Plans and Thoughts
Well, today is probably my last day on Jindo. I have some stuff to finish today and errands to run, but I have no work, so I have all day to get stuff done. If I’m not quite finished by like 7pm, then I’ll stick around one extra day and leave for Seoul tomorrow. I may do that anyway since I’ve heard talk that there might be a picnic of some sort at the beach tomorrow that the other foreigners have been planning, and I might stick around for that. My place to stay in Seoul doesn’t have space for me until Sunday, so it might be easier to stay here Saturday and go to Mokpo Saturday evening, stay there that night, and then go to Seoul first thing Sunday morning. We’ll see. I truly hate schlepping bags around Seoul, and it might make my life easier.
The weather today is nice, after 2 days of rain, so I’m going to take advantage of my last day with the bike and take it for a final spin this morning before coming back to get down to business. I may make a final stop by the Korean Jindo Center, run by the Korean government for “maintenance of the Jindo breed”, one final time to get some last photos for the Jindo rescue I peripherally work with.
My apartment is mostly finished. I had all the foreigners come over last night and root through all the stuff I have left, and people took almost everything, which is great. What they didn’t take I will be leaving for the next foreigner who lives here, but I didn’t want to overburden the next resident with too much stuff.
I have 3 small boxes to take to the post office, one that needs re-packing, and then I need to re-pack my suitcases. Right now they’re half-packed/half-piled with clothes. I have a scale, so I’m going to check their weight and remove stuff to ship back as necessary. Thankfully shipping is very cheap from Korea as they still offer surface mail, so I’d rather ship home clothes I’m not likely to use until the fall than risk overweight fees at the airport. Today I also need to call to cancel my internet, and I need to go to the bank to make sure that all my promised payments go through, so that I can raise hell if they don’t.
Other than that…that’s it!
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On one hand, it’s weird to think that I’m so close to leaving Korea, but on the other, I’m getting used to the idea. A few weeks ago, I was sort of terrified at the thought, but now I’m really glad to be going back. I’m sad to be leaving Jindo, but glad to be leaving Korea.
You see, of all the places in Korea, I feel like Jindo is sort of the perfect place in Korea for me. There are a few reasons for this. 1. I’ve always been a big dog person, and Jindo Island is pretty much an island covered with protected dogs. There are an estimated 12,000 Jindo Gae on Jindo Island at any given time. I’ve seen a little more than 1/10th of them. 2. Jindo has traditionally been a place of exile. For thousands of years, different rulers have sent rebellious types here, turning the island into sort of one giant penal colony. It’s virtually impossible to swim across the strait to the mainland due to the extremely fast current, so it was sort of a natural prison. The general personality of Jindo has significant remnants of that rebellious, anti-authoritarian, anti-rest-of-Korea streak, and it is a good mesh with my personality. 3. Because it has generally been a place of exile, it also has a huge proportion of artists and artistic traditions. There are four galleries on this little island, and even a dynasty of artists who have been here for a few hundred years. Art and aesthetics seem to be more important here on Jindo than I have seen in the rest of Korea, and as an artist, I really appreciate that. 4. Unlike much of rural mainland Korea, Jindo (and some other island counties like Wando and Sinan) has never been terribly interested in modernizing all that much. Sure, it’s kind of annoying sometimes (I’d love to see the stinky open sewers go away), but at the same time, I’m glad to see a people who don’t feel the need to keep up with the Kims. I was raised in a family where we always sort of did our own thing, in our own time, and from discussions with my students, I feel that is the general sentiment here on Jindo as well. So what if your house still has the mud walls and tile roof that would be a fixture of shame in the rest of Korea? They work, right? I can appreciate that attitude.
However, unfortunately, I feel that Korean culture as a whole is just not very compatible with me. Our values are too different (though again, the values here on Jindo are different and slightly closer to my own), our goals are too different, our life outlook is simply too different. I have enjoyed living here, but I have not enjoyed working here. As the “waygook next door”, I have enjoyed my life here. As the “waygook teacher”, I have not. I have found that strangely, I have been accepted into the general society here on Jindo far, far more than I was ever accepted into the society at work, and that really has been one of my major annoyances. If the clerk at Family Mart, who I see perhaps twice a week, and the Pizza Man’s daughter, who I see twice a month, both were able to remember my name and nationality within a couple months, why did my coworkers, who see me three times a week, take almost nine months to remember my name, and even on my final day, could not remember where I was from? It’s not about these people’s memories, it’s about the nature of their association with me, and that’s why I could never work in Korea long-term. I think I would enjoy living here (if someone gave me an apartment and a stipend), but I just cannot stand the way the culture of work is here.
Anyway, this post has gone on long enough, but I wanted to write it down while I was thinking about it. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Originally published at Teh Blog. You can comment here or there.