Existential Memoir
Brunch in Seogwipo in the Darker Part of the Year
A distraction from my inner void
On weekends in the fall, when the daylight hours were fading, I used to board the intercity bus from the north part of Jeju Island to Seogwipo to meet my friends for brunch. Sometimes I was very hungover. Often, I was a little lost. It was soberingly lonely, riding a bus in a remote part of a remote island far away from home.
To get to Seogwipo, I had to ride southward through the rolling hills. I lived on a windy slope at the foot of volcanic Mt. Halla in the northern part of the island of Jeju. It was well-known that the south side of our island was always a little warmer, so when the seasons were changing, it was nice to escape to the south. It seemed to catch a tepid sea breeze up against the slopes.
When deboarding at the Seogwipo bus terminal, one could clearly see the stately volcano whose summit often hid behind a cloud. But it wasn’t summer anymore, and the sky was a light shade of grey. The seasons were moving into a very bleak and dark part of the year and they’d take me with them.
Getting off the bus after an hour was like emerging into a whole new world. Residents of Seogwipo seemed to live the “old way”, doing things as they had done for hundreds of years. It…