Surviving…

One fascinating point for me has been the fact I’ve not felt homesick one day ever since I came to Korea. I’m not quite yet sure what to make of it. Is it that it’s still to early to tell? Is it that I’m having too much fun to realize? Or is it that I’m just playing the psychological game of sucessfully managing my happiness?

It’s probably a little bit of everything, but especially the later. Being happy is imo is 80% self-control. So many of the foreigners that I’ve met here in Korea are unhappy with somepart of their stay and often seem to take it out on their surroundings or fellow friends. Their unhappiness in my mind is closely linked to their unwillingness to accept that Korea is and will always be counter to the Western world. Rather than try to fit in and accept the East as East, they keep looking to find the West somewhere cloaked among the homegenous society! The result is isolation, which leads to loneliness — the death of any traveler.

To avoid this pitfall, the easiest trick that I learned was just to make as many friends as you can so that you don’t have enough time to think about all the pet-peves to manufacture. Church has been a wonderful entry point into the culture; it acts not only as a guiding religious institution, but a lax social insitution, where the people I’ve met are more than willing to lend a helping hand. There are many ways to meet people, but meeting the right people is essential. In a country where foreigners are accepted more as a fact of life than a welcomed inhabitor of this densely populated pensiula, you are often taken more for a tool than an individual. That is… a tool to learn English, a tool to emigrate to a foreign country, a tool for international business — and overall just a tool be used. Initially, it’s not a problem and goes by hardly without notice. After the induction period, it begins to feed at the problem of loneliness — as these meaningless relationships are of no deeper value.

The friends that I’ve met through IWE (http://iwe.youngnak.net) have been a relief. Everyone is so genuinely concerned with your wellbeing; you feel truely as though you are watched out for. If you need help with money, they help find you a job. If you need help in lodging, they find someone with a spare room. If you need good old-fashioned advice, they can help with that too.

Hrm… I guess another not-so-insignificant part of surviving without homesickness has been the fact that as a child I’d spent so many summers in Sweden alone. I never realized it until I came here how much that much have trained me mentally to survive alone. Living at home my entire life I thought would have a more dominating effect on my emotional dependence on family, but it hasn’t… and that is interesting.

So.. next week school starts. I wonder how that will be.

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