Happy New Year! Yesterday Japan Aunt caught me coming in and invited me to breakfast today. I set my alarm and with difficulty woke up before 10am to prepared rice cake soup and savory pancakes. She had hoped to treat The Not Rock as well but he was nowhere to be found. Note: later, that would turn out to be for the best. We talked for an hour and half in Korean and I understood at least half of what was going on. She told me about her 25 year old son: he has always been bad at school but loves to earn money. He went to Canada for a…

I told S I bought her son a gift while in the US and I asked for her address to send it off. “We’ll just come to Busan.” And thus I spent the day with S, her husband, and her son. They treated me to sashimi which is inexplicably expensive given Busan’s proximity to the ocean. She asked how long I’d be staying in Korea. “My next contract is for a year so at least a year. But I’m wondering, if I can get fluent at Korean, if I should stay a little longer to set up freelance technical translating.” “Oh that would be perfect for you!” My idea was…

The new roommate could not look less like The Rock. House Owner has lost her people description privileges. The Not Rock is a tall, white man, with hair, and super blue eyes whose humor and mine are not on the same page. At the very least, the first thing he said when I wandered through in my pajamas (my day clothes, really) “Hi, sorry if I surprised you.” He’s here for a week or two while he waits on his visas (he’s betting on two separate countries and the winner will be his new home). He’ll have to do a two week quarantine in his new country but as he’s…

I told my Korean teacher about Busan Boy because teachers are secret holders and occasional therapists, too, you know. She agreed he’s a narcissist. “He obviously had a confidence problem, because he needed to be the one to ditch you. Not the other way around. “Language exchange, HelloTalk, Tinder… those are not nice guys. You know, I’ve heard from my female American students that men from language exchange will offer them free Korean lessons, then neg them during the lesson so the woman loses confidence and only talks in English from then on. Boom. He gets free English lessons.” Damn, so sly! And mean. She then told me this: “That’s…

I spent nearly an hour in front of an immigration officer and I like to think that the panic in my eyes convinced him to take pity on me. I’ll spare you the details except for the fact I started to question my entire existence. Should I just hop on a cargo ship to Russia? Luckily the nice man, who made a string of phone calls and also seemed alive inside unlike the poor lost souls at Seoul immigration, even printed extra copies of a paper I needed. Faith in humanity restored! I bowed and thanked him as I left. I called my friend and wandered into an alley off…

It’s time to talk about Busan Boy, a complicated story from 2020. Below you’ll find two posts that I wrote but never published until now. This was originally written on May 4th, some days after the fallout with someone I had considered a friend. I couldn’t bring myself to publish it at the time. From a FaceBook post I made around that time: “I have been dealing with the devolvement of Busan “friend” to to the near worst possible ending that has involved changing my phone number and contemplating filing a police report. Somewhere along the line between meeting on a language exchange app and eating dinner together I started…

I cannot believe that I once spent 30 minutes talking to a nice man at Kroger, telling him about my plan to move to Korea. And then I did. So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, and then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable. Christopher Reeve

The little flame of fluency achievability was extinguished with a sad little poof on Saturday. I met my friend Rachel at the bus stop and she told me, “you’ve forgotten a lot, haven’t you”. Seven weeks without Korean practice in the face of a friend who saw my ability before I left for the US meant an obvious loss of skill. I usually speak Korean with her and as usual by the end of the day my brain was cooked. I was mentally exhausted and physically worn out from our day trip where we completed not one but two Busan bucket list checks. Both Gamcheon Culture Village and Eulsukdo Island…

Two girls in puffy, colorful jackets turned to me and in unison said, “HELLO!” in English. “Hi! I like your jackets. They have so many colors.” I answered in Korean. They stared at me from the bus stop bench in silence which is the usual response I get from kids in this exact situation. Maybe all kids have a set script they expect both parties to follow when approaching a foreigner. Or maybe it’s that when I double checked the word I used for “color” much later, it has the meaning of tint OR sexual relations and now I want to die a little. I thought they were finished with…

En route to Korean class, an older woman caught my eye at the subway station. It was in fact my roommate from the second floor. We rode the train to our respective destinations while she asked about my parents’ age (she’s a year younger) and told me about the metro in Japan. “I’m moving back in the summer. Come visit.” She talks to me in a mix of Korean and accidental Japanese so sometimes I just pretend to know what’s going on. (My usual M.O.) In class my teacher told me, “I’m putting pressure on you because I think you can do it. I think you are a fast learner…