A Month of Merriment, Marriage, Meetups and Missing People

I’m married. I am a husband. There are still moments where I catch myself surprised at this concept. After the holiday that my wife and I took in South Africa, there was a lot to process. We got married, reunited with family and old friends, and even managed to sneak in some moments alone where we could. We were hard-pressed to improve on our holiday to Seattle, but our month back in South Africa may just have done so. I mean, we will only get married once, so it has that going for it.

Our holiday was split into three main stages: pre-wedding, wedding, and post-wedding.

The pre-wedding stage was mostly spent in preparation of the big day. We had meetings with flower arrangers, decor organizers, the reverend who officiated our service, and others that I have forgotten because it was all a frantic blur of checking, double-checking, and making sure one more time that everything was exactly as we wanted it. Between the meetings, we had little time or energy to see those closest to us who had been waiting to see us for almost two years. This was disheartening for Kris and I, but we knew that the sacrifices would pay off in a truly great wedding day.

And boy, did they. Some people say you judge a wedding by how many things went wrong. The most serious thing that was off-colour was the bridal bouquet – they weren’t a colour that Kris liked. That just made her more than happy to throw it away at the reception. Everyone we’ve spoken to since the wedding has had nothing but kind and enthusiastic words about their experience. All in all, the wedding was truly one of the greatest days of my life. It was a happy, joyous celebration of love spent with friends and family, and everyone had a wondeful time. I couldn’t have asked for a better ceremony or reception.

Post-wedding, most of our time was spent trying to see as many people as we humanly could. We had breakfasts, brunches, lunches, afternoon teas, dinners, post-dinner teas, drinks, and all-day gaming sessions with anyone who expressed a desire to see us. Of course there were people we missed out, and we were a little disheartened by that, but we did the best we could.

By the end of the holiday, we were quite ready to be alone in our apartment with our cat for a while. We had spent our time putting ourselves out there more than your average woman of the night, and it was glorious. It was heart-warming to see our old connections again. Some relationships had changed, but most had remained exactly where they were when we left them.

One phenomenon that Kris and I both noticed in ourselves towards the end of the holiday was that we had begun to long for the friends that we had made in Korea. Facebook posts of gatherings were met with a pang of jealousy, even though we were going to be spending the day seeing five different groups of people. It is a feeling that we thought would be more prominent in expats – no matter where you are, you always miss the people that you left behind. If you’re engaging in your work abroad, you miss your family and childhood friends. When you return to visit your family and friends, you miss those friends that you made while living abroad. No matter where you are, you’re always missing someone. Luckily, we weren’t away long enough for these feelings to detract from the bliss of being newly married and seeing a bunch of old friends and our families again.

When we went through the gates to return to Korea, waving back at relatives, we weren’t breaking down like we were the last time we left that airport. We weren’t a young couple heading abroad to see what the wide world held for them. We were leaving as husband and wife (still weird to write/hear that), returning to our job and blossoming life on the other end of the planet. We don’t know when we’ll return to South Africa, or under what circumstances, but we eagerly await our next month of seeing more people than we can count and getting fat on beloved South African food.

Unpacking Seattle

After most holidays, people compare the experiences that they had during that short period with holidays they’ve had previously. Was that the best holiday I’ve truly ever had? Was it better than that rose-tinted trip I had to Disneyland when I was twelve? Did the sights, sounds, smells, and other sensations I exposed myself to give me a higher level of pleasure and happiness than the rest of my existence? After your average holiday is compared with the rest of your life, the stories are filed in their mental shelves, where they will be accessed repeatedly in the short time following your holiday, but then decreasingly over time. My recent holiday to Seattle is something else – it is one of those truly unique, marvelous experiences that will likely form the core of my being going forward.

“Why the melodrama and hyperbole? Surely it was just a holiday? Just file it and be done with it.” a metaphorical critic might say. Well, figment of my imagination, you forget what exactly happened in Seattle. I traveled around a great city. I witnessed one of the most exciting and awe-inspiring Esports events of all time. Oh, and I also got engaged.

My mental doubter seems to have let himself out. Great. Now I can stop talking to a pretend person and go back to speaking politely to the Internet.

My two weeks in Seattle truly changed my life in multiple ways. Each aspect of the holiday – the tourism around the city, The International (the aforementioned Esports event), and my engagement – left me with memories and emotions upon which I will build. Each aspect of the trip moved me in different ways. As such, it feels wrong to lump them together into one sprawling tourism-Esports-engagement mass of experience and internal reflection. So, in the next week, I will form clear, considered pieces about each of the three aspects of my trip to Seattle. I’ll talk about what happened, how I experienced it.

I hope that you’ll join me for a detailed, week-long exploration of the link between my experiences and myself – past, present, and future. It’s amazing how much a two-week span can affect a person. I look forward to sharing it with you all.

Seattle Trip Day 1: Purgatory

After months of trying to coerce English into the minds of children and adults, Kris and I left for our two-week holiday to Seattle today. During the day, we time-traveled, watched far too many movies, completed the entirety of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and dreaded American immigration. All of this before we even landed in the US!

The different time zones that lay across our world are not something that we, as humans, often think about. Even in a family like mine where members are spread across three time zones and 14ish hours, we have just become used to only calling each other at specific times to make up for time differences. Yet today, when we left Seoul just before 4pm on Thursday afternoon, flew for about 10 hours (during which we watched 4 movies each), and landed in Canada at around 10am on Thursday morning, we felt rather like Phineas Fogg must have done. Time travelling was awesome!

What was significantly less awesome was the 8-hour layover that awaited us at Vancouver airport. After clearing US Customs (yes, in Canada, as bizarre as that sounds), we walked around the airport, checking out all of the shops. Once we had completed the shop rotation, we decided to buy Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and see how far we could get. As it is a play, we devoured it in its entirety within 3 hours. We tried to get Pokemon Go to work on the spotty WiFi at the airport. While we did catch some Pokemon, what we caught the most during our hunting was frustration at the lack of consistent Internet connection. Finally, Kris settled down for a well-earned nap while I re-read some of the graphic novel masterpiece that is Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba’s Daytripper.

By the time I was two-thirds into the story, it was finally time to board. We left Canadian soil and, 40 minutes later, touched down in Seattle. We knew that one hurdle lay ahead of us: immigration. Would they turn us away? Would they let us be? Would they force us to recite minute details about our life for no reason? As we made our way through the terminal, all of these possibilities weighed down on us. We needn’t have worried. There was no immigration. We simply picked up our bags and left the airport, finally loosed onto the American soil that is to be our home for the next two weeks.

We are now both quite content to take it easy tomorrow. We plan to find a suitable camera for the trip, visit a local board game store, and browse the wares of an Ultimate shop. Our short time with my brother and our TI6 experience both begin on Saturday. Tomorrow, however, we will take in the sights, sounds, and retail experiences of Seattle. We may get fat, but at least our wallet will be lighter!

Winter Battle Pass: Our Lunar New Year Present

For those who are new to the blog, or do not otherwise know, Kris and I are pretty much nuts for the computer game that is Dota 2. Whilst some of our colleagues and Ultimate friends have been doing things as extravagant as going skiing and visiting other countries, we have spent the majority of our holiday in our apartment fervently playing as many games of Dota 2 as possible. A large reason for this is a recent piece of content that was released for the game: the Winter Battle Pass.

As is evident from the name, the Winter Battle Pass is a temporary addition to the game, lasting only for the season of winter. There have been similar content to the Battle Pass that have been released for the past few seasons, but none have been as well-received by the community.

Essentially, the Winter Battle Pass costs $8, and gives the player access to content that is unique to holders of the pass. Unlike other games that hold significant content behind a paywall, the Winter Battle Pass does not in any way affect a player’s chances to win the game by altering stats or adding new playable characters or the like. All of the heroes in Dota are available to every player, and the only thing differentiating a person who is just learning the game and someone who has played for years is the knowledge and skills that the player picks up by playing. So, what does the Winter Battle Pass offer to the players of the otherwise free-to-play game in return for their money? Hats. Sweet, sweet hats.

Sometimes bears just want to be cowboys (this set was eventually removed from the store for violating the core aesthetic of the hero)

Whilst no amount of money can give you an in-game advantage, it can buy you cosmetic items to make your hero look cooler, prettier, or of a different style. The Winter Battle Pass allows players to complete in-game quests in the attempt to gain levels and, thereby, hats. Previous incarnations of the Battle Pass idea have been far less well-received, as they were a little more money-grabby and a little less sensitive to what the community wanted. The hats-to-money ratio was out of whack. But the current Battle Pass has struck the right balance between keeping Valve’s investors happy and the community playing as many games as possible in order to complete their challenges.

The pass has been so successful that the average number of players at any one time has risen over 2.5% since the Pass came out. At the peak time in the last month, there have been more than 1.1 million people playing Dota at one time, almost equalling the record numbers for the game from last year in March. Whilst this may not be anywhere near the numbers flaunted by Dota’s main competitor, League of Legends, the growth is encouraging.

So, Kris and I have been holed up in our little apartment, playing game after game in our hunt for pretty hats. I have raged a little, leading to a small domestic dispute, but I have promised to be better. We stopped. Then we started again. Because hats.