travel

A girl sitting two rows behind lightly gasped as our bus passed through the rural western Korea town.

“That house looks like it came from somewhere in America,” she said of the single-family dwelling, an odd sight if an expat spends the entirety of their time here somewhere where such things rarely exist, like Seoul, Busan or pretty much any of this country’s metropolises.

Her astonishment made me smile. She’s likely not been in Korea long, at least not long enough to have seen that single-family houses in Korea exist, even if their apartmentalized counterparts outnumber them by perhaps 5,000,000 to one–kind of how waygookin sometimes feel outnumbered by their Korean overlords.

But, they exist. It was about a year ago that I, too, stared dumbfounded on Gadeok Island, during my first visit to Soyang Orphanage.

Having lived in Korea for roughly four years now, we’ve heard countless questions and comments about the country. Most of them are curious, good natured notions that we’re happy to answer. Some, on the other hand, are strange! Those strange questions usually stem from some misconceptions about what Korea is and what it’s like here. We wanted to dispel some of those myths, so we chose our top five misconceptions about Korea and made a video about them!

By Eli Toast

When I left Ralph at the bus station his mien was one of resigned disappointment with the way things had panned out. He was going back to a different part of Asia and I was boarding a train heading south the same evening. I took a rickshaw to the train station and enjoyed a pleasant conversation with the driver about our families and life trajectories. At the train station I sat and waited like everyone else, all of us looking nauseously green beneath the platform’s droning sodium bulbs.

I made a calendar before I left for my winter vacation. Littered with notes in the margins about confirming flights, double checking bus schedules, and detailing directions to hostel addresses, I mapped out a two week excursion to three very different places: Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. Sitting at my desk at school, looking at the creased page full of travel details, I couldn’t wrap my mind around what those two weeks would be like. And, as I sit here again behind my desk in South Korea, I can’t fathom how those two weeks held so many memorable miles, random bruises, pale misty mornings, blazing noon heatwaves, and cheap, delicious street food. My short time traveling over those two weeks took me on an incredible journey that felt like it spanned two months. Here’s some highlights of it.

BALI, INDONESIA

From Kuching I flew to the sovereign city-state of Singapore. From now until the end of my holiday I would be making short distance flights to various places and spending a little time in each place. My trip to Singapore fell on the weekend and I was keen to meet some people and do some social activities in the wake of most of my independent adventure in Borneo. With this in mind I had arranged to meet someone through the courchsurfing movement and I would be staying with a Spanish girl called Sara in Singapore for two nights.