The Amazing Paper Race - Part 2
Man, desk-warming is glorious when you don’t have any work and a month of blogs to update! Still have 2 more hours till I can leave for the day. Let’s get this party started!
Picking up from the last blog, I have to reiterate the sentence, “Then a scary feeling settled in amongst all the joy: I was leaving for Korea in 15 days.” It was in fact one of those moments that can either make or break a person. I was leaving everything I knew, all my friends and family, my “summer job” and family there, and most of all, a place where I knew the language. It was like standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down into all the misty uncertainties of my life choices up to this point.
But damn it if I was going to falter. I had worked hard and put so much effort into this process I was not going to let anything stop me now. With my plane tickets purchased, I set out to make my last few weeks full of memories.
Of course I hung out with my dearest friends and celebrated early birthdays and going-aways with two of them. Alex and Cody (literally my brothers now since we’ve known each other since 1st grade), have birthdays very close to mine, and Alex was leaving on his own adventures to California on the day I was leaving for Korea. So we celebrated in fashion and may have crashed a wedding dance (just maybe, haha!). I also spent a lot of time in the Blarney Stone, which is to my friends the “Central Perk” of our real-life sitcom. I played D&D and had cosplay photoshoots, I had late night adventures and boardgames, I had all the wonderful things I could ever have wished for, and the best part, none of them seemed forced to happen because I was leaving and the clock was “counting down.”
On my birthday, I spent the day in a car driving to the Twin Cities for my next morning flight. Some birthday, haha! It’s okay, I spent it with my family and Alan, the faces I really wanted to be at the airport when I left.
The morning of my flight was busy and sleepy. We took the trolley to the airport at 5:30am and got to my check-in gate with no problems. Farewells are a horrible thing, especially when you aren’t going to see someone for a year, but they had to happen. Walking into the check in line for my flight, I realized I was truly alone now. I didn’t have anyone to go ask questions for me, watch my bags, or to talk to. It was hard and I may have gotten teary-eyed, but I made it okay through my multiple flights and managed, at the international gate, to find a crowd of finger-nail biting, sleepy-eyed EPIK teachers.
And off to Korea we went.
I’ll cover orientation and my first few weeks in Korea in the next blog.
All the best and stay cool, cats! ^^
Picking up from the last blog, I have to reiterate the sentence, “Then a scary feeling settled in amongst all the joy: I was leaving for Korea in 15 days.” It was in fact one of those moments that can either make or break a person. I was leaving everything I knew, all my friends and family, my “summer job” and family there, and most of all, a place where I knew the language. It was like standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down into all the misty uncertainties of my life choices up to this point.
But damn it if I was going to falter. I had worked hard and put so much effort into this process I was not going to let anything stop me now. With my plane tickets purchased, I set out to make my last few weeks full of memories.
Of course I hung out with my dearest friends and celebrated early birthdays and going-aways with two of them. Alex and Cody (literally my brothers now since we’ve known each other since 1st grade), have birthdays very close to mine, and Alex was leaving on his own adventures to California on the day I was leaving for Korea. So we celebrated in fashion and may have crashed a wedding dance (just maybe, haha!). I also spent a lot of time in the Blarney Stone, which is to my friends the “Central Perk” of our real-life sitcom. I played D&D and had cosplay photoshoots, I had late night adventures and boardgames, I had all the wonderful things I could ever have wished for, and the best part, none of them seemed forced to happen because I was leaving and the clock was “counting down.”
On my birthday, I spent the day in a car driving to the Twin Cities for my next morning flight. Some birthday, haha! It’s okay, I spent it with my family and Alan, the faces I really wanted to be at the airport when I left.
The morning of my flight was busy and sleepy. We took the trolley to the airport at 5:30am and got to my check-in gate with no problems. Farewells are a horrible thing, especially when you aren’t going to see someone for a year, but they had to happen. Walking into the check in line for my flight, I realized I was truly alone now. I didn’t have anyone to go ask questions for me, watch my bags, or to talk to. It was hard and I may have gotten teary-eyed, but I made it okay through my multiple flights and managed, at the international gate, to find a crowd of finger-nail biting, sleepy-eyed EPIK teachers.
And off to Korea we went.
I’ll cover orientation and my first few weeks in Korea in the next blog.
All the best and stay cool, cats! ^^