A Collage of My Favourite Activities – Ver. South Korea

If my other posts have been about the big things – the culture shock, the travel, the emotional weight of leaving – then this one is about the small things. The afternoons, in-between moments that didn’t make it into the itnerary but made it into my heart anyway. Consider this a collage: unchronological, unpolished, and entirely honest.

Cherry Blossom Walk

Spring in Korea arrives slowly at first, snippets of sunshine, a warm breeze cutting through the cold, and then all at once. One week the trees look bare and the next the streets are lined with blossom so dense it almost looks like something out of a fantasy book. We walked for hours around different parks, taking photos and having picnics beneath the pink. There’s something about cherry blossom season that makes everyone slow down slightly, look up more than usual, take photos of trees they would normally walk past without a second thought. It is brief and beautiful and everyone who sees it understands immediately why people make a fuss about it. I understood it too, standing under a canopy of blossom in a city that had slowly started to feel like mine.

Picnics by the Han River

The Han River is one of Seoul’s greatest gathering places. On any given weekend, you’ll find people there – families, couples, friends – spread out on picnic blankets with convenience store hauls, or in the evening with friend chicken and beers, watching the city from the water’s edge. We went many times across the year, in different weathers and different moods. Autumn visits wrapped in jackets, spring ones in lighter layers, watching the city reflect on the water as the sun went down. There’s something quietly joyful about a Han River picnic: unpretentious, easy and definitely Korean. We’d sit for hours and talk about everything and nothing, and it never got old.

Cafe-Hopping

Korea takes its cafes seriously, and I, in return, took that seriously too. Seoul in particular has a cafe culture unlike anywhere I have ever been, and I keep trying to find that back in Manchester… Themed cafes, rooftop cafes, study cafes. tiny independent spots tucked down alleys you’d never find without someone who knew where to look. We made a habit of it: picking a neighbourhood, wandering until something caught our eye, ordering something photogenic and sitting for far longer than was probably polite. Some of the best conversations of my year happened over an iced americano in a place we’d stumbled into by accident. I have a folder on my phone just for cafe photos, that takes up about a quarter of my storage..

A Friendship Photoshoot

At the end of my time in Korea, one of my best friends, Jieun, suggested we do a friendship photoshoot, quite a common practise between Korean friends, but it was actually both our first time doing one. It was our way of marking the end of my year abroad, of saying that what we had built here was worth commemorating. You meet people on a year abroad in this accelerated, intense way’ you go from strangers to family in the space of months, bonded by the shared experience of having uprooted your lives and landed in the same place at the same time. But there’s also something particularly special about the friendships you form with people who are from the place you’ve chosen to call home for a year; Jieun showed me sides of Korea I would never have found on my own, and that kind of friendship is rare. The photoshoot was our goodbye and thank you to each other. We got dressed up, found a photographer and spent an afternoon being together before we had to say our final goodbyes.

This is what made leaving Korea so difficult. Not the landmarks or the novelty of being somewhere new. It was the afternoons. The people. The ordinary, irreplaceable texture of a life you have built from the ground up in somewhere totally unexpected.

It was, without question, exactly where I was supposed to be.

Thank you for reading all the way down here.

Mallie x