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.
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.
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