It's 11:00 at night here in Daegu. Rebs' stuff is sitting in 3 open suitcases as she gets one last good chat with our friend Narina before we head home for two months. My stuff is mostly packed in one bag in the bedroom. I've been slowly adopting the minimalist attitude over the past few months, one of the reasons we've chosen not to carry a cell phone when we're home. Feeling like my world is cluttered, I've been seeking a solution. Now that the school semester is over (if you're unaware, we teach English in Korea), I am really looking forward to the time away, the chance to step out of the picture and look at my life in Korea from a distance.
It feels a little weird going back to the States after being gone for two years, and having not lived there for three. Rebs and I were talking about the reverse culture shock we expect to feel--noticing things we had forgotten about when we first left. In a sense, we've become weird. We now know and (as much as is possible) understand the Korean way, and have somewhat adopted most of those methods for ourselves. But in doing that, have we lost some of our western logic? A more tangible example for people who haven't lived in another country, specifically Korea, is personal space. In Korea, the larger the city, the smaller the proximity of personal space available. This is why it's not uncommon to have your nose in someone's armpit on the subway, or get shoved aside by a halmonee (grandmother) with her purse as a battering ram on the bus. I just imagine myself going home and bumping into someone in a packed store and continuing to walk on without noticing, then having that person turn around and call me names. Rebs also says I need to work on my driving skills. And we're not sure what's going to happen with driving because when we got our Korean driving licenses, we had to turn in our American ones. So we're going to the DMV when we get back and see what they say. I can only imagine the look on the lady's face when she sees my license all in Hangul.
But it's all worth it to get some much needed time with family and friends. If you're in Colorado, Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Kansas, drop us a line because we'll be around!
PS - this is Dusty writing, not Rebs.
