Bonding and Re-bonding

I sit at Incheon airport, a place that has become strangely familiar to me over my time in Korea. Even though I normally only spend a few hours here with each visit, I find that there is far less change here than the rest of Korea. Restaurants and shops have largely remained in their same places. The procedures are generally the same. The process of arrive, check in the bags, go through security, go through immigration, find the gate, wait for the plane, then leave gives me some small comfort in the otherwise moderately stressful act of travelling.

For this visit, Kris and I will be returning to South Africa, mostly for her best friend’s wedding. I say mostly so as not to offend all of the South African-based friends and family that we will see while we are there. It’s also to see all of you, I swear!

This will be the second time that we’ve visited South Africa since we left for Korea and I started this blog. Last time was for our own wedding, and for a much longer period of time. With this visit, we will be staying for less than two weeks, and trying to cram in as many lunches, brunches, dinners, board games, Ultimate games, family meetups, and general socializing as we possibly can in that time. In our last visit, we had a much more relaxed social timetable, because we could afford it. We also were lucky enough to see a large portion of the significant people in our lives at the wedding.

While things might not have changed too much at Incheon airport, a great deal has changed in our family and friend situation back in South Africa. My entire immediate family will be working outside of South Africa before the end of this year. Kris’ mom has moved out of their long-time family home. Over our time in Korea, we have lost contact with many of our friends back in South Africa, with each year causing more friendships to fade from vivid experiences to sepia-toned memories. This is the nature of life. Situations change, and you have to adapt to your new environment.

However, we are excited to return and get in touch with everyone that we might have neglected to video chat or message in the past few months, or even years. We will undoubtedly have many a story to share with each other. There will also be those that we cannot meet up with, whether that be because of scheduling problems, distance, or even just sheer forgetfulness. Maybe this will cause a few more friendships to lose their luster, or maybe agonizing over the missed opportunity will be the splash of colour that livens a bond that was dulling.

Kris and I are both excited to be returning to the place that was once the only place we called home. Our lives are more diverse now, and we will be leaving our Korean home for a while to nestle back into our South African one. Oh, and eat our body weight in biltong, Cadbury’s and Gino’s.

We’re Going…Home?

When my fiancee Kris and I first started planning our holiday to South Africa, we were extremely excited to be going ‘home’. We would be returning to the friends and family that we’d left behind all those months ago, and it would be a momentous, happy occasion. Sitting here in Incheon airport, waiting to start the first of two flights that we need to take to return to Johannesburg, I feel strangely different.

Over the past few days, we have been frantically trying to scramble together all of the things that we need for our wedding (the main reason that we’re heading to South Africa in the first place). We took our cat, Catsby, to the home of friends where he will be staying for the month. We collected my suit and received Kris’ wedding dress back after modifications. We bought Christmas presents for the close family that will be there when we return. As the date of departure drew closer, I began to feel like we were actually leaving home, and not heading towards it.

The more I thought about it, the more conflicted I became. Surely South Africa was my home? It was where I was born. It was where I went to school and university. It was where I met and fell in love with Kris. I had spent the vast majority of my life there. Surely that was my home? I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt otherwise until I mentioned my feelings to Kris this very evening, and she hit me with wisdom that I simply couldn’t see.

You see, home isn’t about where things happen, or where you have property. It isn’t about how many experiences you have in a place. It isn’t about how long you’ve spent there. Home is about people. The people around you are what make a place a home. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros accurately expressed this feeling in their song ‘Home‘, which Kris just happened to be whistling for most of the day.

Sure, we have friends and family in South Africa. We have many people that we frankly can’t wait to see, people that we haven’t seen for months or even years. But, now that we have spent many months living in Korea, we are also leaving a host of friends behind. These friendships, like those in South Africa, were forged through board games, Ultimate, food, or late-night deep conversations. And they are why Korea has felt like home – the amazing community that we have built around us.

In the end, my home will always be where Kris and I are together. For the next month, that will be South Africa, and we will relish our time catching up with those that we haven’t been able to hang out with due to the inconvenience of being on the other side of the world. After that, our home will once again be in Korea, where we will share our stories with our newer friends. Wherever Kris and I are together, we are home. And that is a pretty amazing feeling.