Living the Daydream: Months 5, 6, and 7

Hi friends! Long time no see :’)

It’s literally been an entire month since I’ve written a blog post, and three months have gone by since I’ve written an update post. Before this accidental break from the blog, I had been focusing on putting out more informational posts that apply to everyone but definitely feel as if I owe a good old fashioned personal update to all those who know me from home or have been following along my whole adventure! And while it seemed as if I took a month long hiatus from working on my blog all together, I have been doing lots of researching, expanding my knowledge of certain blogging topics, and putting in lots of work on extending my reach on Pinterest! Stay tuned to the end of the post for more updates on blogging.

So here it is: Living the Daydream: Months 5 , 6, and 7!

Where I’ve been:

When I was dreaming about coming to Korea to see the world teach, I had expected this section of my roundup posts to be much more exciting, so please bear with me!

While this experience hasn’t been everything I ever dreamed of in terms of travel, I still managed to see a few new things during my Christmas break as well as my Lunar New Year break.

Here’s what the last two months were lookin’ like:

1 week in Seoul
3 days snowboarding in Yong Pyong
1 day on Nami Island
And a lot of time chilling in Busan - which is never a bad thing:)

Highlights

The last few nights of a midnight curfew. When I arrived in Korea, the curfew was 10pm. Slowly, as the months went on, that pushed to 11, which in turn slowly pushed to midnight. It’s honestly really hard working 9 hours a day and trying to make friends in the area with a curfew like that, so we were all over the moon to have what seemed like more time in the day to do things and explore new parts of the city (and hopefully make some more friends!)
But then, Omicron hit, and the curfew snapped back to 9 O’CLOCK PM. Worse than it was when I got here. So, we decided to make the most of our last few nights of going out until midnight, and they were definitely some of the most fun I’ve had since being here.
Discovering (more) new food. If you read my last update post, you know that Korean food has completely won me over. This month, I discovered that I live in literally the best area ever when it comes to eating (not when it comes to being connected to the rest of the city though RIP) and now my weekend mornings consist of souffle pancakes and avocado toast at a restaurant called Mermer spent with the cutie resident bulldog. We found an incredible Katsu place in Seomyeon, there’s a place that sells truffle gnocchi 3 minutes from my work. The french place across from me makes Sandwiches that I’ll think about for the rest of my life. I had the best Shabu Shabu of my life in Seoul, and a hole in the wall on my street makes heaven on a plate for 6 dollars.
I am BLESSED in the food department, let me tell ya. I keep telling all my friends that I truly don’t know what I’ll do when I go home and don’t have access to this decadence.

The week in Seoul over Christmas break! Seoul was fun the first time around, but it was even more fun when I got to go with friends. We have very similar interests, so we hit so many different parts of Seoul that I had been dying to see! We ate incredible food, visited like 20 cafes, walked marathons, and had a grand old time — even with the 9 pm curfew! To read more about that trip, be sure to check out my Seoul Rundown!

BROCK IS HERE. I repeat: Brock. is. here. For those of you who don’t know, Brock is my fabulous boyfriend who took two 10 hour flights, spent 10 hours in Turkey during a layover, and suffered for 10 days in government facility quarantine to spend this month with me. Even though I work all the freaking time, we take lots of walks, eat lots of food (Hence all the new food discoveries this month) and it’s just nice not being so lonely all the time, as all my friends live quite a distance away from me. I was able to show him everything Busan has to offer, and we’ve had the best month ever re-discovering my city together.
I’m so happy he’s here:) He literally leaves tomorrow, and I’m going to be absolutely distraught for the next few weeks. I’m super grateful that we were able to see each other despite the raging pandemic, and the time we had together was so so fun! So I need to count my blessings instead of getting upset and wallowing for the next few weeks.
Getting the chance to see Garden of the Morning Calm! It’s something very small, we were only there for about an hour and a half, and we nearly FROZE, but this light show is the largest private garden that’s accessible to the public in all of Korea. During the wintertime, they deck the whole thing out in millions of lights, and it was so gorgeous! I initially had it on my South Korea Bucket List, but decided it was too far out of the way. Luckily, the tour that Brock and I booked to take us to the ski resort made a pit-stop there, and I may or may not have snuck it back on the list just so I could check it off! It was absolutely gorgeous.

Learning to snowboard! We only did two days of it, and while I have never skied nor snowboarded, I actually ended up surprising myself! I was able to turn and go down a mountain without falling! The first day was definitely better than the second, as I woke up incredibly sore - lol!! It’s a workout for sure - and the second day I hit my head SO hard, lost my phone on the slopes and a glove on the ski lift, and turned in early, I still had lots of fun and was just happy to be there.
While it’s definitely not a newfound passion (and I might just try skis next time haha) it was super fun to spend time with Brock while he’s here, have him show me one of his passions, and to learn something new!

Lowlights

COVID - It’s getting so old and I sound like a broken record, but my experience here is truly nothing like I though it would be. I kept my hopes probably higher than they should’ve been when COVID initially hit in 2020, thinking that surely by the time I moved to Korea that everything would be under control, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Cases in South Korea have literally never been higher, not even during the initial outbreak.
If I get COVID, I’ll lose two weeks of pay, and the stress of that is pretty intense! Obviously there’s no international travel going on, and I feel a little stuck here. While I love being in Korea, there’s just not much that I can do. I went surfing this summer, and people literally wear masks in the water. While I’m glad that they take it so seriously, and I’m not mad at Korea, I just feel as if this should be the time of my LIFE — and due to unfortunate circumstances, it’s just not. I know that I’m not alone in this feeling, and that everyone has lost so much in the last two years, but it does suck that what was supposed to be the adventure of a lifetime is falling a little bit short.
The process of getting Brock here ~nearly~ killed me. When I came to Korea, the Delta variant was hitting the United States hard, and I had a nightmare of a time getting a COVID test so that I could board the plane. So with Brock, we thought ahead, booked him a COVID test far in advance, and kind of forgot about it until it was time for him to get tested. Unfortunately, his departure lined up perfectly with the Omicron crisis, and the test we booked that initially said it had a 1-2 day turnaround had an overwhelming amount of tests and changed their turnaround time to 4-5 days — something that would’ve prevented him from getting on the plane.
We looked for tests everywhere, but we were having no luck finding anywhere that could get us results in time. He woke up at 6 am multiple times to try to snag spots for tests with same-day results, but was never able to snag one. Finally in a last ditch effort, him and his family all woke up early, thinking that between the 5 of them they could get a spot. I even set an alarm for 8 pm here so that I could try as well.
THANK GOD, I was able to snag the 8 am spot and he could get his test. I can’t imagine how stressed he was - I was beyond stressed and I wasn’t even the one with a 35 hour travel day and a 10 day government facility quarantine ahead of them.
He’s here now, thank goodness, and hopefully going home is a much smoother process.

The stress of graduation. If you’ve ever worked at a Hagwon, you know that graduation is a big freaking deal. Long story short, just as I was getting into the groove of work, graduation has snuck up on us, and it has all spiraled downhill rather quickly. Graduation, after two long months of working on plays, songs, speeches, memorizations, and ballet and music performances, graduation is TOMORROW. I cannot wait to be done, and although that presents a whole new set of challenges (a new schedule, new teachers, brand new batch of kids, etc) hopefully it will be much smoother sailing.

The cold weather! Back where I’m from in Virginia, it gets pretty cold during the winter. Sure, we have the odd day thats 70 degrees in February, but it’s typically really cold. The weather in Busan is around the same as back home temperature-wise, but something about living by the Ocean during the winter just takes the cold to the NEXT. LEVEL. It’s such a shame because there are so many outdoor things to do here that I would love to show Brock while he’s here, but the cold makes it so hard to do anything once I’m off of work and the sun has already set.
I’m just a summer kind of girl. I get so sad and negative during the winter, so I’m looking forward to the pick-me-up that spring always brings.
feeling of temporariness — if that’s even a word?? My time in Korea is temporary. Instead of feeling as if I’m taking a much needed break before I potentially launch myself into corporate America for the rest of my life, I feel as if I’m in limbo.
If you know me at all, you know I take a lot of pride and joy at making my rooms that I’ve had throughout the years feel like home. Although I have purchased a few things for my tiny studio apartment here, I know that there’s no way I can bring them home. In fact, I’m at the point in my year-long teaching contract where it literally makes no sense to buy anything at all, even new clothes or shoes. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m a material girl, and I like to be surrounded by things that make me happy! I’m not getting that sense of happiness here.
Additionally, I have no idea what comes next, and the uncertainty is just added to this strange feeling in my stomach. I made a list of goals at the beginning of January, and feasibly, living here in Korea, I can’t even accomplish most of them. Read more? English books are few and far between. Eat healthier? a bunch of 30 grapes costs 10 dollars. It’s discouraging!
I’ve made fantastic friends who help my to feel a little more normal, as their friendships are one of the only permanent things I have here, but sometimes it’s hard to focus on enjoying the present when you feel so temporary.

LOLs

One of my kids, when writing his diary, referred to me as “Emma Sensei”. and it made my freaking day.

Fitness

We have some good news and some bad news in this category: A new gym opened at the top of the hill that I live on - and its affordable!! This means no more sprinting home after work to catch the bus to the gym. I’m hoping that this means much more consistency and less excuses when it comes to working out.
The bad news, is that with Brock here, the last thing I wanted to do was to go to the gym after not seeing him for 9 hours. We ate out almost every day, and I feel like I’ve lost a lot of progress! 100% worth it, but definitely not ideal. Hoping that I can get back into the swing of things and really show up for summer. After all, I’ve never spent a summer living by the beach, and I’m trying to be a beach QUEEN this year lolllll.

Blogging

Blogging is really starting to stump me. I feel as if I’ve done everything correctly to get enough traffic to my site, but honestly, I’m just not seeing that much improvement. One win that I celebrated this morning was growing my Pinterest to 150k monthly impressions! I’ve really been working hard on that platform recently, as that’s where most blogger’s traffic comes from. Unfortunately, due to either me just not creating good Pinterest graphics (hopefully not this) or people simply saving my travel guides to use when they are actually traveling (hopefully it’s just this), the Pinterest traffic is only translating to about 6 thousand monthly views. I need over 10 thousand to get approved for a basic ad network!
I’m staying optimistic that once travel begins to open up, I’ve already put in the work and the traffic comes quickly and easily, but you never know! Maybe I just need to reconsider my strategies again. Momma didn’t raise no quitter okay?
Next month, I’m going to go back and revamp old blog posts by adding affiliate links and attempting to monetize without ads. I’m going to keep working hard on Pinterest, keep putting in the work, and trusting that hard work is all I can do. The rest is out of my control! I’m so grateful for all of you who read my blog, even my silly little update posts. Your likes and comments mean everything to me!