I may be a day late and a dollar short, but here it is folks. The end of my Korean experience happened all the way back at the beginning of May, and it has only taken me a month and a half to write about it. Let's see, where to start. A lot of people have asked me if I was sad to leave Korea. My answer continues to be that "I really miss the people and my students, but I was ready to go." I could focus on the few negative experiences I did have and talk about the boring life lessons I learned from it all, but instead I am going to focus on the strange/absurd/awesome experiences that are way more fun to read about. Here they are in no particular order:
1. Getting 5 sessions of laser hair removal on my underarms for 45 bucks. This does include being laughed at by the girls working at the clinic and not understanding why my underarm hair is funny. To me it is no laughing matter.
2. Getting 4 cavities filled by a transgendered Korean-American dentist, whose technique was less than gentle when taking out an old filling to replace it with a "new and better one."
3. Seeing both my ovaries on a screen with an ultrasound done by a nice Korean Gynecologist. (Health update: Both right and left look to be doing just fine.)
4. Day drinking, covering my body in mud, and acting like a child with all my besties at Mud Fest. One highlight of the day does not include getting mud thrown in my eye rendering me blind and ripping a hole in my soft lens contact. If you want to talk about a case of "The Blind Leading The Blind" imagine me and my buddy Josh (also with mud in his eyes) blindly trying to get help for our mud filled eyes.
5. Video taping all my friends bungee jumping.
6. Riding an ATV for the first time.
7. Eating an improperly prepared shrimp brain.
8. Being told by students that I look like a vampire, my eye color is funny, and that I need to lose weight if I want a boy friend because I am "cute."
9. Living in a high rise apartment where the fire escape plan was a hook in the wall, a rope, and a harness...
10. Being told by my Korean boss at my goodbye party that he thought I was only "so-so" looking when I arrived but that I blossomed into my looks.
These are just to name a few and all I can think of at the moment. Needless to say, my last 2 days were filled with lots of tears. I have never been good at goodbyes and it is always hard to end a chapter of your life even if you know it's time. My time there is very important to me because it served as my transition from ugly duckling into swan. My boss saw that change physically in my appearance and I see that change mentally and emotionally in my soul. My views about myself, you, and the world were all molded and formed in a way that never would have happened anywhere else. And I wouldn't trade it for a million bucks.
