Day 98: Thank You

It bothers me that I made it to 98, not 99 days... I should have come a day earlier or left a day later, but I guess it's a bit too late to do anything about that now...

I was up nice and early today to do last minute cleaning and packing. Then I caught an airport bus that was fortunately only a few minutes away from where I was staying. It was super hard to push both my suitcases up the hill and across the road, but the driver helped me load them onto the bus so I was thankful for that. I looked out the window the entire time I was riding the bus, rather than going on my phone. I saw so many more places that I wanted to visit, which made me excited to come back!

I ended up arriving at the airport way too early. I had to wait an hour before I could even start checking in so I grabbed a sandwich and my last yuja tea and I sat down to play on my phone. I was just relaxing by the window when a bunch of airport security started surrounding an area near me and putting up caution tape. I looked over and there was a little package just sitting by itself. I looked around and nobody else seemed to be concerned or even paying attention to it. I grabbed my things and moved as far away as I could! I was not taking my chances when I was so close to being back home.

Fortunately, nothing blew up. I checked in and found out that I was still 6 kg under the weight limit and all I could think about was how I could have bought so many more albums...

I met a really nice man on the plane who was from the US. He had been visiting his son who works in Korea as a blockchain developer (so fricking cool!). He visits his son twice a year and it made me think of what myself or my parents might have to do if I end up living in Korea, which is definitely something I am considering. While there are some parts of the culture that bother me, I really love the environment. Seoul is amazing! I love the mountains and the river and all the other cool places I can explore. I also love that there are many districts that make up Seoul that are very different from each other. Plus there are still so many cities that I want to explore! The flight really does suck though. 13 hours is very painful and hard to sit still for. I got bored of watching movies, I couldn't sleep, and I got so frustrated that I wasn't even enjoying my music. I ended up staring at the screen with the flight path and zooming in a little bit every time the plane moved even a tiny bit further along the path.

When I got close to landing I suddenly got this rush of energy and excitement thinking about seeing my family again. The whole unloading and customs process seemed to take forever because I just wanted to see them. They were so cute! They waited outside the gate and had made adorable signs with BT21 characters on them (I can't get over how supportive and awesome my family is about my love for kpop). My brother seemed to have grown quite a bit since I last saw him, which I was definitely not impressed with... I am shorter than both of my younger siblings now and it just feels strange.

I had told my parents that there was a birthday ad for Tae downtown Toronto and they had been nice enough to drive us all to go and see it. Unfortunately, the ad must have ended already because we waited around in the cold for a good 10 minutes and didn't see it. We piled back into the car and drove back home.

I spent the evening showing them all the fun stuff I had bought and they were all surprised by how little I bought compared to how much they had been expecting haha. My family waited until I got home to celebrate Christmas so we could all do it together. After I showed them everything we all went to bed with plans to have our Christmas the next day.

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Some final notes:

It took so long for me to get a good sleep schedule again and to not be exhausted every day, but I think I have finally recovered!

My plan is to go back to Korea in a year or so after I have graduated and teach english for a bit. I am finishing my Bachelors degree for math and we'll see where I go after another year in Korea. The dream is to work for an entertainment company or in some kind of mental health field in data analysis I think, but who knows.

Things I will miss: kimbap, yuja tea, convenience stores with everything you can imagine in them, the people, the mountains, the Han river, the amazing transportation systems, unlimited data, hearing all the music I love in restaurants and cafes, readily available kpop merch, being in the same time zone so I don't have to do math every time new music videos or content are going to be released, and so much more.

This was such an amazing experience and I am incredibly glad that I did it. There were so many people that made this possible! Thank you to my family for face-timing me frequently and always being there for me when I had issues or when I wanted to talk for ages about everything I had seen that day. Thanks to my sister for letting me call her to randomly freak out about a new song that a BTS member released or to just listen to me talk. Thanks to my baby brother for checking in on me and always being so positive about everything that I was doing. Thanks to all my friends from home who texted or face-timed me and who were so incredibly supportive of everything that I did! Thanks to those who have been part of this journey with me through my blog and to those who made me smile with how happy they were for me. I am so fortunate to have a wonderful support system of such amazing people around me and I really could not have accomplished every thing that I did without you. And finally, thank you to all the amazing people I have met on this trip, I hope to stay in touch and see you all again when I am back in Korea! Oh and thanks to Namjoon, whose Twitter posts took me to so many amazing places and made my trip planning way easier. I am so sad to end this blog, but I hope that I can look back on it someday and smile at all the memories that I have made. This has been the most amazing experience and I can't wait to do it again!

Goodbye,

Emily

(January 1, 2019)