Coffee break

How’s it going?

Pretty good, thanks. How about you? It’s been a while.

Where you at?

I just got back in Seoul yesterday, after spending a week around Sokcho. It’s a small town on the east coast that is close to the Seoraksan National Park, which I really wanted to visit.

There are buses departing from Seoul every half hour, and you will get there in just over two hours. I went on a short and easy hike to the Towangseong Falls, but there are many other and more difficult ones. I wanted to go on another trail the next day but had to cancel because of the weather, and the fact that I don’t have the proper gear for a more serious hike, in more difficult conditions.

Besides the park, I just enjoyed chilling on the beachfront and trying foods from the stalls all around the area. You don’t need to stay an entire week, but if you want to get away from Seoul and see both the sea and the mountains, that’s a pretty good option.

Do you manage to meet people?

Yes, but that’s not something I actively try to do. I don’t do things and go places with “meeting people” as a goal. I just happen to have random conversations with random strangers. And that’s good enough for me.

I was on my own when I arrived at the end of the Towangseong trail. A group of four hikers arrived shortly after me, and we just started chatting about anything and everything. They were doctors and nurses from Venezuela, currently working in the US, on a one week holiday in South Korea. They wished they could stay longer but unfortunately didn’t have enough vacation days to do so. We were talking about work-life balance when another woman joined us, shortly followed by her mother. We quickly learn that she’s from Russia, but now lives in Germany, and we now all have our lunch break together, and exchange about our very different experiences in life, work, travel itineraries and all things in between. A japanese women hiking on her own kindly asks me to take her picture in front of a sign that shows she completed the trail. We then leave the spot one after the other, and all get back to our own paths.

We probably won’t ever meet again, and I hope we all can remind ourselves about this short and sweet encounter, sometime in the future. Not as a life changing event, but just as something nice that happened during a hike we all took on the same day.

All of my encounters during this trip have been driven by serendipity, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Aren’t you bored, sometimes?

Yes, but that’s a good thing. Everyone should get bored, once in a while.

Everything still going as planned?

Weekdays and weekends don’t matter anymore and that’s a little weird, but very enjoyable. I believe that used to be the default way I was thinking about time, but this has completely changed. I now need to think really hard about what day of the week is today. My time management could be split into buckets like:

• travel days: these ones are about going from my current location to the next one. It doesn’t sound like much, but I usually don’t plan anything else on these days.
• visit days: these ones are about things that require a little planning (eg: a museum or gallery that’s not open all the time, or an area/neighborhood with no regular transportation schedule). I usually plan these one or two days in advance.
• nothing days: the ones when I literally just wake up and see how I feel. It might turn into a visit day, or not. These make most of my time and I really want to keep it this way.

Today is a nothing day, for example. I found a comfortable coffee spot next to my accomodation, where I’m now writing this post. I have absolutely no idea about what I’ll be doing this afternoon. Tomorrow is also a nothing day. I might just take a nap and walk around Myeongdong, or go visit one of the many museums I bookmarked. There’s a bar in Itaewon I want to see, but I can decide later if and when I want to go.

And after that… [double checks]… monday is my next travel day. An early train will take me to Jeonju, in the south of the country. I’ll stay there for a couple of days and haven’t planned anything beyond that.

What is it like to not work?

These posts you are reading right now is what I consider to be my only “homework” (for the lack of a better word), and I enjoy it. I like that it takes a little more time and effort to put together than a post on social media (side note: Substack tells me that you like it when I write longer posts, so I probably won’t make any more posts that only have pictures).

Not working is making me realize that I don’t want work to define who I am as much as it used to, in the past. Not many people have asked what I do for a living, and I haven’t asked this question a lot either. I’m fine with it being part of my identity, but I just want it to take a little less space, in order to make more space for other interests. I don’t know exactly what I want to fill this space with. But I want to have this space.

With that being said, I'm slowly starting to think about coming back to some kind of employment, but what I’m reading about the current market tells me that I shouldn’t be rushing right now, and that I can keep chilling, for some time at least. So I keep chilling.

So… when are you coming back?

I don’t know. There’s still a lot of places I need to go.

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