A Visit from a Friend

I spent today with my friend Mi-jin. I met her a little over a year ago when I took a trip to Jeju Island. I was visiting various tourist destinations by bus. I made it to a temple in the far southwest part of the island and was planning to continue east along the southern coast from there. What I didn't know as I sat at the bus stop was that no buses ran the route I wanted to travel. So I waited and waited and waited for a bus that was never going to come. A taxi driver tried to persuade me to take a very expensive ride to my next stop and got a little confrontational when I insisted that I wanted to take the bus. Finally, an older man noticed the problem I was having with the cab driver and came over to help. He explained that the bus wasn't going to come and that I shouldn't go with the cab driver, but if I wanted to wait a couple hours, I could ride along with his group of senior citizens. I didn't really see an alternative, so I agreed.

While I was sitting on a bench waiting, these two girls, a couple years younger than I am, came over to me and asked me to take their picture. Then they told me they were driving on to the next place I wanted to go and asked me to join them. Their names were Mi-jin and In-shil. They grew up on Jeju Island and went to elementary school together. Mi-jin had moved to Seoul and was back visiting her family for a holiday. She had borrowed her dad's car, and the two of them were spending the day driving around to various tourist destinations on the island.

Since they were ready to go and seemed like better traveling companions for me than the group of senior citizens I would have had to wait another 90 minutes for, I took them up on the offer and had one of my best days in Korea. I tagged along with them to several of the tourist destinations along the south coast of Jeju Island. Communication was a little difficult, but we managed to converse and joke and share and learn from each other. I was genuinely sad to say good-bye to them when they dropped me off at my motel at the end of the day.

In-shil still lives on Jeju Island, so I haven't seen her since that day over a year ago, but I met Mi-jin in Seoul shortly after returning from my trip to the island. Unfortunately, we didn't keep in touch this year, but about a month ago, I sent her an email message to see if she still remembered me. It turns out she did and wanted to get together, so she came down to my town to spend the afternoon with me today.

We had lunch together, came back to my apartment and talked, went for a walk in the local mountain park, and stopped at a coffee shop on the way back to town. Her English has improved a lot in the past year, and so has my Korean, so we were able to communicate better than before. She called In-shil while we were eating lunch, so I was able to talk to her again, too. It was fun to reunite with a friend, and I'm disappointed that I let so much time go by without being in touch with her. I don't want it to happen again, but sometimes it's so easy to get caught up in the busy-ness of daily life that before I know it, a whole year has gone by.

In a way, my whole time in Korea has been like that. One day became a week became a month became a year became two years and more. I can hardly believe that my second contract at my current school is coming to an end. I've made the first step of an important decision concerning what's next for me, but it's too early yet to post that publicly on the internet. What I can say is that I'm mostly content with the first part of my decision and am looking forward to what comes next.