A Few Final Thoughts on Korea

I really wasn't able to give my time in Korea it's due recognition in the frenzy of the last few weeks, so I wanted to post up a few remaining pictures and give some closure to this small chapter of my life.

Is she not just the cutest thing?!?  This is my year and a half old niece (cousin's daughter) whom I met for the first time recently.  She could quite literally be the pudgiest, roundest child I have ever encountered, and it brought me so much joy to look at her.  I had to resist the urge to bite her cheeks or simply gnaw on one of her limbs.  The photos were a great souvenir of my a spent with my cousin and her family, but something else remains indelibly etched in my mind from that day.  As we were all sitting around together she said, "It's nice to have a lot of family around."  I definitely felt something at that moment.  Maybe it's because she could still say this to me after not having seen one another for 20 years.  Maybe it's because I realized this statement acknowledged an implied emptiness in the absence of family.  But mostly, it's because I felt the impact of how true her statement was.  By going to Korea, I gained a new subset of family that was virtually non-existent in my life up until now.  This one thing is probably more valuable than the sum of all my other experiences and travels there.  With family, you have no choice but to take the good with the bad, but at the end of the day, having them is a blessing.

Work was tiring.  I am not a morning person, and I hate getting up in the mornings... I loved it all anyway.  

Look at these faces.  They are what got me up in the mornings and kept me going.  This is actually my bus crew.  Every Wednesday, I took one of the buses after school to Pyongchang Dong to tutor.  Let me say, I felt like a bit of a rock star as the kids fought over whom I would sit next to that day, whom I would talk to at the moment, and whose bus stop I would get off at upon arrival in the neighborhood.  Never in my life did I imagine that I would become a librarian nor that I would enjoy it this much.  If I do say so myself, I think I was a pretty cool librarian.  :)

Oh, and hanging around Seoul was a lot of fun too.  Korea is land of cafes.  Koreans love to sit around and talk and look like they are a necessary and indispensable fixture in a given room.  I thought I'd give it a try.  

It may look like I'm not doing much, but it's not as easy as I make it look.  Actually, the country is just big on aesthetics in general, so the majority of the places you come across are very well decorated and put together.  Case in point, an Italian restaurant/wine bar/cafe that I went to in Apgujung Dong...

And let me not forget to acknowledge the beautiful food that went with the beautiful decor in the restaurant...

And for those times when I felt homesick in Korea, there was one place that I could always go to make me feel like I never left the US.

There is definitely something about bulk food items that screams, "America!" ...that and pizza, hotdogs, and chicken bakes.  It seems that the love of free samples transcends cultural boundaries.  I'd like to think I did a little of the same with my time.  Holla.