My folks drove me to the Arcata airport — a ridiculously expensive point of departure seeing as how it cost just as much to fly from Arcata to San Francisco as it did to fly from San Francisco to Korea; and even though my employers paid for it, it’s possible I might have pocketed the difference had I driven down to San Francisco instead, something I would have done gladly since I love that goddamned city so much — at 5 am.

The biplane, or whatever the hell primitive vehicle it was, left at 6 am and landed in SFO by 7, just in time for my five-hour layover.  Thankfully, my good pal Dan and his smurf-colored truck picked me up and we killed some time at an omelet house in San Bruno.  Two things stand out from that morning: the waitress thought we were a couple, and Dan observed, quite rightly, that I wasn’t enthusiastic about leaving.

I’ll sum up the twelve hour flight even though no one in their right mind gives a damn.  The plane traveled with the sun; it was never night.  I sat in the second to last row, dead center, sandwiched between a young lady who constantly requested the attention of stewardesses (who, in turn, constantly mistook me for the attention-requester) and a man whose elbow guarded our shared armrest.  He snored a lot, too.  I watched most of four movies, in this order: Up in the Air, 9, A Serious Man, and Men Who Stare at Goats.  That last one was cut off when the stewardess collected my headphones.

Sunday, 6 pm Korea time, I arrived in Incheon.  Alistair, the recruiter whose English accent I love to imitate (“Fantastic news, Travis!”), arranged for me to the stay the night in a guesthouse near the airport.  My instructions were, once I had claimed my baggage, to phone the guesthouse from an information desk.    The problem: all the booths near the baggage claim were abandoned.  I picked up a random phone anyway and  dialed the number.  The woman (who spoke English) on the other end asked me what exit I was near.  I had no idea.  A nearby security guard was no help, and so I told her to give me a likely exit number and fifteen minutes, and I’d meet the driver there (“And you are . . . Caucasian?” she asked).  Once I left the baggage area I saw that, of course, there were information desks galore, all occupied by women who spoke fluent English.  Ah yes, I thought.  That feeling of being a blundering idiot.  How I missed it!

Outside it was cold, and I thought about how spring, glorious spring, was just beginning back in California.  A minivan screeched to a stop and out hopped a brisk young man.  My luggage probably weighed more than him, but he insisted on heaving it in the van himself.  We were off, and fifteen minutes later I had passed the hell out.

I slept fitfully, woke early, and dressed in my badass cashmere suit, as per Alistair’s instructions.  The man who drove me to Gongju knocked on my door at 9 am exactly.  I didn’t like the angle of his eyebrows.  For a second I thought he might be a coworker, and was relieved to discover that no, he was simply a taxi driver.  He drove a Kia SUV with leather seats.  We had nothing to talk about.  At first we skimmed the outskirts of vital, dynamic Seoul, and then the landscape became drab and ugly, barren field after barren field.  To keep my mind off the terrible mistake I had likely made when I agreed to spend a year of my life in this wasteland, I read some Nabokov and opened one of the boxes of raisins I had brought as a gift for my director (a gift package was, again, Alistair’s instructions).

Around 11 am we climbed the long driveway to the three-storied Language Institute — my workplace for the next year.  It sits on a hill, a bit north of Gongju proper.  I still hadn’t seen the city, but the apartment buildings in the distance hinted at a respite from the desolate countryside.  And then, beside the parking lot, I saw something that caused me to reconsider my entire attitude up to this point.  It seems that even when I find myself trapped in a dust-swallowed purgatory, God presents me with a bit of heaven: