planes, trains & automobiles

i’m going to take my failure to write since i left canada not as a marker of lacking sharing abilities or as infidelity to those reading, but more as a side effect to having been running to catch up with life since the last plane landed (mercifully) on land.

it’s actually been rather like this:

much like korea, the road runner goes a million miles an hour and speaks a language that is incomprehensible to me.

the trip was not as terrible as i’d expected, considering i was sure at least one of the planes would inevitably go down. i suspected it would be the thirteen-hour one from chicago to seoul, because how can a flight last that long without the machine running out of fuel? or accidentally flying over ukraine?

chicago airport train terminal.

in the end, none of them did fall, or even experience rough turbulence, which i’m still so thankful for. although they’d never know it, my seat mates were spared from sitting next to a more whimper-prone version of courage the cowardly dog.

given that everything went so smoothly and i was safely on korean soil, i expected the last little trek of the journey to be swift and pleasant. a forty-minute plane ride, and i’d be in busan in time for dinner.

so imagine my dismay and, honestly, simmering panic as the last plane was delayed and delayed, and the airport emptied out but for a large group of people all bound for the same destination, most of them crowded around the air busan counter, angrily yelling at the sole last stewardess in korean (naturally).

the flight was cancelled, i grabbed my bags, and after a very confusing ten minutes with a taxi driver, during which he repeatedly tried to point out that i was in fact brandishing two ₩1,000 bills, not ₩10,000 (think $1 vs. $10) to pay for my ride, i was spending the night in a hotel in seoul.

and the morning wasn’t bad, either.

by ten o'clock the next morning, i was both at my final destination and at the peak of my excitement. there was so much to do, and not enough hours in the day to even come close to doing some of it (this is especially true with jet lag).

since i arrived, i have been trying to learn as much as possible about my new job, establish some routines, not wake up suddenly at three o'clock in the morning, and improve on how to properly say ‘thank you’ in korean. kamsa-hamnida.

i’m not sure if ‘hit the ground running’ would be a fit expression to describe this transition (i have yet to master grocery shopping, or not become mute when interacting with koreans), but it popped into my mind as i began to write. maybe we can just say that since i hit the ground, i’ve been running. and i don’t mind it one bit.