Why I Went to Korea, Part 1 up

I've been thinking about it for a while. I love to Korea to death. I especially miss the friends I left behind there and the many memories that happened there. Every day, I wonder what they are up to and how they are doing. Every day, I wonder why fate made it that I would be so far away from them and why I still think of them.

I'll be honest. I went to Korea for the first tme for all the wrong resasons. These reasons were extremely selfish and back when I was very immature. Back in 2013, someone asked for me to come to Korea. "Well, I'll think about it..." I thought. During that time, I just started becoming a substitute teacher so I can get hands-on experience working in classrooms and working with children, and scheduling was pretty flexible as long as I told my agency I wasn't available to work certain days. I eventually realized that I had the opportunity to tak advantage of it. So I wondered...."Now that I went to Evo, went to all these tournaments, what's next for me?"

When I was young, I always wanted to visit the Philippines, the birth country of my parents and the home of my relatives my grandmother keeps in touch with still. However, I also wanted to visit Japan, France, and a bunch of other countries. But honestly, besides Canada and Mexico, I never really left the country. As thankful as I was to go to other states, I never really got out of the North American continent. But anyway....

Let's fast forward to say, maybe a couple weeks or a month after Evo. Grandma says "Jasmine, we're going to the Philippines next year." I blurt out "Grandma, can we visit another country too?" Grandma offers China as a side trip, but then I think about when I was offered to visit Korea.

"Grandma, I want to go to Korea."

 My grandma immediately disapproves. On top of that, a few weeks later after telling some of my friends that I'll be going to the Philippines next summer, my grandma suddenly decided to postpone the trip.

Why? I asked my grandmother. Then I knew what was coming...

"It's too hot, it's too rainy, not safe, etc."

What the fuck? I'm 20-something years old, and I'm thinking this is the same shit all over again that you constanly said the past years I asked as a preteen and a teenager. At this point, I'm done with this bullshit.

Then I realized, wait, I'm 20-something years old. I can book my own flight. I can book my own room. I have a job with flexible scheduling. Fuck it, let's find some flights to Korea.

Bam. $700-something USD flight roundtrip from SFO to ICN.
Bam. Cheap guesthouses to stay at.
Bam. This girl is going to Korea for Summer 2014.

But what this girl didn't realize was that things weren't going to be truly a dream trip.
This girl didn't realize after three days, she was going to be ill and bedridden at one point of the trip.
This girl didn't realize her phone was going to get wiped out.
This girl didn't realize she was almost screwed over.

Yet, somehow this girl ended up picking herself up and enjoyed herself. This same girl decided to not let her dreams be shattered and took action to make new friends and go beyond her comfort zone. As difficult as it was at first, this girl ended up coming back to Korea, not twice, but a total of five times.

How did she do it?
Why did she do it?

To be continued...