Seoul: KHall Arrives

I spent a lot of the weekend a couple of weeks at Incheon Internation Airport. I turned up sometime around 5 with a rolling bag of clothes and electronic distractions and a backpack that held a smaller backpack that held my camera and lenses. It was like a really lame Matryoshka doll.


Whatever weak plan of action I stepped of the Cheongju - Incheon bus with involved checking into an airport hotel and ditching my bags. I was at the airport, meeting my girlfriend whom I have not seen in 7 months. The next day we would fly to Tokyo. I wanted to have a grand airport reunion and I didn’t want to be all hot and grimy from lugging around luggage for 3 hours or so before hand. I wanted to show off my new crappy prepubescent pubical-hair beard and slightly slimmer frame. I wanted her to come through immigration and see somebody who had adapted to life abroad. It’s hard to give the appearance of adaptation when you are pulling luggage, looking frazzled and ready to get the hell out.

KHall

Guess I should have actually made a hotel reservation.

On my own, I would have just squatted in the airport. I spent multiple days (not all at once) in Athens and about a solid day in Mexico City. But, Kelly was coming. Last time I saw her I was living off of a pretty low magazine wage and whatever I managed to scrape together with freelance work. I had decided that for the first time in my life, this was a no-expenses-spared sort of trip. It seems so long ago and another world away that I was ever so poor. It seemed so long ago and another world away since I had seen K Hall. I guess that was pretty much true.

In the end, I stood outside of immigration with my luggage sprawled on the floor around me. I waited as people came back home or stepped out to meet strangers holding signs. My favorite sign was taped to a pole: BOB SMITH: WALK STRAIGHT THROUGH THE DOORS TO THE BUS.

A bit earlier and further down the corridor I passed a man as he sobbed uncontrollably as his family looked on, not looking much better. I wondered how long he was leaving for or whether he was going to a hospital somewhere far away, or a funeral. I blocked it from my mind as I waited.

The most obvious difficulty in travel is the distance from loved ones. After a time it grows to be more than just a physical fact and a lesson in world geography. Time goes by and life continues on while we are gone; whether the place we are gone to is across the state or across the world. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily. It’s just different. It happens when you aren’t paying attention. There’s that hit of homesickness or that feeling of being so far away at the beginning of a trip but you adapt to it and you cope with it.

The person I was when I stepped through the same sliding doors I was waiting at now seems so different. I haven’t learned any massive life lessons and I haven’t had some huge philosophical growth, I just feel a little different. Growth through travel, I guess.

I have my own little world here. It’s temporary and the clock is always counting down on it, but it is an obvious truth. I have my friends here that bare little to no resemblance to my friends back at home. I have my habits, my little apartment that nobody from home had ever seen. I have this reality here that is so far removed from my reality in Shrewsbury, MA that my two lives don’t seem to really overlap. People at home, save regular phone conversations, stop being part of your day to day life.

That’s part of the reason why I was so nervous as I stood there waiting. It felt like that first date feeling in that battery acid seems to be pumping through your veins and that it feels nice and exciting but mostly you just want it to stop.

K Hall was the last person out of immigration. I was scared to see her. It seemed like it had been so long, despite talking regularly. Distance is hard. This trip had been a long time coming and I half expected that instead of actually stepping through the doors and into Korea (the one overlap in my past and present realities) she would vanish or at least be deported or something.

She wasn’t. She wheeled her red luggage around a crowd of people and over to me.

Sometimes you don’t realize how much you really miss your home until a piece of it drifts your way.



Anyway, we spent a night in the most expensive hotel we had ever stayed in together. It was an airport hotel that was 5 minutes from the airport. It was 5 minutes apparently if you sat on a plane going full speed and bailed after 5 minutes.

I tried to wow K Hall with my awesome knowledge of Korean formalities and greetings that starts with “hello” and basically ends with “thank you.” In my daydreams I imagined a gourmet dinner and hours and hours of conversation and stories. Reality wasn’t quite so dramatic but it was equally as nice. We watched The Office and America’s Funniest Home Videos in the hotel as Kelly fought the fatigue of traveling from Boston to NJ to Beijing to Korea while I ate a horrible cup of noodles with a toothbrush.



Things she brought me:

Dots

Everlasting Gobstoppers

Jujubees

Snyder’s Buffalo Sauce Pretzels

2 Heath Bars

A box of precooked bacon