The Trip That Reminded Me There's More to Life

I flew to Seoul on October 29, and I stayed in Korea almost all of November. After studying Korean for over two years, I had really been wanting to go to Korea. The trip was planned months before losing my job, but getting let go changed what it meant.

My girlfriend and I had been planning this trip on Wanderlog since September, adding and removing places across numerous updates. Mostly her. By the time I actually got on the plane, I had lost my job and the trip had become something different than what we planned. It went from a vacation to a reset.

Walking around Seoul and using Korean I had learned from a screen was surreal. Ordering food without pointing. Reading signs slowly. Having conversations that went somewhere. I had been studying this language since 2023, mostly so I could talk to her family, and here it was working in the real world.

We had dinner with her parents and I held a conversation in Korean. I told jokes that made them laugh hard, her dad belly laughing. That was the whole point of studying for two years, not just to be understood but to be funny in someone else’s language. It worked.

We went beyond Seoul too. Jeju Island with its volcanic craters and the Penguin Village. A cable car ride in Mokpo. The historical sites in Gyeongju. Muneoppang in Yeosu.

I don’t know if the trip fixed anything. But it changed the direction I was looking. Six years at Amazon and I had tied so much of my identity to that job. Losing it felt like losing a part of myself. But here I was in Korea, having fun, making people laugh, being accepted by everyone I met. The loss wasn’t as great as I initially thought and felt. There’s more to life than the job, and I was living it.