Sunday, April 9, 2017

Saying Goodbye

Saying goodbye, going away
Seems like goodbye's such a hard thing to say
Touching a hand, wondering why
It's time for saying goodbye
Saying goodbye, why is it sad?
Makes us remember the good times we've had
Much more to say, foolish to try
It's time for saying goodbye
Dont want to leave, but we both know
Sometimes it's better to go
Somehow I know we'll meet again
Not sure quite where, and I dont know just when
You're in my heart, so until then
Wanna smile, wanna cry
Saying goodbye
La la la la la la la la
It's time for saying goodbye

—"Saying Goodbye" from The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)

The time has come... after 4 years and 8 months, I finally decided to pack my bags, leaving Seoul to return to the USA. My Seoul Adventure is thus... over.

Goodbye to the SVP who brought me to Suwon
(now Cisco Korea president)
To be honest, this wasn't a spontaneous decision by any means. My wife and I had made the decision to move months before, and once she received her USA immigrant visa then the decision was a done deal. However, we kept our intention quiet from almost everyone around us, not wanting to disrupt the natural rhythms of life and also take the time to enjoy the beginnings of married life together in my adopted expat nation. Slowly, slowly, we started telling our friends, one by one. I told my Senior VP at Samsung in January — I anticipated he would tell other Korean colleagues, but he mostly kept silent.

The near unanimous reaction was surprise. I suppose once you stay in a strange place such as Korea long enough, well past people's expectation, then people just assume you will be there indefinitely. You come to be viewed like furniture, an object that always sits in the room, only really noticed when unexpectedly moved out one day, suddenly leaving a gap in the space once occupied.

As I wrote about a couple years ago, there seems to be a natural cycle to expat life in Korea. You just know when it is time to go. You start expat life in a state of wild wonder, then you confront challenges and if you overcome those you get more comfortable and decide you're comfortable in your adopted home. Then slowly over time, circumstances change, friends leave, and you need to decide whether you will reinvigorate your life and double down on the expat experience. Or, as Steve Jobs once famously put it, if you wake up day after day, look at the mirror and don't want to do what you are about to do that day, then you need to make a move. My gut knew before I could even admit the feeling to myself.

Farewell beers with some Samsung colleagues

The last 2 months felt like endless preparation for moving... saying goodbye to the in laws in Vietnam, working out the logistics of when to fly out, selling household items on Craigslist, tying up all my finances, and progressively telling more and more people that we were leaving. Yet despite the drawn out preparations and despite feeling resolutely that I was making the right decision, I still wasn't mentally prepared for the mix of emotions I would feel along the way. At times I felt excited, anxious, impatient to move on, or fearful of missing out on a last experience or a person to say goodbye to. I had my one sad day where I almost cried at my work desk, and other days where I couldn't wait for the last day. The last couple weeks at work felt very strange ... fortunately my director stopped assigning work to me but I still needed to be in the office for 40 hours/week per Samsung HR policy, even if that time was largely spent finishing personal affairs, calling my wife, or having coffee chats with colleagues one last time. It feels strange to come to work knowing you are not there to build something. I had invested almost 5 of my young years acclimating to living outside of my comfort zone, and yet I was just fading away. Leaving was anticlimactic, nothing like arriving.

My final Samsung GSG 2012 "Survivors Lunch" in Suwon

Up to the very end, many of my coworkers didn't know I was leaving. I didn't want to make a scene and I didn't want to disrupt daily business. But maybe I should have told colleagues earlier. Saying goodbye doesn't come naturally to me. I had a couple nights out for farewell drinks with colleagues and a pizza lunch in the office on my final day at Samsung. My Senior VP gave me a parting gift ... Nike basketball shoes, probably because I had accidentally received an ugly black eye while playing pickup at Samsung Digital City 2 weeks prior.

My final day in Seoul started as a sunny Saturday morning, one of those rare clean air days when I felt like I could just live in Seoul forever. My apartment was almost completely empty — the movers had packed most of my belongings in a shipping container and my wife was already gone as well, having moved to the USA ahead of me. I only had a few items on my agenda: say goodbye to people at the gym, get a haircut, video chat with my wife, and make sure everything fit into my suitcases. The air had a crisp early April chill, great for a morning walk wearing a fleece jacket and jeans. Even on my last day in Seoul I discovered new things... a coffee shop in my neighborhood open at 7am(!) and a new Vietnamese bun cha restaurant opening soon. Something I will never forget about Seoul: its dynamism. Always new shops, new restaurants, old buildings torn down and rapidly replaced by new ones.

Final day at my neighborhood gym

Early on a Sunday morning, I vacated my apartment of 4 and a half years and dragged my 2 big suitcases to the limousine bus stop bound for Incheon International Airport. I was leaving much as I came, with 2 big suitcases, but also a memory bank of wild adventures in a vastly different culture. On my 56th time passing through Korean departure immigration — an average travel rate of once per month — I handed in my alien registration card and said I wasn't returning this time. My final contributions to the Korean economy were a duty-free purchase for my wife, a coffee, and 2 kimbaps from my favorite food stop in the Incheon terminal, Robot Kimbap. I posted a quick notification to all my Facebook followers and had a video chat with my wife from the gate. I felt closure in my Korean experience and ready to start anew in my home country.

Spring is a time of revival and rebirth in Nature — and so it will be for me in the year 2017.

Last minutes in my Seoul apartment, packed up for the final time

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Seoul’s Public Transit, and Driving Obsession

Here’s a fact which may surprise you – I have lived without owning a car for 4 and a ½ years, and I have been totally fine! As readers of this blog will know, I come from the USA, land of cars. In addition to the suburban house with the white picket fence and the 2.1 kids, the automobile is a central part of the American dream. I eagerly awaited the freedom gained from receiving my first driver’s license when I turned 16 and felt pride in being able to drive my neighbor to high school during my senior year. In my 20s when I received a promotion at work I celebrated … by treating myself to a new car. Unless you are in New York, living without a car in the USA feels somewhere between traumatic and impossible, so when I sold my wheels to CarMax to move abroad in 2012 I was entering a great unknown.

Regular Seoul traffic
Flash forward to 2017 and I haven’t really missed a beat. I settled in the center of Seoul, near the Itaewon district, and for my first job next to Gangnam Station I was able to commute by public bus. As a few of my colleagues lived in my neighborhood, I frequently would commute by taxi with them. Taxi prices in Seoul are very reasonable by developed-world standards – the cost for 4 passengers to my workplace almost equaling the bus charge – and there is rarely a shortage of unoccupied cars patrolling my area. Since transitioning to a job in the suburb of Suwon in 2014, I have been able to board a Samsung-operated shuttle bus to work with a stop 8 minutes from my apartment.

Seoul has a superb, thorough public transit system that can take you almost anywhere in the metropolitan area. The subway is the 4th busiest in the world (behind Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai) and with so many lines that the numbers 1-9 are not enough to denote them. Announcements and signs are in 4 languages (Korean, English, Chinese, Japanese) so you should never get lost. With the Subway Korea app you can easily plot your journey and the trains are extremely punctual. You can easily buy transit cards at local convenience stores, or the charge will auto-deduct from any Korean credit card (or your smartphone if you’re a savvy techie!). Transferring between lines or to the bus system is free – it’s very functional and rational!

Big roads in Seoul, filled with cars and buses
The bus system is intimidating for a tourist but well worth learning if you’re a resident, and it’s a great incentive to learn some Korean. The buses are far more Koreanized but the major lines do make stop announcements in English. Pretty much wherever the subway does not go, a bus will – and there are many lines even in the suburbs. Figuring out the right bus to take can be tricky, though Google Maps is slowly getting better (still quite limited functionality compared with USA). With some Korean language ninja skills, though, you can plot your journey with ease using Naver Map – it not only tells you all the possible bus lines to take but also gives precise walking directions… even telling you which exits to use at the subway stations. With the KakaoBus app, you can track when your bus will arrive and see route maps for every bus line. All the information you need is in your hand!

Riding taxis requires actually interacting with a non-English-speaking human (Shock! Horror!), but with a little planning you can manage. It’s important to either have the address you are visiting written in Korean, which the driver will punch into his GPS system, or to be able to say the name of a nearby landmark in Korean. Again the fares are inexpensive by global standards and all drivers are REQUIRED to accept credit cards. And no tipping! Such a lovely system! The cars are almost all modern Hyundais with air conditioning, functioning windows, seat belts, few nasty smells ^_^ There is an app for that too, KakaoTaxi, which you can use to call a taxi, though it’s in Korean (English guide here). Generally it’s faster to stick out your hand and hail down a passing cab than it is to use the app. Uber has tried unsuccessfully to break into Seoul and its coverage is very limited.

Some fancy cars sneak in among the Hyundais and Kias
Finally, getting out of Seoul for the weekend is pretty easy too. Inter-city buses travel from Seoul to every other city in Korea. Booking tickets in advance requires even more advanced Korean language ninja skills than plotting a journey in Naver Map, but there are enough buses that most times you can just head to the bus station and hitch a bus departing to your destination in the next 20-30 minutes. Or you can stick to the KTX express train, which is the best way to get to Busan and has an okay English-language reservation website.

In spite of the ease of getting around Seoul and beyond with someone else driving, there are a ton of cars in this city. Traffic here is AWFUL, awful, as bad as anything I have seen in the US – including Washington DC. The major roads in Seoul are well-maintained and insanely wide for such a crowded city, and the proverb “if you build it, they will come” definitely applies here. Almost every apartment complex has an underground parking space built for each tenant, and every shopping area is packed with parking as well. If you’ve been out drinking soju, no worries! There are drivers for hire (대리운전) all over who will escort your vehicle home for an affordable rate. Just last weekend, I had a couple coworkers to my house for dinner who drove into Seoul from one of the commuter suburbs and needed to navigate the 20km (12 miles) return journey after a few glasses of whiskey. The hired driver arrived just a minute or two after being summoned and only charged 25,000 KRW ($22) for the journey.

End of the workday at Samsung, full of the executives' black cars and private chaffeurs
Where you can’t find garage parking you can probably find valet parking for your vehicle. Hence, big roads + lots of parking = tons of cars. Despite all the alternative public transit options, I guess the appeal of driving oneself around in an automobile is too great, even far from America. Unlike the US you don’t see pickup trucks here and few SUVs – the roads are filled with a monochromatic blend of black, grey, and white 4-seater sedans, dominated by Hyundai’s and Kia’s.

Though I haven’t owned a car while living here I haven’t missed driving too much. If I had small children at home I would certainly buy a car, and it would be nice to drive to one of the better grocery stores rather than settling for the mediocre stores in my neighborhood. Also it would be nice to occasionally drive out into the countryside for the weekend to escape the city, though then I would be dealing with the awful traffic. Not to mention… driving standards here are good by developing country standards but quite bad by American/European standards. The drivers are aggressive, they brake and accelerate suddenly, and they don’t like to let you into their lanes. Seoul is certainly better than Busan, where I routinely saw drivers run red lights, but I am surprised there are not more accidents here.

In short, I haven’t seen a need to invest in the Korean obsession of owning a car and sitting in endless traffic. I have never driven here, not even rented a car (in Jeju this would have been nice), but haven’t felt hampered, and the cost savings from not owning a car have been immense. I have only driven cars during business trips and the occasional home leave to USA, and it will feel a little strange when I someday return to the USA and restart my daily commute by getting behind the wheel.

Friday, February 10, 2017

My Crazy Little Neighborhood Gym

Life changes at a rapid pace in South Korea, but one constant during my time here has been my crazy little Crossfit gym in my Hannam-dong neighborhood. I’ve never been a “gym person” and stayed fit back in the US by playing soccer or running. When I moved to Korea I thought I would continue both, but the Samsung Global Strategy Group soccer club met irregularly (and not at all once winter set in), and my running ambitions ended very quickly after my first jog along the Han River. There is a bicycle trail along the Han River about 1km from my apartment which isn’t pretty but is a decently safe place to run in a heavily urbanized city. I strapped on my running shoes after coming home from work one evening and headed to the trail. The trail was quiet but the air was polluted that night — a sadly common problem in Seoul — and I didn’t feel well after jogging. I caught a bad cold the next day which I couldn’t shake for about 3 weeks, and I vowed not to go jogging on that trail again…

Class pyramid!
Winter of 2012-13 was rough… not only was it the coldest winter in recent Seoul memory but I also was sick for large chunks of it. My body really had difficulty adjusting to the frigid conditions, near-constant fine dust in the air and a different diet. I wasn’t exercising and by springtime I had acquired a small gut and gained a few kilos. I did a body fat analysis at a pop-up medical station next to a trade show I was visiting for work in Daegu … my body fat was 22% and upon seeing the results the Korean nurse told me I was “obese”. In case I didn’t understand, she drew a stick figure of a man with a fat belly!! Though from a Westerner’s perspective Koreans have absurd body standards, this was a wakeup call that something wasn’t right with my health.

That workout left me sweaty
On the train ride back from Daegu to Seoul my work colleague said he could bring me to his gym that evening … Crossfit Sentinel One. We lived in the same neighborhood so the gym was a convenient 6-minute walk away from my house. I’m so glad I joined him! I entered a modestly size room in a building basement, with a lot of barbells and weights but little else in the way of equipment. No mirrors on the wall. A group of about 12 had assembled for a “boot camp” style cardio workout class. My heart was pumping, sweat dripping down my face. Panting and sore, I knew I had found a place I needed to bring into my life. And, big bonus points, the instructor spoke perfect English! I signed up immediately. Two months later, I had lost my Korea flab and all my sicknesses from the winter had cleared out. I felt great!

Posing again
I did the “boot camp” workouts for a year, group exercises with mostly body-weight movements for strength or some light kettlebells/dumbbells/medicine balls. The exercise was great but I was starting to get bored with it, and most of my friends from the boot camp class had “upgraded” to Crossfit, which also took place in that gym. The Crossfitters seemed crazy and cultish to me, throwing heavy weights around at lightning speeds, extreme diets, lots of moans of pain. But I needed to spice things up so I took an “on ramp” class to learn the principles of heavy weightlifting and then I was in. I was totally scared – doing highly technical movements with high loads seemed like the perfect recipe for a major injury.

Another group shot
Around this time I also traded my short commute to Gangnam Station for lengthy shuttle bus rides to and from Samsung Suwon Digital City every day … more than doubling my commute time. My evening return time home became highly unpredictable, and throwing in the awful Seoul metro area traffic meant evening workouts were not really doable anymore. Hence I did something even more crazy — I switched to 6am workouts! I am not a morning person and 6am was far from my ideal workout time, especially for lifting heavy things. But the 6am coach was amazing, an expat New Zealander with the nickname “Badger”. The coach had a degree in exercise science and knew everything about how to diagnose when someone’s mechanics were off on an Olympic weightlifting movement. I felt so much safer knowing that Badger was going to stop me before I threw out my back or ripped up my shoulder muscles or tore a knee ligament. When you don’t know your limits, exercise like Crossfit can be dangerous, and I grew much more comfortable with the movements under Badger’s tutelage.

My all-time favorite coach, Badger, on his last day teaching at "the box"
It has been 3 years of Crossfit for me now and a lot of people have come and gone from the Sentinel One gym, instructors and members alike. Badger moved to another gym and the instruction now has mostly flipped from English to Korean. My work schedule is under control now and I have returned to evening workouts. I try to visit 3-4 times per week when I am not traveling for work, and my health is great. I hardly get sick now and my body fat is down to 12%. Plus I frequently realize little accomplishments — one day I bench-pressed more than my body weight; this week I did 12 strict pull-ups for the first time. I’m still a low-intermediate in Crossfit terms but I have only had one major injury in 3 years — scraping my shin on a box jump — and my wife loves how I look! Working out in groups with an instructor telling you what to do is a great motivator for not being lazy in the gym. I never plan to become an elite athlete or participate in the Crossfit Games or anything crazy like that, but I do enjoy having a convenient fitness community just walking distance from where I live.