Two weeks is a long time to travel, a long time to be away from home, a long time to be a stranger. But I do not feel like a stranger here.

Yesterday I celebrated my brother Rob’s birthday with my sister-in-law with pizza and beer (my one non-Korean meal here). There were no strangers at that table.

While we enjoyed our food and drinks, Rob and Misun told me about their backpacking trip through China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand back in 2004. Now that was an adventure trip: two people in love and tramping through sometimes inhospitable lands, where they couldn’t even read the menus. When I hear about trips like that, I hesitate to talk about my own travels as adventures. Mine have been sheltered, in a way, from the most dangerous and uncomfortable experiences of travel.

But adventures come in many flavors, some more difficult to swallow than others. I have tried to approach everything in a spirit of adventure: with openness, awe, humility, and gratitude. Walking through live fish markets, it is hard not to think of the word “revolting” when looking at some of the comestibles there, but in my mind I searched for other words: interesting, bizarre, unusual, intriguing, curious. I try not to think in ways judgemental or closed-minded. These are ancient foodstuffs, some of these people’s lifebloods and livelihoods. Who am I to say judge pigsfoot or dried frogs?

I want to live all my life with this same spirit of adventure; I want to be open to different experiences, different flavors, different ideas, different ways. I want to stray out of my comfort zone sometimes and challenge myself. I want to look all around me and wonder, as Fitzgerald wrote, at the “inexhaustible variety of life”. I want every day to begin like Stephen Dedalus’s diary entry and the final line of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

I go home tomorrow to a summer still young; to a wife, daughter, and budgie that I miss and who will be happy to see me again; to another span of experiences waiting to happen. I go home tomorrow to continue the adventure and to keep on wondering and being astonished at the people, the music, and the possibilities of this amazing world.