#i know this sounds pent-up and bitter but i'm just tired and homesick so that's all it is really

[lux-astrorum]

If you want to, you should post a rant about your experiences in Korea, I'm curious

ok to be honest I do love Seoul so much, but I’ve just been really emotionally tired lately. even though I’ve lived here for 15 months now it feels kind of like I’ve gone full-circle in the last year and I’m experiencing culture shock all over again in some ways? except this time instead of encountering these things for the first time, now it’s more like I’m just tired of dealing with them and it’s just getting under my skin. I’m sick of being the only foreign teacher AND the youngest teacher at my school in a very age-centric society, which means that I’m just expected to go along with everything all the time even though I’m always out of the loop and nothing ever gets explained to me, and I get treated like an incompetent baby all the time -OR- people expect me to understand absolutely everything and know about everything even when there’s no reason I should. I’m tired of fighting against a language barrier with every single person around me every single day and people assuming that I’m either perfectly fluent in Korean or that I can’t understand a single word. I’m disgusted by men who sit in the pink seats on the subway reserved for pregnant women. I’m disgusted by plastic surgery ads EVERYWHERE that make women (and men) look like anime dolls. I’m tired of having to make small talk with people who “just want to practice their English, can I have your phone number???”, people who don’t actually care about me as a person they just saw a foreigner and were like “It’s free English!” I’m tired of crowded subways and everyone pushing and shoving without apologies everywhere I walk and not having personal space. I’m sick of old ladies staring at me and leaning over and covering their mouths to whisper something to their husbands or friends when they see me (or worse, just saying it outright and assuming I won’t know). I’m tired of aggressive salespeople trained to be pushy with foreigners and tourists. I’m tired of the endless rallies and boycotts and scandals and anger and complaining. I’m sick of breathing carcinogenic air that’s thick with dust and chemical pollution. My heart is broken from having to watch old people squatted on the sidewalk or subway station selling trinkets trying to survive (Korea’s rate of elderly poverty is extremely bad), from watching career men and women on their commutes look frazzled and hurried and exhausted in this work- and business-driven burnout culture, from watching women and girls plaster their faces with foundation that’s noticeably several shades too light, from hearing my perfectly healthy-looking coworkers talk about how they can’t eat a full meal at lunch because they have to diet, and from having to hear my students as young as 8 years old tell me every single day that they’re tired and sleepy, and from knowing that my sixth grade students are already worried about taking their college entrance exam in high school, and from watching students with developmental delays or mental disabilities be expected by the teachers to sit in silence alone and not participate in the class in any way, and from hearing a fifth grade girl tell me “You’re so lucky to be American; Americans have such free minds and really believe they can do or become anything, but people here don’t think that way.” ...And lately I’m also cold and grumpy all day because for some reason the school buildings in a first-world country aren’t centrally heated. 

but in spite of all that, I do love Korea more than I can say and I’m so glad that I came and that I decided to stay an extra year. I’ve had such a great time in the last 15 months, discovered so much about myself, learned a ton, became a lot healthier physically, seen so many K-pop concerts and Korean hip-hop acts perform in person, and I wouldn’t take it back in a million years or trade it for anything. tbh lately I just really miss the USA a lot, because it’s where I was born and where I grew up and where my whole family was born & grew up, and so it’s my home in a way that Korea or anywhere else never can be. obviously the US is fucked up in all its own ways, some ways similar to here and some different, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from living here it’s that no country is some perfect, ideal dreamworld society, every country is facing their own problems and socio-cultural issues. I also feel like I was pretty open-minded and sympathetic towards immigrants and foreigners in the states before but BOY OH BOY, mad props to anyone who packs up their whole life and takes it somewhere else because that shit is HARD and in ways that no one else except other people who have done the same thing can understand. and I’m even moving BACK home after 2 years away, like I can’t imagine permanently relocating to the other side of the world tbh. 

tl;dr - 

사랑과 미움이 같은 말이면 I love you, Seoul

사랑과 미움이 같은 말이면 I hate you, Seoul