Saturday was a busy, busy day. I had made plans with a doctoral classmate of mine to attend a lecture at Yonsei University in the afternoon, though I had lost track of the days of the week. So, when I reached out to my cousin and was invited to attend a baptism the next day, I immediately said yes. It turned out that there was no scheduling conflict, I just had to wake up bright and early to take the train two hours south to Pyeongtaek. I really didn’t mind the chance to catch up on four hours worth of podcasts on the round trip, but I was exhausted from lack of sleep.
A group of Japanese tourists spent 5 or 6 hours packing their bags, only going to sleep at 3am and immediately launching into rather loud snoring. Meanwhile, just outside my dorm a couple of people were chatting until 5 in the morning. I gave up trying to sleep around 6 and choked down a couple cups of coffee while reading the news until it was time to head to the subway station.
There are churches everywhere in Korea and even with several neighboring churches, the LDS building stood out in its simplicity. It’s kind of how embassies are supposedly sovereign territory, stepping into a Mormon church transports you to another time and place. Anyways, it was nice to briefly say hello to my cousin, her husband, and their kids. Though religion isn’t important to me, I was happy to attend as a representative of one side of the family. I’m surprised that people on the other side flew all the way Korea just for a baptism.
It was also an unexpected reality check to make small talk with traditional Americans. I’ve been in a bit of a bubble among the international drifters that I forget that having a family and a career are assumed to be the default status of most people. I haven’t really had explain my situation to anyone, or myself for that matter. Is it really so weird that I lived in China for ten years, am fluent in the language, don’t have a job, and am just hanging out in Korea studying Korean for the fun of it?
With the church stuff wrapped up around 11 am and an appointment at 1 pm, I hoofed it back to the train station for the commute back into town. I met up with my classmate in the Sinchon station and we had a nice lunch before going to the university. We had just enough time to grab a coffee before the scheduled 3pm start of the lecture. We should have gone straight in, however, as a last minute schedule change had the talk start at 2:30 instead of 3. It also wasn’t a lecture, so much as the afternoon session of a two day conference on “Chinese Language Education and the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (meaning: computers). The first presentation was a Taiwanese scholar (working at Hong Kong Polytech) discussing corpus linguistics and issues involved in computing frequencies. Quite interesting. The second presentation was a scholar from Shandong providing an overview of interlanguage corpora. It’s been just over a month since I graduated, but it feels like a lifetime. If I had taken that post-doc in Beijing, that’s how my life would have been. I like research, but the endless treadmill of publications and presentations all feels so meaningless.
My friend had to run off to catch a 6pm train back to Daegu before the session wrapped up around 5:30. I declined the offer to join the conference for dinner, but still got dragged into the mandatory group photos.
I headed back to Sinchon station to meet someone for dinner. A few weeks of swiping had finally paid off and I got to escape the gravity well of the hostel. We didn’t really click, but had an awesome barbecue dinner that somehow I ended up paying for. Considering I had been treated for lunch, I shouldn’t complain, but I’m annoyed she didn’t offer to split, especially as I wasn’t thinking of it as a “date.”
Not long after 8 pm, I was back in the hostel doing my best imitation of a corpse on the living room rug.
| Orange drink @ 7-11 | 1000 |
| BBQ | 30200 |
| Total: | 31200 (189 RMB) (USD 27.9) |
Running Total: 5342 RMB
(USD 789)
Daily Average: 267 RMB
(USD 39.5)