Obligatory Korea Blog

I wrapped up this blog on June 7, 2018, after finishing my ~1,600-mile bike ride across Europe, an odyssey I completed to cap my six years of teaching in South Korea. But as I predicted at the end of that entry, my relationship with Korea never really ended.

In August of 2018, I moved to Boulder to earn my MFA in fiction writing at the University of Colorado. There, I wrestled with deeper form of reverse culture shock than I'd experienced before, one that left me with a sense of disconnection from myself and my peers, and kept me in a perpetual state of scheming to return to Korea.

In 2019 I did return, to take summer language classes at 경동대학교, and shortly thereafter I began editing Korean textbooks for CU's Korean department.

Then in 2020, as was the case for most everyone, lockdown worked its wonders. On a personal level, it forced me into even deeper isolation and postponed my next visit to Korea until summer 2021. By that time, once I'd received both Covid vaccinations, I felt like I could responsibly travel again. But stepping back onto Korean soil was no longer as simple as hopping on a plane. After the 14-hour flight, I had to pay to be quarantined in a hotel room in Seoul for two weeks, the government's mandatory period for determining tourists were asymptomatic. The hotel's staff placed meals outside my room three times a day, and beyond opening my door to grab my food, I didn't move beyond those four walls for 14 days. More than once, while I burrowed into a draft of one of the novels I'm writing, the words of Tim Kinsella floated back to me: You won't get shit done til you go to prison.

In winter of 2023 I visited again to propose to my now wife, the woman I met during my first year of teaching in Busan. She's the most important reason I've maintained my connection with Korea, my deepest motivation for getting closer to the culture. Together, she and I have been building a bridge between our countries for 12 years.

I visited again in winter of 2024, and now I'm back once again, here in the summer of 2025, continuing on my journey toward language fluency and regaining my status as a legal resident. But we don't plan to settle here forever. We currently await good news on her U.S. immigration application, which we submitted over a year ago. We want to be fluid between both places, and so we continue working toward achieving that freedom of motion.

Whatever else has happened in the 7 years since I last wrote, Korea has been inexorably bound up with it. More than once I've wanted to resume my posts to this blog, but I wasn't sure how to do it.

I finished the biking portion of the trip on May 7. Here’s my Google maps trail of stars, mostly of places I reached by bike (pretty much everything from Barcelona to Birmingham), some I reached by train or plane (Paris, Dublin, and the south of Switzerland specifically), and a couple that I hoped to reach but never did (like that lone star in Wales).

The Route Since Last Time: Dover - Canterbury - London - Oxford - Birmingham

Final Distance: 2,650 km / 1,646 miles

Final Ascent: 16,322 meters / 53,550 feet

Everything since I stopped riding a month ago has been a blur. After hanging up the bike, I stayed with two of my oldest and best Busan friends, Chris and Holly, who in their two years since leaving Korea have bought a house in Birmingham and found jobs teaching and technical writing. I got a feel for life in their part of the world--catching football matches at pubs, meeting their friends and family, going out for curry, eating Sunday roast in beer gardens. I also got to spend time in a handful of other noteworthy English towns: Canterbury, Cambridge, Oxford, Warwick, and Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was born. Chris and I even caught a flight to his homeland (sort of--he’s from Northern Ireland but we visited Dublin in the South) for only 40 bucks round trip.

London more or less bookended my time in England. I stopped there for a few days at the beginning of May and then shortly again before my flight back home. I arrived there with no expectations and was blown away by the abundance of diversity and culture. I stayed at a hostel near Imperial Square and at every turn was confronted by a monument or statue that had me reflecting on a different historical event or era. And there were so many incredible museums throughout the city, many of which were free. It might have been my favorite city of the trip.

While in London, I also got to spend time with Katie, another of my oldest and best friends from Korea. She’s now getting a master’s in therapy and has found an apartment in a Korean pocket of London. She was always the most adept Korean speaker among us.

She, Chris, and I arrived in Busan with the same incoming cohort of public school ESL teachers, and Holly was only a month behind us. In parallel, we careened through the wildest of our initial months abroad, grew to integrate with and love our surroundings, weathered the pain of prolonged separation from family and the familiar, reveled in the ecstasy of travel and expat life, and ultimately found a sense of belonging halfway around the world. And now I’ll join them, and many of the other lifelong friends I made after settling in Korea, in letting those experiences inform the transition into life back home.

As of May 30, that’s where I’ve been. In Texas, getting ready to scope out a place to live in Colorado. When I touched down in the States, I closed the loop on not only this bike tour, but also the journey that began when I first boarded the plane to Busan. Six years and 20 countries later, much has changed--my worldview, my beliefs, my values, my sense of self, my interests, my trajectory.

Since the earliest months of my time in Korea, I’ve had a recurring dream that revisited me at least once during this bike trip. In it, I return to the States and find myself at the baggage claim, or riding in a car down the streets of my hometown, and I think to myself, “What did I just do? Why did I close that door?”

While walking through the exhibits on India, China, and Korea in the British Museum in London a couple days before my flight home, I felt an ache. I know I’ll get back to Korea. I still have significant ties there. Part of me even believes I’m meant to live in Korea, or some other country in the region, long term. Or at least to do another substantial stint out there.

But when I was out there, part of me always felt a pull to get back here.

And the longer I’m out here, the more significance my memories of my time back there will surely take on.

On and on.

Sometimes a place just won’t let you go.

The Route Since Last Time: Bruges, Belgium - Dunkirk, France - Dover, England

Countries Visited: 7

Total Distance: 2,291km /  1,423 miles

Total Ascent: 13,118 meters / 43,038 feet

There were so many bonds that I had to sever, and that had to be severed for me, before I moved from America to Korea. And when I decided to strike out from Busan two years later–to the far ends of India and Indonesia and dozens of destinations between, to wander until I stumbled onto my next path in life–a new teaching opportunity reeled me back to Korea for an additional three years. But not before visa issues nearly marooned me Stateside. Even this last January, when I loaded up my bike and started pedaling to the bus that was to start me on my way out of Korea, a bike malfunction, ice-covered trails, and a run-in with a troop of Korean soldiers–who were marching in drill formation down the trail that led to the station–all nearly conspired to make me miss my bus.

Mainland Europe didn’t want to let me go, either. Clear of the canyons of Luxembourg and the rolling landscape of southern Belgium, I thought it would be a straight shot to Dunkirk, France, where I planned to catch a ferry to England. And for a couple of hours it was. The terrain was finally flat, running between rows of trees along a low-lying canal. The sun cast the horizon in a golden glow.

But then the rain started. And soon it became a downpour. Even though I was clad in rain gear, water started to drain in under the tops of my boot covers and down into my shoes, down my chin and beneath my waterproof layers to my chest. As I pressed on, the wind ripped open the zippers on the sides of my poncho. Its flaps lashed my back. I weaved between flocks of sheep idling in the cycleway.

A woman smoking a cigarette under the overhang of a roadside apartment complex advised me to backtrack to a tram station on the coast. But I couldn’t understand her instructions, and I couldn’t locate the station on my phone. Finding it would probably necessitate more wandering than it was worth, and besides, there were only 25 miles to go. I was determined to cycle every inch of my route.

Signs for the port started to appear. Two miles to go. The wind kicked into high gear. My hands had long since gone numb. With my head down, I fought for each pedal stroke.

I pulled into the ferry ticket office, overjoyed that I’d made it. The attendant asked if I wanted to upgrade to the VIP lounge for something like 15 bucks. After that shitshow, I thought, why not? I was ready to kick back and warm up. I swiped my card and scrawled my signature onto the receipt with my red, swollen hands.

And then the attendant directed me back outside.

“Just present your ticket at that booth.“ He pointed at some obscure point down the road leading to the coast. “But you need to go now, if you want to catch the 6pm.”

Though all of the ferry signs showed entry for bicycles and pedestrians, the port was really only designed for car traffic. I fought my way to a checkpoint along the roadside and presented my drenched ticket. The attendant waved me on to passport control a little further down the road.

The immigration officer there was an Englishwoman, probably not much older than me.

“Where and when did you enter Europe?” she asked.

“At Barcelona, on February 28th,” I said.

“And what have you been doing here?”

“Cycling across Europe, on my way to see friends in Birmingham.” The wind was flinging droplets of stinging rain onto my arms and face.

“You’ve cycled all this way?” She gave me a look of disbelief that I’d grown used to, even become proud of, in interactions with people I’d met along the trail. I smiled and nodded. She craned her neck to peer out at my bike. “How long do you intend to stay in Birmingham?”

“A couple of weeks,” I said.

“Do you have a ticket out?”

I hesitated. I knew my answer wouldn’t win me any points. “Not yet. I’ve had to keep my schedule kind of flexible. I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get here.”

“Don’t you need to get back for work?”

“Well, I’ve been teaching in Korea for the last 5 years, and I just finished that job and won’t start graduate school until August.” The wind kept whipping my poncho into my face. My teeth were starting to chatter.

“How long have you known this friend in Birmingham?”

“We actually taught with the same program in Korea, so about 5 years.”

“Do you have a home to return to in the States?”

“When I get back I’ll stay with my parents for a bit before I get my new living situation settled near my university.”

“And which university is that?”

“University of Colorado.”

“Do you have an acceptance email or something that I could see to verify your enrollment?”

I flipped through my phone and found it, then handed it over to her, compliantly, promptly. I’d never been questioned so much at a passport control. Not in Asia, even in countries with stringent visa application processes like Russia and India. And certainly not in mainland Europe, where so far the borders had been void of any checkpoint at all. But I was providing honest, verifiable answers to her questions, and I’d read that my U.S. passport guaranteed me a tourist visa in the U.K. I stayed calm.

She scanned the email for a couple of seconds and handed the phone back to me.

“So far you haven’t told me what I want to hear,” she said.

My gut dropped.

“You don’t have a date of exit from the U.K. You don’t have a job. You don’t have a home to go back to. You’re traveling by bicycle, which is extremely unusual. Nothing you’re telling me is concrete.”

“I understand,” I said. The smile washed off my face. The wind was howling.

“I’m going to stamp your passport with a date by which you must leave the country, and if you overstay that date, there will be penalties. But before I do that, we need to fill out some paperwork with details of your stay. What’s your friend’s address?”

My stomach sank deeper. “I actually don’t have his address.”

“You don’t have his address?”

“No,” I said. I searched for something I could offer up. “I have the address of the hostel where I’m staying tonight, but I don’t have his address.”

“How were you going to get to his house?”

“Well, I knew it was going to take about a week to cycle up to him. So at this point I was just going to head in the general direction of Birmingham and ask for his address when I got closer.”

“When was the last time you were in contact with him?”

“A day or two ago.”

“A phone number, then.”

“Sure,” I said, unlocking my phone once more. But I already knew I didn’t have it. I paused for a second before looking up in defeat. “So, I know this is terrible, but we only communicate via a chat app that we used when we were in Korea, even for voice calls. So I don’t have his phone number.” I scrambled to the bright side before she could reply. “But I can call him on the app, right now, and we can get all the information we need.”

“Yes, let’s do that,” she said, “because this is getting worse and worse.”

I shuffled to the side of the booth where I could get some relief from the howling wind and called my friend, praying he’d pick up. Which he did, after only a few rings. I rushed the phone back to the immigration officer and then returned to the side of the booth while they chatted, hopping around to try to get warm, my teeth chattering more and more violently. After a couple of minutes she called me back over.

“Your friend has verified what you’ve told me,“ she said, “so I’m going to stamp your passport for entry.” Her expression softened, just a bit. “I hope the weather clears up for you. I’m sorry to give you such a hard time. It’s just that nothing you’ve told me is concrete.”

Those words, which she repeated again and again over the course of our 15-minute exchange (which felt more like an hour), played on a loop in my head as the ferry carried me across the choppy channel. In the weeks since my graduate school path became clear, I’d been inwardly rejoicing that I’d finally found a practical outlet for my creative impulses. That I was going to rejoin life in the States, but outside of the corporate strictures that had driven me to flee home in the first place.

But there I’d stood, on the threshold of the next phase of my journey, an entire continent closer to my next major undertaking in life, and the gatekeeper had nearly denied me entry on the flimsiness of those very strides.

Still, after all that trouble, she stamped my passport for the standard six-month tourist visa, well beyond the few weeks I told her I wanted or needed.

As the ferry neared England, the white cliffs of Dover jutted up from the churning ocean. For the first time I understood how such a small, isolated country could have been such a domineering global force for so many centuries. The weather and the landscape were impenetrable. Unforgiving. I cycled off the ferry and over to my hostel, just a mile or so down the street. It lay down a dark alleyway. After the heavy rains, dampness hung in the dorm. I fell into a deep sleep.

The next day the sun was out. I hiked to the ends of the trails atop the cliffs of Dover and looked out across the channel. In the distance, I could see the coast of mainland Europe, after all just a faint line behind me.

For some reason I thought it would.

The Route Since Last Time: Basel, Switzerland - Freiburg, Germany - Strasbourg, France - Saarbrucken, Germany - Luxembourg City, Luxembourg - Wellin, Belgium - Namur - Brussels - Bruges

Countries Visited: 6

Total Distance: 2,200km / 1,367 miles

Total Ascent: 12,984 meters / 42,598 feet

I settled on the rough sketch of my route using the maps at eurovelo.com, and while reading about the different cross-continental trails there, I could have sworn I saw that through Luxembourg and Belgium, I’d be freewheeling across flatlands to the coast.

Not the case. As I left Basel, Switzerland, I paused for a second at the nexus of three countries–Germany, Switzerland, and France–snapped a goofy selfie in front of the flags waving in solidarity there, dropped my last 10 franc note with a woman clutching a cup by the curbside, and embarked on one of the toughest legs of the journey yet.

The terrain stayed flat for a couple of days as I cross-crossed the border between Germany and France. But as I approached Luxembourg, the trail took me high up onto rounded plains, where clusters of wind turbines churned against the sky, and then shot me down into valley villages. The climbing then started all over again, over vast stretches of sloping farmland. Peaks and valleys the whole way.

Over the entire course of this trip, one question has been looming: What’s next? I didn’t renew my contract at the end of the last school year in Seoul because I’d spent much of the year prior drafting writing samples and putting together applications for MFA programs in fiction writing around the States. Acceptance rates for those programs are notoriously abysmal, but I gave it my all anyway. And even if I didn’t get in I figured I could just keep cycling until a better idea hit me.

By early April all I had to show for my effort was a pile of rejections, one acceptance to a school that wasn’t offering much in the way of teaching positions or funding, and one spot on a waitlist that I didn’t have a lot of hope of getting off of. Forging my way across unfamiliar, physically demanding landscape while trying to figure out where the hell I was going to land, and whether I was willing to go into debt to land there, was really starting to take a psychological toll.

The day I was to head into Luxembourg, I woke up in my tent at a campsite in Saarbrucken, Germany and checked my email. A spot had opened up at University of Colorado. They wanted to offer me a teaching job in addition to a spot at the program.

Phone service was in and out all day as I crawled up and down the hills. My thighs were burning. My head was filled with thoughts of how I was probably going to bungle the whole deal by not responding to some key email in a narrow window of time.

I texted my Dad to tell him how badly the hills were beating me down. As I passed one of the valley villages, a response arrived: “I heard good advice from a guy who climbed Everest. He said, let the mountain come to you.”

It’s advice I’ve tried to take to heart before, but when you’re in the thick of it, sometimes you need a reminder. I stopped trying to smash my way through the hills and instead just remembered that I was getting closer to relief with each revolution of the pedals. The acceptance wasn’t going anywhere, either, and soon enough I’d be able to iron out details with the university.

Still, the climbing didn’t stop. My hostel in Luxembourg City was at the bottom of a literal canyon, and to leave the city I had to climb out of it. Through the south of Belgium I rolled up and down never-ending stretches of two-lane highway, as if riding the world’s most painful rollercoaster, using every one of my 27 gears in the span of a couple of minutes to advance just a few kilometers. On the way to Brussels, my ascent totaled over 1,000 meters.

Now in Bruges, the terrain has leveled out. The end of the journey is in sight, just a few hundred miles away. I’m reveling in these moments, atop this plateau, my direction clear. But even if you can’t see the next mountain on the horizon, you can rest assured that it’s there. And if you can make peace with that, you’ll be all the more prepared to start your ascent when the time comes.

The land of free public transportation, endless cycle trails, and Alps perpetually on the horizon.

(Also the land where food is way too expensive and everything closes at 7.)

The Route Since Last Time: Montpellier - Sommieres - Avignon - Bourg Saint Andeol - Valence - Saint Vallier - Lyon - Brangues - Geneva, Switzerland - Lausanne - Bern - Basel

Total Distance: 1440 kilometers / 895 miles

Total Ascent: 8,472 meters / 27,795 feet

The mountains got more intense the closer I got to Switzerland. For the couple of days leading up to the border, I was making my way along the Rhone River, ascending slowly through a valley lined with snowcapped mountain ridges. But right before the border, it felt like I was climbing straight up for two straight hours. I passed a road sign bearing the name of the small village at the summit, Usinens, and a small Swiss flag. But after I flew down the other side of the mountain, Google told me I was still in France. I’m not sure when I actually crossed over. There was no sign or delineation. At some point I was just in Switzerland, on the road to Geneva.

It’s been interesting to see the changes in culture as I’ve moved through Switzerland. Around Geneva, French language and culture dominated. Outside Bern, everything became distinctly German.

I’d planned to cover about 50km a day on average, including rest days. But it’s ended up being more like 40 because I’ve lingered longer than I meant to in most major cities. Sometimes that’s meant seeing some incredible sights–in Geneva I went by the UN building and visited the museum next to the CERN laboratory. In Bern I toured the apartment where Einstein developed the theory of relativity. But it’s hard to do much of anything after two or more days of 70-80 miles of cycling, especially with how the mountains have been. I usually crash the night of arrival, spend a day chilling out, and and then dedicate another day to sightseeing.

My most recent sightseeing journey was a Hermann Hesse pilgrimage. His novels followed me through a few major phases of my life, from high school up through my late twenties. So when I realized his house/museum/gravesite was a 3 hour train ride away, I found some discount tickets, locked my bike at a hostel in Basel, and made my way down to Lugano in the south of Switzerland.

Again, the contrast in culture was stark. In Lugano, the language, the food, the architecture were all Italian. And the landscape was stunning. Tree-lined mountains dotted with clusters of villas shot up into the clouds from a lake in the middle of the city. Spring seemed to have already bloomed there, too–the magnolia trees were shedding pink and white petals onto the hilly streets.

It started raining just as I arrived, so I checked into my hostel, grabbed my free transportation card, and took a bus to the Hesse house. It was up in the mountains, on a winding residential street. I spent the afternoon learning about his life and travels. The woman at the front desk screened a documentary in English for me and then directed me to his gravesite. Amid rows of tombstones stacked with sculpturework, those of Hesse and his wife stood quietly in a corner, just a couple slabs of stone planted in the Earth. When I started walking back to the bus stop, the rain had let up.

After the bike fiasco, I started out from Barcelona on March 7.

The Route So Far: Barcelona-Arenys Del Mar-Girona-Figueres-Cadaques-Llanca-Perpignan, France-Leucate-Narbonne-Beziers-Marseillan-Montpellier

Total Distance: 512 kilometers / 318 miles

Total Ascent: 3,310 meters / 10,860 feet

Most Encouraging Moment: Yesterday, when I arrived at my airbnb in Montpellier, my host looked at my bike, asked where I’d come from, and said, “You're very courageous.”

Most Discouraging Moment: On my first night of camping, I pitched my tent under a tree. I woke up the next day to find that birds had pooped all over it. I cycled to a convenience store to buy wipes and alcohol and spent the morning scrubbing it down. (Pretty funny, actually.)

Favorite City: Girona, Spain

Most Picturesque City: Cadaques, Spain (proof below)

I generally figure out my lodgings between a day and a few hours in advance. I've stayed at a combination of hostels, airbnbs, and campsites. (Travel tip if you ever find yourself in France this time of year: Most campsites don't open until early April.) Occasionally, if I find a secluded spot a couple hours before sundown, I wait to make sure I'm out of sight, and then I pitch my tent.

Traveling along the ocean has been nice, but some of the most interesting sights have been inland. Girona is the oldest city in Catalonia. Figueres is the hometown of Salvador Dali (great museum there).

Not to mention, the trails along the coast in France have been getting swampy. Cycling through the mud along a canal, I could hear accordion melodies floating from docked riverboats, and I understood for the first time what the Louisiana bayou might have in common with France. And then yesterday I was really grateful when, halfway down a slim trail that extended across an inlet, a German cyclist told me that the mud ahead was basically impassable. He'd spent over an hour battling through it and had punctured his tires twice in the process. I backtracked a bit and rerouted inland over a bridge.

I found Spanish drivers to be way more considerate than French drivers. In Spain, along highways and back roads, there were often signs reminding drivers to give cyclists 1.5 meters of space as they passed. In France, there are no such signs, and it's about 50/50 as to whether a driver will give me space or even slow down. Sometimes they even seem to deliberately step on the gas when they get up next to me.

Mind's mostly empty while I'm cycling. A few times I've wavered between wondering why the hell I decided to do this and understanding that this exactly what I'm supposed to be doing.

Avignon is about 100km away. Might go the whole way tomorrow, might break it into two rides. I'll take my first substantial break there, and then I'll start heading north.

Here are a few more scenes from the trail. Find and follow me on Strava if you want to see maps and pics regularly.

I was supposed to ride off into the sunset.

But life rarely fits into a picture-perfect blog post. 

(Or a bike box, for that matter.)

Picture 1: Haeundae Beach in Busan, one month ago. My final semester of teaching in Korea was over, my plane ticket to Spain was booked, and I’d just about finished equipping my bike for some long-term travel along the Mediterranean Coast.

Still, something told me to hold my tongue about my plans for the coming months and beyond. “Don’t open your mouth,” I thought, “until your next steps are sure.”

Glad I waited. 

Picture 2: Barcelona airport, long after I’d already continued onward with repeated assurances from the lost baggage department that they’d promptly forward my bike. Four days, one flight to Valencia, multiple hours on hold with a call center, and one train ride back to Barcelona later, my bike was back in my hands, somehow free of damage. (More than I can say for the box I shipped it in, amirite?!)

This disparity between expectation and reality sums up why I’ve started and stopped writing in here multiple times. As genuine as I try to be about my life since I moved to Korea five and a half years ago, I inevitably begin to feel like I’m adopting the tone of the zillion travel blogs floating around the web, gloating about the whimsical experiences I’m living through and the sunny life lessons they’re imparting to me. But that’s never been the whole story.

And truth be told, I didn’t decide to plow across an unfamiliar continent on the strength of nothing more than my own two legs because I thought it would be easy or comfortable, or because I expected only heartwarming epiphanies along pristine coastlines. (Although some of that would be nice, too.)

I decided to do this because I knew it was going to challenge me, and that I’d emerge on the other side all the more resilient for having done it.

So, I’m now in Barcelona, with my bike and all of my belongings finally in tow. This new starting point cuts out about 200 miles of coast between here and Valencia that I’d hoped to ride, but that’s OK. I need to get my mind back in travel mode. To remember that flexibility is paramount, and that the most valuable experiences often come to pass while you’re waiting for something else to happen.

Most pertinent to the premise of this blog, I’m out of Korea. Job is finished. Visa null and void. Maybe my current travel itinerary should warrant a new blog, with a new theme, but as I’ve come to understand over these last five and a half years, leaving a place is almost as important as the experience of living there. I should know–I already tried to leave Korea once.

So, I might check in here every now and again to trace my bike tour and my transition into the next phase of life.

After all, what else am I going to do? I quit my job!

Some practical lessons I gleaned from this experience, which might help anyone who’s trying to navigate a similar crisis, or just researching upcoming travel plans:

NEVER fly Aeroflot. I learned weeks after buying my ticket that they’re notorious for losing bags. I crossed my fingers and hoped it wouldn’t happen to me, but lo and behold, when I showed up at baggage claim, my bike wasn’t waiting for me. I wasn’t the only one looking around in a daze after 15+ hours of travel, either.

Nothing reshapes your sense of time like leaving home for an extended period and then, at regular intervals, returning.

After arriving in Korea in August of 2012, I stayed abroad for nearly a year and a half before visiting home for Christmas of 2013. And since then, I’ve returned every Christmas season – in 2014 after wrapping up my public school job in Busan and then traveling for four months, and now in 2015 after finishing up my first year as a literature and composition teacher at a private international school north of Seoul.

My visit in 2013 was the kind of vibrant, nostalgic homecoming you always imagine when daydreaming about returning. I was warmly greeted by family and friends, I experienced my favorite foods and places once again as if for the first time, and every minute aspect of home became a yardstick by which I could measure the ways I had and hadn’t changed since being away. Maybe most importantly, I stayed for only a couple of weeks, so the excitement of being home never faded.

In 2014, I learned about reverse culture shock. I’d spent the months prior to the Christmas season in Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and India, and upon returning, I felt like I was having a nervous breakdown. I’d spent so much time alone in my own head, surrounded by foreign languages, that I could not tune out all of the idle conversation around me, no matter where I went. Trying to reintegrate myself into the world of small talk, when I was so out of touch with the topics people use to relate to each other, gave me immense anxiety. My favorite foods made me sick – even staple comforts like guacamole were too rich to eat.

I felt a disorienting sense of disconnection with the world around me when doing the simplest of things. I remember walking my dogs on Christmas Day and being thoroughly creeped out by how I was the only one outdoors. Rows of perfect, carbon-copied houses stretched on and on, and I knew everyone was home, but there were no signs of life. This after months of zig-zagging my way through shoulder-to-shoulder foot traffic. Another time, staring at the TV in a zombied state of jet lag, an informercial came on for a treadmill with incline presets to match the landscapes of destinations around the world. “Hike the volcanoes of Indonesia!” it said. I had, only weeks before, multiple times. The plastic, gimmicky commercialism blanketed everything, including my memories of the travels I’d just taken, in surreality.

I couldn’t really register all of this as culture shock at the time. After all, who expects to go into shock after coming into contact with their own home? I just thought I was becoming prone to anxiety attacks. But in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. At one point, in the ice cold mountains of India, I stayed in a hotel where there was no heater or running hot water. I had to request from the kitchen that they boil me a bucket of scalding water, and then I’d use a smaller bucket to mix a bit of the hot water with some cold from the faucet and ladle it over myself to bathe. When you transplant yourself overnight from months of that into the middle of the most excessive culture in the world, it’s inevitable that your brain’s going to completely freak out.

That 2014 Christmas season stretched into a period of 3 months at home while I waited for my new Korean teaching visa to clear so I could start my new job. I readjusted to American life in that time, but I was also stuck in a state of limbo, and the pace of my days slowed to a crawl. I became uncertain of whether I’d actually get a visa in time to start a new school year, and thus whether I’d have a chance to resume a life of living abroad.

And then suddenly, in March of 2015, everything started moving in fast forward again. Within a period of three days, my visa cleared, my school booked my flight, and I was back in Korea, starting a new job.

My months since then have felt jam-packed with experience. Everything moved so fast, but now that I’m home again for Christmas, it feels like they happened over a period of two years, not nine months. In my work life, I adjusted to running my own classroom, rather than relying on a co-teacher, and the incredible amount of organization and administrative work that goes into that. I learned to teach entirely new sets of content, abandoning ESL and instead guiding students through grammar lessons, the writing process, and making sense of literature. I spent my weekends exploring Seoul and other farther-flung regions of Korea. I trained to bike the 400-mile path from Seoul to Busan and then did it. I went to Russia for two weeks. My relationships from my first stint in Korea took on new meaning as I bused from Seoul to Busan and back two weekends or so a month. And up near Seoul, I adjusted to a new pace of Korean life and developed new friendships that deepened and became dear to me.

Meanwhile, with my feet back here on home turf, I feel like I’ve been away for maybe a month tops. The reverse culture shock is not as near as drastic as last year, and I’m slipping back into familiar roles with friends and family with ease.

Back when I visited in 2013, on the day before I was to fly back to Korea, I hiked around Grapevine Lake with my brother. The breeze was brisk and the sun was shining high in the blue sky, and as it dipped closer to the horizon and illuminated everything in a palette of warm color, I began to think about how my life had forked into two different paths: One in Texas and one in Korea. People and places I loved were on both paths, and somehow, impossibly, I’d become lucky enough to exist on both.

Of course, someday this may change. I’ll miss, or come close to missing, a major life event of a loved one back home and realize that the cost of spending the majority of each year away from home is simply too high.

For now, though, I feel lucky. I feel charmed. I feel blessed.

So, that happened. Not entirely intentionally, either. What started as mid-travel ambition snowballed into a 4.5-day, 400-mile ride from Seoul to Busan and then continued coalescing into multiple weekend excursions of 50-100 miles to various destinations around Korea.

I’m sure 1000 miles ain’t no thang for quite a few cyclists out there, and in and of itself, I don’t think it’s anything to gloat about. But the intense focus that I found in biking, seemingly out of nowhere, completely took me by surprise. And now looking back, I can see that it’s been one of the defining activities of my year, and that it will likely be one of the most important aspects of my second stint in Korea, if not beyond. It’s helped me see and experience more of the country than I ever would have otherwise. And it’s given me a sense of freedom that’s not easy to come by in a place where owning a car is not the norm (even if the public transportation system IS top notch).

The first thing that set me on this path? I quit drinking.

I was spending a couple of weeks in Busan during my summer vacation, and like any good summerboy, I was just trying to let loose. I hung out with friends on the coast, drinking rice wine by the waves. I hit Busan’s brewpubs at night, meeting new people, reading, and attempting to lull myself into relaxation mode.

One morning I woke up in my favorite beachside spa--not even after a night of drinking--just feeling generally worn down and despondent. As I got ready for the day, I considered what might be the root of all this negativity and what immediate change I could make to rid myself of it.

A quiet thought floated through my head: I should quit drinking for a year.

It made so much sense. Not that this was the first time I’d thought of quitting. But it was the first time the thought had arisen so organically and simply and felt so right. I realized I was about to be a mere year from 30 and that I’d gone through most of my twenties with alcohol, and it might be useful to go through this last year without. I thought about how a clear head might help me make some long overdue decisions. How maybe I was using alcohol to compensate for disappointment with other more meaningful pursuits. How so much of my time had slowly become consumed by socializing with the aid of alcohol, and how it might be good to free myself up and see what kinds of activities I’d drift to.

It’s funny how you can know something is right and good for you, and how at the same time you can fight it with every rationalization at your disposal. I turned the idea over in my head for a week, and at every possible juncture, a stray thought would pop to the surface and blurt out, “NO! You won’t be able to bond with your friends!” Or, “It’s not ACTUALLY the source of your negativity! Look somewhere else!” Or, “Once you tell people you’re going to go through with this, you’ll feel stupid when you can’t actually make it through the whole year!”

Or, I’d start devising some scheme for moderation. It would go something like this: “A year is too long. Moderation is the mark of strength. I should let myself have a drink once a month. OK, yeah. Once a month, for a year. Once a month I can go out with friends and have a couple of drinks. Good. Right. Once a month I can go out and just really enjoy time with friends and just PARTY.” Then I’d recognize the trap of escalation that my brain was setting for me. 

Eventually, I decided, I can’t be moderate with alcohol because  at this point in my life, indulging in alcohol is a decidedly immoderate activity.

After that week of consideration, the plan was set and the year was on. It’s been on for about 4.5 months and hopefully will continue. In that time, I’ve spent a good many nights in bars with friends, completely sober, and I’ve felt aimless in those moments. But aside from some readjustment and missing the sheen that a drink can cast over a night out, I’ve been fine. When the year’s up, maybe I’ll try it again, or maybe not. All I know is that for now, in every respect, quitting has made my life better.

I’ve heard that dreaming in a foreign language is one sign of fluency. Over the last couple of months, I’ve had at least three dreams in which I heard and conversed in Korean. But contrary to how I’ve always pictured “fluent” dreams playing out, the actual content of those dreams has either mirrored my real-life learning struggles or seemed weirdly symbolic of the process of trying to adopt a new language.

Emphasis on the weird.

Dream 1: The Korean-Talking, All-American Baby. I’m at a bus stop, under a bridge. Extended family members I barely recognize and haven’t talked to in years are sitting on red and blue plastic chairs at red and blue plastic tables, like you might find in a Korean street market. I’m carrying a baby. It’s a boy. He’s my son. He has fair skin and blue eyes, and he can’t be much more than a year old. He’s talking to me, but in Korean. Very simple Korean sentences. I’m replying to him in Korean, and the whole exchange is tickling me to laughter. I speak to him in English, but he doesn’t respond. I introduce him to my family members. No one seems pleased to meet him. I suddenly wonder who this kid’s mother is, and I think to myself, this can’t possibly be my son.

Dream 2: Surrounded by students. I’m at a park with my students, sitting cross-legged in the grass. The kids are chasing each other and speaking in rapid-fire Korean. I keep thinking to myself, “I wish I could understand everything they’re saying.” But I can’t. I’m awash in a sea of drifting conjunctions and verb endings. I hear the “ands” and “buts” but don’t know what they’re connecting. I know that they’re talking about something in the past tense, but I can’t make sense of the actual events. One student walks up and asks me a question. I just say, “Sounds good.”

Dream 3: No service at the bank. I reach the front of the line at the bank and ask a question in Korean. The teller says, “You can’t do that here.” I ask him, “Should I go to another bank?” He nods. I take a few seconds to gather my words and then ask, “If I go to another bank, can I complete my transaction there?” “That’s right,” he says. I leave, annoyed.

Lots of frustration, lots of confusion, lots of identity crisis.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend two of the three Christmas seasons since I left for Korea with my family. But because it falls in the middle of the school year, Thanksgiving during that same stretch of time has been a little wacky.

2012 My friends and I were fresh-faced foreigners in Korea, just three months into our new jobs with Busan’s public school district. Most of us lived in shoebox efficiencies with beds no more than a few feet from the kitchen sink, so the whole mass of us piled into the apartment of the one guy with multiple rooms. We spread out mats, sat down on the floor, and ate an assortment of chips and salsa, pizza, Korean dumplings, pasta, and more. The drinks were just as varied. The night was hazy. I ended up on a dance floor. I can trace the multi-year relationships of at least two of my friends to that night.

2013 Bickering and politics within the Busan friend group -- an inevitability when you throw a few dozen twenty-somethings into circumstances that compel them to become each other’s support group and surrogate family for a year -- led to me not getting an invite to Thanksgiving. I went to a basketball game with some buddies instead. If not a festive time, it was still a good one.

2014 I was in the misty mountain town of Darjeeling, India and was nearing the final stretch of my 4-month, 5-country backpacking trip through Asia following my departure from Busan. I’d spent the day descending mountainside alleyways and wandering sloping tea fields, and it didn’t even hit me that it was Thanksgiving until I was searching for a place to eat dinner just before sundown. There was nothing Thanksgiving about my meal, but it was warm and hearty, and I had chips and a Coke on the side to give it some American flair.

This year, the director of the American side of my international school and his wife invited us to their apartment. A couple of weeks in advance, another coworker coordinated the dishes we could all contribute. I got a pineapple casserole recipe from my mom and embarked on the adventure of cooking my first Thanksgiving dish. Even after just the one, my kitchen was a trainwreck. I have new respect for Thanksgiving chefs.

We live in a suburb of Seoul, so the apartments here are newer and more spacious. We sat at a table. We had turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes--the works. After eating, we lounged around and chatted while watching Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Christmas music was playing, and there was a Christmas tree by the window overlooking the mountain ranges that line our small town.

The holidays at this time over the last few years have been adventurous and strange in good ways, but I’m THANKFUL (see what I did there?) that I got a reminder this year of what traditional Thanksgiving feels like. Turns out, it’s a little like home.

I’m thinking a lot about the country I left behind a little over three years ago.

Wages are falling for my maligned “millennial” demographic, and while I willingly gave up a higher-paying job those three years ago to find more fulfilling work, I can’t help but contemplate how much society’s lack of regard for the futures of younger generations might be affecting my major life decisions.

A band I interviewed in my freelance music journalism days, who at the time was promoting their innuendo-laden album “Heart On” with a Denny’s pancake promo stunt, is no longer laughing -- is now in fact breaking down on camera -- because extremists ripped through the concert hall where they were performing with gunfire and explosives.

My head’s in a dark space.

And then, while I’m hopping from thought to thought, I run over my workday and think about how well Free Reading time did or didn’t go with my 8th grade classes. Before flying across the world for this latest job, I packed a huge bag full of my favorite childhood books, from Goosebumps to Salinger, in hopes of helping my new students find some joy in reading.

The words of one student float back to me:

“I hate American book smell.”