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Barry Walsh lives in Guildford, Surrey, and is currently jobless. He spent a year in Kingston, Canada, as part of his undergraduate degree sharing an all-male flat with eight other guys. Hoping to amend this after graduating he taught English to kids in Taegu, South Korea, in a school with eight all-female Korean teachers. He is an avid reader and enjoys writing philosophical/nonsense stories depending on his mood. Barry has a burning ambition to go to Greenland in the future but first he would like to sort his life out and earn some money. Additional Resources South Korea  Unique Lifestyles  Books on Living in Korea

Where do I go this weekend? I have made it through the week, once more only through terrible neglect of the soul – an exile from my freedom. It's Saturday morning in South Korea. As soon as I leave school I am a bird – liberated from social confinement. I jump on the bus. I am meeting Jonny, another teacher, living elsewhere in Korea. He’s from Northern Ireland. We flew over on the same plane. I am like a child again, my self-inflicted alienation only serves for this brief but acute weekend release.

I stretch out on my cotton wool armchair. Korean buses are beds on wheels. I listen to music, watch the passengers, take in the view outside. This is bliss. I am the only Westerner travelling today as always, but whereas during the week I am detached, now I feel I belong. My weariness of heightened cynicism is replaced by a tempered tranquillity. Unhurriedly gliding by, a mountain looms over a flooded paddy field. Workers with bent backs and straw hats tend the rice. Idyllic. Inside is in harmony without.

My mind drifts to anticipation of meeting Jonny. We will eat Korean food, drink, go to a nightclub, and finish off with karaoke. I’ll probably be sick. This is the standard routine. I hate routine, but we only meet every three weeks or so (the rest of the weekends I escape somewhere alone) and the deliverance from loneliness overwhelms any banality. Even so, we manage to participate in something uniquely amusing every time. Every little novelty in a foreign country imprints itself on memory.

This is what occupies my imagination just now. I want to be reckless tonight. Will we find a Korean friend to show us some good bars and then, giggling, childlike, run away from him – his usefulness expired? Will we get into a fight with some other who, frustrated at his lack of English proficiency, torments us to help him out, and when we flee, still prevails and ensnares us again? Or will we find we are penniless, and so stay in a five star hotel making use of room service, mini bar, Korean massage and public bath facilities courtesy of my mother’s visa card (to be used in emergencies only)? Or dance on the nightclub stage with cucumber in our ears, run across police cars or pretend to be famous sports stars? The possibilities are tame and hardly daring, but they sustain my excitement. It is enough.
 

Back on the bus I pass pagodas, dried up rivers, template towns, smashed up cars, and pervading all, mountains, neither lush nor barren, and fields waterlogged in spring. This country, the Hermit Kingdom is a forgotten nirvana. Up here, below the trees, are temples and hermitages and monks; I could run outside and climb and disappear forever, taken in by the trees and the monks, fed and nurtured, my body lost to civilisation, my spirit found by renunciation.

The service stop approaches. I think of coffee and a cigarette. With amazing fluidity, the bus turns off the motorway, enters the service area and parks. I start for the toilet still preoccupied with my serenity.

To me this is what experiencing a foreign culture is all about. I have done nothing uniquely Korean on my journey, but my self-assurance is sufficient. I ask the bus driver in my limited Korean how long the stop is for. I already know – it’s always the same – but right now my self-love is smothering my self-consciousness. While in the toilet, I observe my appearance – why don’t I have a girlfriend?

Over a coffee and a smoke I watch the clouds intermittently reveal a majestic mountain surveying all. It is me. Today, I am a narcissist.

The bus pulls out of the rest area and I, we, are back on the road. I listen to Massive Attack’s Mezzanine in expectation of tonight’s hedonism. The speed of the bus and the smoothness of the road work in harmony with the music. There is one direction and I am floating on an irrevocable stream.

Why does it all affect me so? It is only a three hour bus ride to meet a friend. I must have sunk so low during my weekdays – I am dimly aware of this. But the thought of the return journey tomorrow never surfaces. Today, I cannot dispel my tranquillity; tomorrow I will not dispel my gloom. I have set my moods apart – they are in complete conflict and cannot co-exist.

I feed off Jonny’s enthusiasm. He also has to ride for a few hours for our rendezvous, and his state of mind is somewhat similar. We meet at the bus terminal, find somewhere to stay the night, drop our bags off, get dinner and then drink, drink, drink. It’s always frantic; I work on Saturday morning, so Saturday night is all I have. On spring shoes we bounce from pub to pub. Tonight, we are going to pull chicks, “For God’s sake, we’re Westerners. Asian girls love us!" But first we lament about his school, my flatmate and the gradual wearing down of our initial enchantment with the country. This won’t do. We progress to talking about books and their meaning – 1984 and Brave New World. I feel my being intensified as a result of having read these masterpieces of free thought while in Korea. He sees Big Brother’s influence on the sometimes-tractable Koreans. Invariably though, all our roads lead to frivolity, and we find redemption only through absurdity.
 

It is here I wish to dwell forever more. Do I hear monks high up in the hills in a perpetual state of comic relief? I imagine I do. Passing over a river, I notice its banks are an ugly brown, still showing from the dry winter that has departed. Just as laughter washes away my troubles, so the monsoons will erase all trace of this blemish and restore nature’s beauty. In summer, the mountains and the rivers reign supreme; all else takes a back seat. I may have to endure seasons of discontent, but the weekend is my summer, and I have banished my demons.

We are nearing our destination. It is in a valley surrounded by mountains. The road spirals down from its high altitude right into the downtown area. As the bus winds down, my thoughts gradually leave me, flushed away to subterranean depths for another three weeks. Reality returns. Inside a continuous current of anticipation remains. Jonny is here. And I have already met him.