Seoul
Seoul, South Korea
(This is a piece I wrote after our initial arrival in Sri Lanka. The world has changed, but my feelings have not.)
Stopover Seoul
Stopover (n.) A place where a journey is broken.
A stopover takes threads from the place you were and weaves them together with the threads of the place to which you are headed.
They are the comma after “before” and before “after.”
We’ve been traveling, internationally as a family for over ten years now. When we began we would often take the opportunity to rest between two long haul flights: JFK/MAA, IAD/CMB. “For the kids,” we would say, when really it might have been for me. It was an opportunity to stretch our legs, to sleep horizontally in a soft bed and ultimately to explore a new place, if only for a minute. Thus somehow claiming the journey as our own. What can be heralded by many as a hassle, claiming bags, rechecking bags, I revere.
I find that in the jet-lagged in betweens, I am able to grasp, in the blur of time and location, the ability to see things as purely as a child. I can tell you spec by spec each moment of each stop over. One I made in London, with three toddlers, alone, on my way back from India. I can tell you the color of the sky, the sound of the wind in the grass as we walked to the park, shuffling our stiff legs to a nearby park. I could paint you the roses in the suburban neighborhood gardens, tell you how the cool air felt on my face, the wet leaves sticking to my sneakers, the taste of the mist that hung in the air. During a stopover, colors seem more vivid. Even my tastebuds feel brand new.
We’ve stopped in many places over the years and while some stops were hardly long enough to claim on my map of places visited, they are to me, as vivid as any place I’ve explored much more deeply. They have always left me satisfied with the time I had and thirsting to return for more.
It was time that was not about the many goodbyes we had just said or about the arrival in a new country we would call home. It was only about us, about Seoul.
