Well, we've officially lost our minds. We've uprooted our entire lives, packed them into a couple of checked bags, and flown halfway across the world to South Korea. Stupid? Maybe. Gutsy? Kinda. Exciting? More like terrifying. But I have a sneaking suspicion it'll be worth it.
This was, after all, something we've been wanting and planning to do for years. "If we do one thing," I would say to Zee time and time again, "we have to live out of the country before we have kids." Now I'm very excited to have little noisy, curly-headed mini- Zee's in the future, don't get me wrong, but I've been told countless times once you have them, making giant life changes can prove to be a bit difficult. And moving abroad is the definition of a giant life change.
We both knew the longer we waited to make the move, the less likely this dream was to come to fruition. When Zee was nearing the end of his Master's degree, we started really looking into how we could make this pipe dream of ours work. Argentina was a potential option with a few companies Zee could work for, but most required fluency in Spanish. Nursing abroad also proved harder to manage than I initially anticipated. Army bases were some of the only legitimate options, and they often had limited positions and long contracts. It wasn't until the sister of a friend told us about the EPIK program in Korea that we felt our dream could be made a reality. Year-long contracts with options to remove, great public transport so there was usually no need to buy a car, decent pay, free housing, and in a safe and modern country. Jackpot. And so here we are in South Korea during the middle of the pandemic, starting, not a new life, but a very different one.
After the many tears shed over leaving our family, friends, and fat cat Sunday, a 2 hour flight from ATL to Toronto in which I lost my passport on the plane and had to sprint through the airport nearly crying to get it before my next flight left, and the 14 hour haul from there to Seoul, I was thoroughly exhausted. Zee kept me positive, God bless him, or else I might have descended into hysterics from all of my hyper-charged emotions. The entire flight from home to my new home in Korea, all I could think was I must be doing something incredibly dumb. Nearly all of our friends were in driving distance back in Atlanta, we both had jobs we loved, the pros go on and on. Neither of us speak Korean, I know a whopping ONE person in this country (and we're going to be living 3-4 hours away from her), and the list of cons kept rolling through my sleep-deprived brain. And then I would look over at Zee looking out the plane window, and he would turn to me with the look of a child about to ride a rollercoaster and say "I am so excited to be in Korea, tiners." And the fears and worries would take a backseat to his joy.
Life seems like a big question mark at the moment. Covid continues to have its way with the world, we don't even know what our apartment looks like yet (or how big it'll be, fingers crossed), and we have no idea whether we'll love this entire experience or not. I do know this: we'll be better people at the end of it. We'll have learned and seen and done things we never could have if we hadn't left our comfortable lives back home. We'll have done it together too. I'm pretty proud of us.
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