Life On Lockdown

Actually, there’s no lockdown in Korea and there hasn’t been one, but the title is catchier this way.

It’s been nine weeks since I had shoulder surgery and I never would have imagined that I still wouldn’t have taught an English class. Last Wednesday classes were supposed to start with a gradual reopening, grades 1 & 2, the following week 3 & 4 and then 5 & 6, however if the schools have less than 60 students, which all mine do, they were allowed to come back. I was prepared and ready; while my shoulder isn’t anywhere close to being normal, the nine weeks has allowed it to heal and regain enough mobility that daily life isn’t a struggle, but two weeks ago, an asymptomatic man went clubbing in Seoul, resulting in a relatively big uptick in new cases. This is big in Korea because they had local transmissions down to zero! and caused the school start date to be pushed back to May 20th. Today I heard that the Korean government will not push it back again.

Over the past couple of weeks as coronavirus cases surged in the United States and around the world, Korea’s daily cases were slowly dropping to zero. While my family was on lockdown, life in Korea remained pretty much unchanged, aside from me trying to cope with living with my dominant hand in a sling. Even though the students are taking online classes, I still have to go to school. From nine to five I spend my day with an unlimited potential of things to do. Since I’ve been in Korea my Monday mornings (Sunday U.S.) were the only days I could talk to my family, but now I’ve spoken to them almost every day for three months. Coronavirus has created an abundance of daily opportunities to connect, with no classes and with friends and family on lockdown someone is always available. Come Wednesday I’ll miss my routine of facetiming for the first hour of my mornings. After that and before lunch was my research time. I’ve spent the last two months learning about the stock market and how to evaluate a company, learning about options, and watching YouTube videos to get a better understanding of what’s happening and what it means for our future.

Coronavirus has brought the world to a standstill pausing and changing many aspects of our lives. My plan was to leave Korea in August and travel around Asia for ten months while slowly making my way to Australia where I would live and work on a work visa for six months and then travel to New Zealand. After that, the goal was to go back to school in some field related to education or to obtain a PHD in a geography. I didn’t have an exact plan, but I had an idea. Now all of that has changed. For years that was my plan, but now I don’t think I’ll be leaving Korea in August. I don’t believe the world will be back to normal, let alone the ability to travel. I’m not going to leave Korea if I can’t travel freely and I’m not going to go home if I can’t get a job, so I’m going to stay. I love teaching, but this pause in my life as a teacher has given me a tremendous amount of time to self-reflect. From somewhere within my mind, pushed aside as an impossible route, came the question, “is 30 years old too old to study a degree in architecture?”

My Freshman year at the University of Delaware the question of whether or not to transfer schools to pursue architecture weighed heavily on my mind. It was an internal struggle that caused me an extreme amount of stress. I remember breaking down and crying in my advisors office, frustrated by the choice.  In the end, I decided to stay and found my love for geography. No, not just naming places on a map, but rather the relationships between people and their environment, the physical properties of the Earth’s surface and the human societies spread across it. It also fueled my love of art history, sociology and eventually my desire and love of travel. Staying at Delaware created a stronger foundation for my Spanish skills, which at the time still wasn’t good, demonstrated by the C I received in my senior year Oral Communication class, but was key to helping me become fluent as I lived and taught in Costa Rica and Spain. Delaware helped me become who I am today and I don’t regret staying.

So I did what anybody would do, I typed into google “is 30 years old too old to study a degree in architecture?” And someone had posted the same question on Reddit with encouraging results. It’s good to know you’re not the only one asking and even more so when older people are asking the same. The road to becoming a licensed architect is a long one, but I don’t think I want to live the next phase of my life thinking, “what if?”