So this is it. It's been a year. I remember right before I left, I read a quote. And it gave me the confidence to jump that plane and go. "The days are long, but the years are short." I appreciated it then, but I've lived it now, and nothing has been more true. The winter was rough. Somedays, I came close to running out of the country and hopping the first plane anywhere because I missed my family, my friends, and the simplicity of not having to mime ...

So I just wanted to put this in writing. I couldn't find a script anywhere, and I heard this amazing speech online last night. Spoken by Pico Iyer, I was so inspired. He is born in India, but has lived the majority of his life between England and Japan. He talks about what 'home,' means. And currently, the number of expats (by which I mean foreigners who live in nonnative countries) around the world number higher than the population of Australia and Canada...

I just stumbled upon this quote the other day: "But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cro...

One weekend later, my friend John and I, who I've kept in touch with over the months, decide to get out of Seoul for the weekend. What better way than to spend it on another island? We met on a biking trip last October, and always seem to need to get out of the city at the same time. Since we both had some free time, we decided to hop a ferry and get out to live the island life! We made essentially no plans, which turned out to be interesting. We made i...

June has been an insane month of fun. I have hung out with the absolute best people, and done so manyyyyy many things. I am switching away from school, because the highlights have been the trips. I'll begin with the first weekend, which was a trip I have been looking forward to since I almost got here. Back in December, when I did a Jeju trip, I talked to one of the guys who helps lead the trips, and he told me about this island excursion, we'll call it, t...