Voyage voyage

I stopped travelling, and I mean that in the best possible way. There are still a lot of places in the country where I want to (and will) go in the next few weeks, but I noticed that I’m not really travelling anymore. Instead, it feels like I’m just there.

After my bike trip, I stayed on the island for a week, without any schedule. I just wanted to recover from the time spent on the road, and do a bit of sightseeing.

When I came for the check-in, the hotel staff first thought I was here for business, and as we kept chatting, he told me that nobody stays in Jeju for more than a long weekend. It is nothing more than a leisure destination, both for locals and foreigners. Most people just fly here, visit for one or two days, and either fly back to the mainland, or move on to their next travel destination. When he asked what I had planned for the week, I said that I had no idea.

Staying for longer gave me plenty of time to walk around a lot, and see all the things I wanted to see, including the small Museum of Contemporary Art. Given that it takes three public buses and two hours to get there, I bet that most people visiting the island for a weekend won’t even think about it, but I’m glad I did.

If you exclude Berlin and Paris, I believe that London, Stockholm and New York are the cities I’ve spent the most time in, or visited the most often. I’ve now spent more time in Seoul than in all the cities on that list. As a consequence, it feels a little easier to live in and navigate, day after day.

Google Maps has had a spot on my homescreen since my first smartphone, but Naver has replaced it since I got to South Korea (Google Maps lets you find places, but none of the navigation features work). Using it daily has brought interesting insights to what still is my profession. A lot of what I see makes me think of my previous job, and the craft of designing digital products in general.

I’ve been here long enough to say that public transport in the entire country (and not just in Seoul) is one of the best I’ve ever used. I haven’t been on a single taxi or private car since I landed here, and was still able to visit all the places I wanted to, without any difficulty.

I’m actually impressed by the fact that the same transportation card (I’m using a T-money card) has allowed me to travel between the bus terminal and my hotel in Sokcho, as well as to get to the start of a hiking trail in Jeonju, literally on the other side of the country. It really feels like an actual problem I’ve had in many other places has actually been solved in the best possible way (Just for context, I remember that Taipei uses a “put-the-exact-amount-for-the-distance-and-only-in-coins” machine, when you step in a bus. I also remember that Bangkok buses have staff on board asking where you’re going, before collecting payment).

Travelling to and discovering any new place often makes you take “travel-related” pictures. But the more time you spend anywhere, the more familiar it looks, therefore making it more difficult to see what you found so special in the first place.

By the time I left Paris, I found myself out of inspiration when it came to capturing images of the city. The very first pictures I took in Paris look very different from the last ones I had a chance to capture. The same thing also happened in Berlin. After some time, I just wasn’t able to see anything I thought was special, or worthy of capturing, and the pictures I was taking at this time were clearly reflecting this feeling.

I’m now looking at the pictures I’ve taken during the past few weeks, and I can see the same pattern repeating, at a smaller scale. I haven’t run out of inspiration yet, but I can tell that my pictures from Seoul start to look like I got out of the “travel photography” phase, and I’m now a little closer to “casual photography”, or something that’s just less “travel-related”.

I know this statement probably doesn’t make a lot of sense (if any), but that’s genuinely how I feel. And I take it as a good sign.

Overall, my day-to-day feels oddly normal. Oddly similar to what I would be doing if I wasn’t travelling to this place. One of the ideas I wanted to explore before starting this journey was to “live somewhere else, and not just travel there”, or something along these lines.

I didn’t know where, when, or if this would even happen, and I think I finally got an answer to that one.

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Here’s a bunch of links about travel I found lately, and that I wanted to share:

• I went on a Package Trip for Lonely Millenials. It Was Exhausting [nytimes]: I’m extremely unlikely to ever go on such a trip, despite being in the core target group for the product, so I’m glad this reporter did it to write this story. It feels like the complete opposite of what I think travel should be.
• Are Amazing Cities Being Overrun By Tourism? Porto As A Cautionary Tale [citynerd, on youtube]: an urban planner asks very relevant questions on the relationship between tourism and urbanism. The context is very different in European tourist hubs compared to what I can see here in Asia, but the same questions deserve to be asked.
• Bring back personal blogging [theverge]: I asked ChatGPT to suggest five posts for this blog, and ended up with suggestions for the exact content I really don’t want to write. For now, I’d say this small corner of the internet I pour my thoughts in is safe.