Korea blog: Abbey Load

A 48 hour 6 day work week has severly limited my blogivity (new word?) and so I present a poorly timed photo of the renowned album cover with a double entendre title...work load plus a poor pronunciation of road, get it? No, move on. I have seriously been teaching mornings, eating, trying to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for a fall course I'm taking, teaching again, returning home to a few hours of internet TV and then sleep. I find myself back in class then next morning with the suspicion that I had just been there mere moments before. I am lucky in way that my school is right across the street from where I live and so the cross walk has a particular emblemic (new word?) status in my daily life. I can even see my classroom from the window of my one room officetel apartment.

Having only a few weeks left here before returning home and beginning classes, I have found my acclimatization period to be now eclipsing my "checking out" phase. Unlike previous and more extended forays here in Asia where I would spend the last few weeks (months) making up shopping lists and planning every restaurant trip I would make upon returning home, I now find myself wondering what kind of list I had in mind when I came here. All of the Korean foods I had missed and wanted to enjoy, the bars, temples and beaches I had hoped to see one more time. It seems that the hindsight of expectations is trumped by the anticipation of nostalgia. What the hell was that all about?

I have found that it is so much easier to be critical of a country that is not my own, and that people can really be vehement about it. It seems a little transparent in light of all the discontent we feel about our own homes and the screwed up ways we go about expressing it while trying not to soil our patriotic table clothes. Don't shit where you eat. Canadians in particular can be such passive aggressive tools. Look at me, I am flying between 1st and 3rd person like a fish flopping on a beach.

When it is all over and the passport has been stamped and tucked away, clothes unpacked and Wendy's burger wrappers once again smell guilty, there is always a creeping nostalgia that seems to last a lot longer than the relief of being home again. Just as the pleasure and excitement of being somewhere new never really lasts long enough to make you miss it.