All About Travel

Its that moment. That one moment when you walk into the foreign air for the first time. And I am not talking about when you walk out of the air plane after a 15 hour flight, groggy and unable to pay attention to the new world around you. Its that moment when you step out of the airport, and into the humid heat and cloudy overcast of Inchon that you realize, for the first time, you are in a different world.
Seoul South Korea, the up and coming city that foreigners have been flocking to after the rise in K-pop, Korean food and Korean Dramas. The air had the the faint sent of garlic, musty city air and every once in a while, the sent of sour water whenever I walked by the sewage drians.
Before, I felt like an outsider looking at this world in awe. How could I not? When I had auburn hair, white skin and everything I understood about the world was in question? The streets fulled with black hair, black glistening eyes and tan skin. Teenagers laughing on the street, young children walking home without adults and green buses zooming by as if there was no traffic lights. I was an outsider in this world and the people knew it just as much as I did.
How had I come to this world that was so different from everything I had ever known? But there I was walking the streets where old grandfathers stared at me in amazement and wonder.
The sweet smell of deep cherry red bean in hodokk and hot red ddokbokki from street venders, the lights that never go out even in the middle of the night. The taxi drivers that only understand the term “bali bali” meaning “faster, faster!”
And as summer turned to winter, and then to spring, pink cherry blossoms came to life as they danced to the ground in the cool whispering wind of the ever alive city. And as these seasons changed, I changed. The smell of the sewage, became a time of laughter as it invaded my nostrils. From cat cafes to hole in the wall cafes that made me question if I was allowed to go through those doors. Everything that had once intimidated me, was now apart of my everyday life.
This world that was once so foreign to me now has become apart of me in a way that I could never be the same again. It is a place of fast paced city life, with the slowness of girls in heals too high to walk in. The world where the smell of the city accents the feel of the atmosphere. It is a world that is so different. Ending up in this world was divine and now I am no longer an outsider, because this is my world.