Channeling an old friend May 7, 2008

Korea is not my first time living abroad.  As most of my friends know, I lived in Spain for 10 months back in college.  It was a pivotal changing point in my life and I was a new person after I went home.  It’s amazing how living in foreign countries can change your entire view on life.  While I was there, I made connections with people I still keep in touch with today. 

Of course, some people I met,  I haven’t seen since we parted ways in Madrid.  There was this one woman I befriended that started college later in life and she was 30 years old at the time while the rest of us were 20-21.   She was so full of life and really enjoyed every moment from what I remember.  For lack of a better term, living in Spain was her last hurrah before she got married.  She was engaged to a man she had been with for 10 years and before they took the plunge, she said she wanted to do one last thing as a single person.  We all really forgot she was 9 yrs our senior but she was definitely a lot wiser than us when it came to certain things. 

So when I got to Seoul and started hanging out with my soon to be good friends here, I realized I was channeling the woman I met in Spain.  I’m 7-8 years older than the girls I hang out with and at times, I feel myself turning into their much older sister and giving them advice about pretty much everything.  You don’t realize how much you know till you take a step back and look back at your life and see what you’ve learned. 

 I also benefit from hanging out with them as well.  It’s nice to feel like I’m reliving my early twenties again; so fanciful and carefree.  We don’t talk about the future too much; we just try and enjoy the present.   Of course, I am not ignoring the future because I am at an age where every decision I make is basically affecting my retirement plans.  But it’s kinda nice to be this space where I feel exempt from all of that, even if it’s just for a little while.

I still wonder how my friend is doing from time to time.  She prolly has kids now and is living a proper surburban life in Southern California.  But I’m sure she thinks back to those days in Spain when her only care in the world was meeting her girls for drinks…