Home Sweet Home?

As I look through the last of our photos from the trip, sitting here in my living in Korea, I know that our vacation is over. We still have a week, thankfully, to get prepared for the school semester and check things off our list like, "Pick up Epic". While sitting on a bus to transfer terminals in Narita (Tokyo, Japan), I noticed someone was touching my leg. No, not a creepy guy or an accidental bump by someone who says "excuse me", but a 10-year-old Korean boy, still wearing his neck pillow from the plane, oblivious that he is breaking my personal space. Why? Because there is no personal space in Korea, or Asia in general. He continues to bump my leg as we ride the bus. Welcome home.

As we got in our car last night, I sat in the driver seat feeling cramped, thinking how small our car feels after having driven a rental for a month. I feel like I'm sitting on a phone book. I go to start the car. Oh yeah, it's a stick shift. As we drive through the side street of our neighborhood, a car pulls out of an apartment complex and cuts me off, then continues to drive slowly. Your car is small, therefore you never have the right of way.

It is these small idiosyncrasies that remind me that I am home, back in the "land of the morning calm". But I find myself more irked by such things than I used to be. I always used to subscribe to the idea that we choose live and work in a country other than our own, therefore we subscribe to their rules and culture. But after nearly 4 years, I am growing tired of it. Friends we have here have talked about knowing when it's time to leave. You can just sense it in a person, this restlessness that grows in agitation over simple things that make no difference individually in the big picture. But it is the buildup of getting cut off, shouted at, or whatever happenings that leave a person feeling undignified--they become the straw that breaks the camel's back.

And so it is with myself that I can sense my mood is different. My friends here are great, my work load light, the beauty of the mountains all around us. But I know it is time for us to move on. It will be a challenge this semester to stay positive, to focus on the good, and not to itch for the day we head back to the States. If you pray, please do so for me in this.