Thinking Allowed: Taking a break

The last two weeks have been a world away from the hiking life - we’ve been relaxing in South Korea! Our visas to Japan only lasted three months, too short for the full hike, so we turned our visa run into its own little adventure.

We spent a week in Seoul at a worldschooling pop-up hub with five other families. It’s crazy how within just a few short days we went from awkward small talk to feeling like we’d made new friends! We chatted our way through temples and markets, played Ninja in parks, saw the changing of the guard, visited a sheep cafe and a poop cafe and a k-pop museum. We learned about sewn artwork, antipreservative eyedrop tips, Army meteorology, Gen Alpha lingo, life at IKEA, and language villages in Minnesota. It was intensely social to spend eight straight days in company after weeks and weeks of solitude, but we enjoyed it.

Then came a few days in Busan, a coastal city in the south that feels kinda small, but is actually bigger than Toronto. Our apartment was as spacious and well-lit as the Seoul one was cramped and dungeony. We had some moochy days of sitting on the beach, reading paperbacks from Aladin (sic) Used Books, and planning - and busier days of surfing, escape room, laser tag (first time ever, the girls liked it), and a weird theme park called Running Man (like someone tried to make an arcade more intellectually stimulating).

South Korea is very different to Japan. Everyone walks down the street drinking frappes (Tamar had like a hundred). Cars carom through yellow lights. People coo at Levi all the time. Our beloved bakery Onion is still the yummiest ever, though the lines were appalling. People eat so much cabbage that public bathrooms are noisier, splatterier places. There is always a k-pop poster, video or song nearby. Instead of vending machines, there are selfie shops on every block. Maybe we’ll get culture whiplash in Japan!