nice bonus.

Early Springtime

 

Mid-transition

As soon as I get back from Italy the new term will begin, so not a whole lot of transition time there. Probably still gonna be pretty jet-lagged when I teach my first couple classes, which will be more or less indistinguishable from how I usually teach so no worries there. 

Actually, speaking of the next term, that reminds me of another reason I wanted to do an update. I just realized that this blog will actually be coming to an end within the next few posts, because the next term will be my last as a teacher in Korea. I'll be wrapping up the next term just before the end of August, and around mid to late September, I'll be flying back to Canada to start the next chapter of my life. It'll be a lot similar to the chapters before I moved to Korea except I have a wife and a tattoo now so things are definitely looking up.

I honestly can't believe it's been almost four years since I first moved here. I can't believe I've been gone so long, yet it's gone by so quickly. Just a fair warning in advance, a lot of the next few posts will probably be crammed with nostalgia and bittersweet reflection, so if that sounds like a roller coaster of laughs to you I happily invite you along for the ride. 

Until then, I'll leave you with today's title, which is definitely my all-time favourite song from this country: