Lessons Learned

The week of decadence has ended. The four days of goodbye eating makes me want to leave places more often. Thanks to everyone who helped send me off with either food, wine or technical (and emotional) support. I never could have finished it all without many of you.

Travel lessons learned in the past month:

1. You can't get into Japan with a one-way ticket unless you already have the work visa ahead of time. That was an expensive lesson.

2. If you're applying for your South Korean work visa for the first time, you have to do it in your home country. My job recruiter got it wrong. This will also be an expensive lesson. Details to come on my new detour to Guam.

3. You can buy cameras with a "food scene" setting. This too is life changing. It prevents the food from looking washed out. Thanks to Mike, my travel pictures will be much improved.

There are a lot of other sappy lessons learned in the short period since this decision. I shared those during an excessive amount of goodbyes with people, so I won't use this page for that. Those who helped me get ready for this journey know who they are.

I'm off.

Preparing to Leave

Anyone who is likely to read this blog already knows the story of my 20s: a rollercoaster of really big highs and really dramatic lows. Somewhere through the decade, I discovered the things that are truly important to me in life. And more recently, as 30 rapidly approached, I discovered that I wasn't following through on many of them.

I had left my TV news career to learn the business of radio advertising sales. What I really learned is that I'm not a salesperson and that I don't like working on commission. So, a short four months after the career change, I left the job, sold just about everything I'd accumulated in the past 7 years, and found myself moving to South Korea.

Before South Korea, I'll make a couple of pit stops: first Japan. I'm staying with my cousin who's a nuclear engineer working on a project for the Navy. After spending five weeks with a homebase just south of Tokyo, we'll head to Bali for a week to celebrate my 30th birthday and usher in the new decade of my life.

On May 16, I arrive in Korea for a week of training. That's all you need to become a teacher, right? I'll ultimately land in Incheon, where I'll teach immersion-style English to Korean elementary, middle and high school students. Incheon is a port city of 2.5 million people in the northwest corner of the country, just 12 miles south of the border with North Korea. The processes of liquidating my life and searching for work have been so time consuming, I've barely had a chance to think about how my life will be changing. But if you're interested, you can follow me here as I go in search of the things that are truly important to me, while immersing myself in a new culture, language, and career. Hopefully, there will be a lot more traveling along the way, as well.