The Portal 

So I'm at the airport. Things are pretty surreal as it has come down to the moment I've wondered about for the past ten months. As I approach gate 22, being lowered with each step on an escalator, thinking about what cultural clashes await me, I see an attendant at the bottom. Her smile's a bit eerie. She was standing in that classic chorus class stance where her hands are placed strategically at her bellybutton and her body language conveys "I'm here to help." She may as well be a hologram. As the escalator descends a step at a time, I head on the overhead another airport attendant call out my name. It's in the language and accent my parents have spoken to me in all these years. It's what I've grown accustomed to and yet I'm moved to take in a deep breath. I'm still in shock I'm going through with this plan. I'm not anxious or scared, though. It's definitely thanks to the wonderful program from Regional Convention. I got really timely reminders on anxiety and where our focus should lie.

After knocking out for a good eight hours, (that's what an exciting weekend will do to ya, gooodness!) I wake up to be realize where I am. I'm really just taking this whole trip one step at a time. I guess I am pretty happy about the decade I'm living in. Living during such times of connectivity and globalization, it eases the blow of moving through different time zones. As I'm awaiting my destination to Asia, I'm momentarily distracted by watching the XX, Vampire Weekend, Arctic Monkeys, Phoenix, Monsters and Men, Mumford&Sons play at a Coachella type event in Gastonbury. Although Pandora isn't accessible in Korea, I have at least my playlist.

This is a comfort. It's interesting to think about how others did it in times when knowledge, music, goods, ideas weren't so easily accessible from one part of the world to another. When traveling was so much more of an adventure. Instead of being able to plan out before arriving what one would be ordering that night, having to leave it up to the moment one actually arrived? Travel had much more of an edge then- if not mystery. Imagine the type of stories one would bring home and the smug expression along with it. There was a time when each hilltop held uncertainty. Dwelling on such times deliver a delicious pang of melancholy. Still, what's in the past remains in the past. 

Smartphones and the apps along with it have become a necessity in my life- GPS, Yelp!. Must leave those simpler, lovelier times behind on my own adventures in a very modernized Korea.