Of course, I don’t have a clue what I’m about to reveal to my nonexistent audience. Spontaneous blogging is not exactly my forte, which at least partially explains my infrequent posting. I’m more of a premeditated thinker, and I’m already having second thoughts about this idea, but since my only other plausible option involves rubber gloves, sponges, and chemical cleaners, I’m going to attempt to stick this out until the end.
Before I go any further, I feel like I need to clear something up. My earlier claim that I am alone is not entirely accurate. You see, at the present moment, there is a sexy, naked, young woman tenderly nibbling away at my fingers. Her name is Chamchi (참치)...her nickname is Chommers...her English name is Tuna. She is not human. She is Siamese. Those of you who visit my facebook page with even a minimal level of frequency have already been thoroughly introduced to the feline Korean terrorist living under my roof, so I will spare you too much unnecessary prattling here. However, I will say this about my little monster: kitten ownership in Korea is a lot more difficult than it is in America on so many levels. Part of this stems from the fact that kittens are not popular household pets in Korea. Then again, household pets are not popular in Korea in general. What this means is that finding the necessary provisions to please little Chommers can often be a small challenge that occasionally requires a translator. Additionally, the abundant trips to the vet for shots, vaccinations, and emergency eyeball care have proven to be anything but simple. The two-way 30-minute taxi rides bearing a squirming, meowing cat have not exactly been comfortable. Luckily, my incredibly sweet and helpful Korean friend, So Young, has been kind enough to meet me at the vet for some heavy-duty translation regarding Chommers’ various ailments.
Believe it or not, I am driving at a small but significant point with my ramblings, and my point is this: Living in a foreign country is hard. Of course, a large part of this general statement has logical fallacies in it, so allow me to clear those up. My present lifestyle is not hard. My present lifestyle is impossibly easy. Sometimes I find myself thinking about my future self looking back on my present self, and I end up feeling nostalgic and envious towards my present self. I hope that makes as much sense to me tomorrow as it does right now. Anyways, the point is that it’s a Thursday night, it’s well past 2 a.m., I am still mildly intoxicated, and I am not even slightly concerned about this fact. I don’t go to work until almost 4:00 p.m. tomorrow. I finish work at 10:00 p.m. I work 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, and I scarcely spend a moment outside of this time doing work-related activities. I make as much money as an average first year teacher in America, I work half as much, and I don’t pay rent. I have made close friends from no fewer than 7 countries, I drink like a fish almost every weekend, I go on random international vacations frequently, and I am still somehow financially in the green.
Contrary to obvious appearances, it is not my intention to boast. It is merely my intention to highlight the stark difference between my lifestyle and my everyday life. While my lifestyle (at least on the surface) may appear to be lavish, extraordinary, and ever-so-slightly surreal, my everyday life could not provide a greater contrast. When I refer to my “everyday” life, I am referring to those commonplace, mundane occurrences that happen to you every day that you fail to even notice because they are so ingrained into your daily routine. A trip to the hair salon. A take-out order via telephone. A dinner table reservation. When these situations arise in a country in which you fluently speak the language, they are merely tedious chores; when they arise in a country in which you barely speak the language at all, they become sources of severe anxiety. It’s easy to forget how easy the simple things can be back home. I have grown used to my grocery store interactions consisting of three phrases in Korean: “Hello,” (anyeong-ha-se-yo), “bag, please,” (bong-tu ju-se-yo), and “thank you” (kam-sa-ham-ni-da). Any variance in this routine causes my personal cosmos to realign in highly unfavorable ways; I simply cannot function if a cashier throws out a phrase I don’t know the answer to…I avert my eyes southward, smile bashfully, and blush uncontrollably while exhaling a quiet “a-ni-o,” never to learn exactly what it is that I am saying “no” to. Just tonight, a situation arose at the restaurant in which my friend ordered a chicken salad but was brought a salad containing a mystery meat that was clearly not chicken. In an English speaking country, this would be easy to resolve: “Excuse me, ma’am, but I ordered the chicken salad, and it seems that you’ve mistakenly served me a salad containing a few vertically cut Oscar Meyer wieners. Could you take this back, and bring me the chicken salad, please?” Unfortunately for Shell, between the four of us, we only knew how to say the word “chicken” and "please" in Korean. The situation was “resolved” when they cooked the mystery meat for a little longer and put it back on the salad. And this, in a nutshell, is why it is occasionally difficult living in a foreign country. It’s kind of like that dream in which you struggle violently to say something but the words refuse to come out, and the curious bystanders struggle violently to try to understand you, and in the end, you both fail abysmally at this most basic level of communication. Only it’s not a dream. It’s my everyday reality.
And the incomprehensible part is that I’m completely content with this arrangement.
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