Normal? I'm not sure.

What is normal?

Life seems to be normal until I remember what was once normal, then I’m reminded that life hasn’t been normal for while, but then I think yes it has, life is as abnormal or as normal as you make it wherever you are and whatever your doing. The problem is however that the whole motivation of moving to Korea in the first place was a desire to live abnormally, a desire I first discovered when I left England in 2002 with Toby and Dave. After traveling for a year and returning in 2003, I was so gripped by a passion to travel more that I had to do something fast. Teaching English was the obvious facilitator; Korea, the even more obvious facilitating country. It only took about 10 weeks to get the job and get boarded on the plane. I presumed that fellow ‘aliens’ would be ‘travelers’ by nature, this wasn’t the case. Everybody I met in Korea had their own reasons. Some came for the money, some for ‘an experience’, some were enticed out by friends already doing a year’s contract. Most save a good deal in one year, then travel for a few months after and finally head home.

Opportunities taken

My first year in Korea was hard sometimes but however bad things got at work, it didn’t matter because I could stroll down the road after class, look around me, take a deep breath and smile ‘I’m in Asia, in a little country town. In a few months I’ll have enough money to go to x, x and x’. Sound ridiculous? It was all I wanted. During that year I visited Beijing, The Great Wall, Xian and the Terracotta Warrior; I also visited The Philippines. When I left Korea after my contract had ended I visited Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand and Myanmar. Now about 13 months away from home, I had no feelings of wanting to return so I went on to Vietnam in January 2005 and didn’t leave the country again until January this year, 2006. Here I completed a TEFL cert. and started working for local schools, until I got my current job at the Korean School in September 2005. Taking a break this year in January and February enabled me to revisit Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, and for the first time get over to Malaysian Borneo and also Bali in Indonesia.

Wearing off.......

Now it’s June, 2006. I’ve been in Vietnam for a year and a half. I’ve met many people and I have a firmly established routine and lifestyle. I play for a local expat soccer team and I go to the yoga club. I will get married here in October to my Vietnamese girlfriend Chi. I live in a house with a Vietnamese family of a mother and two boys, and some other tenants. I have a small room with cable TV and a nice balcony. I have no aircon and a shared bathroom with no hot water. I am really living with and among the locals. I rent a motorcycle to get around, order a lot of takeaways and don’t drink too much, even on weekends. It’s all so, well, normal. That’s what I realized the other day – my main motivation for living abroad has almost gone. I go day by day without that feeling of awe, without even thinking about where I am and that it’s in the slightest bit strange. Some people living abroad strive for that feeling, they want the weirdness to go away, but there’s something a little strange about feeling so normal in Vietnam, which really isn’t normal at all.

Asia fatigue

So I am beginning to yearn for a change once more. Strangely the last thing I expected to happen has happened. What was once normal to me, that is the drizzly windswept damp of my native England, now seems completely abnormal. I want to go home. I want to have to put on 5 layers of clothing just to go out of the door. I want to live somewhere that has orderly roads and where people know the meaning of a queue. I want to meet and talk and get to know some of my fellow countrymen once again. I want to stroll along the windswept cliff tops of Dorset and marvel at the waves crashing against the shore. I want to be able to go into a bookshop full of English language books and browse. I want to have fish and chips for tea. All that stuff just seems so, well, abnormal now. I haven’t lost the travel bug and I never will, but I am feeling Asia fatigued. Now thoughts of my next trip are turning to the great cities of Europe – Vienna and Salzburg, Paris, Amsterdam and Venice. No more does traveling around India interest me for the time being. My next real destinations however are Tokyo and the Seoul – more Asia!

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land." -G. K. Chesterton