Shoestring Soul Searching #12: Korea and Xi'an

Winter is here! Some of you just got blanketed in snow. In Korea it’s snowed a few times and the kimchi is safely stored away, bubbling and fermenting. The ground is basically frozen over for 4 months, so fermentation was how you got your food to last until spring back in the day. I think it’s the same reason sauerkraut is a thing anywhere from Germany eastward.

The Korean cold is no joke, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Korean food is good any time of year, but hits different in the wintertime. Next time it’s freezing out, try one of our bajillion stews (my personal favorites are dogani-tang and kongbiji) and it’ll heat you right up. Those stews were made for this weather.

Wait, when’d you go to Korea?

We were low-key there for 1.5 months, which is the longest we’ve spent in one place this year. When I was there in the spring I did say I would return!

Also back in spring, I mentioned I had a goal of reconnecting with the place as an independent adult. Anyone that’s spent significant time in Korea knows it’s not the easiest place for outsiders to figure out. Navigate with Google Maps and your destination might show up as an empty ditch. Throwing trash away requires sorting it into 3 or 5 or 7 categories, I swear it changes each time. Logging in to your bank account has so many security measures it feels like entering the nuclear launch codes.

I’m proud to say that whatever else I achieved or didn’t achieve in 2025, I succeeded on this point. After much trial and error I can do daily stuff in Korea now, sort of. For unclear reasons I still have to go to an ATM to send money like some kind of early hominid from the 90s, but no matter. I’m aiming for a passing grade, not an A+. I can book a weekend getaway, order delivery of a mountain of fried chicken, reserve a yoga studio, you name it.

Not only did I figure out how to be an adult, I took additional matters into my own hands. I learned how to make my own makgeolli, or rice wine. There was something immensely satisfying about getting tipsy off my own creation. Every day I would wake up and listen to the soft, crackling sound of my microscopic babies converting sugar into ethanol. Maybe I listened too long because I let it ferment past the 6-8% ABV this drink is meant to be. That’s ok. Papa’s proud of his little overachievers.

Tiff found her groove in Korea too, without my help. In fact, when I tried showing her everything I liked about Korea last time, it was overwhelming. This time I stopped trying to navigate her experience and she found things she was drawn to. There’s an important lesson in there somewhere. What was she drawn to, you ask? I’ll leave it to her to tell her story, but let’s just say she has enough of those Jason Voorhees-like Korean face masks to scare me well into 2026.

I guess the question is, what now? Because we learned a lot about Korea, but knowledge is fleeting. If you don’t use it, you lose it. So would we ever live there longer-term? Unlikely, but not impossible. I can think of a few compelling reasons for and against. For the moment, it’s nice to know the option exists.

Old man makes birthday visit to even older country

For my birthday we went to Xi’an, because I’m a nerd and recently went down a rabbit hole of Chinese history. During the golden age of Chinese culture, Xi’an (or Chang’an back then) was the capital as well as the world’s largest city. Everyone’s heard of the Silk Road but where does it actually start? I certainly didn’t know before this trip. It starts right at the doorstep of Xi’an and that influence shows up everywhere.

Buddhism passed through here two millennia ago and if your family is East Asian and Buddhist, that’s the version of Buddhism you’ve inherited. Islam also came through here and one of the oldest mosques in China still stands, looking like a Chinese temple but adorned with Arabic calligraphy. And the food…wow. The flavor is recognizably Chinese but with so much mutton and cumin in the air, you catch hints of distant lands to the west. The food was amazing.

China is so vast and diverse that no comparison to another country makes sense. It’s also been around so long that before we even get to Jesus being born, there was Chinese literature pining about the “good old days.” We’re working on a different scale of time and space here. It really is a place that must be experienced to be understood. Suffice to say, I enjoyed my 37th birthday and it was topped off by a birthday shot which each of us drank, then shattered the cup on the ground to have our wishes fulfilled.

(Not perfect but) real experimentation

After nerding out on topics of geography and place all year, I’ve embarked on a 3-4 week process to teach myself some foundational skills in this area. Will it be useful in the job market? Is it relevant to my career? I don’t know. I could ask those questions all day. But my strong sense of skepticism often keeps me from doing anything concrete. So I’m putting those questions aside for now and saying by the time I send the next newsletter, I should have a decent foundation in the skills of GIS, remote sensing, and geospatial data analysis.

I’m telling you this because my AI life coach (try it out) told me I should build in public from day 1. To not learn in isolation, but to document my journey, keep myself accountable, and force myself to synthesize my knowledge. So for starters, here’s my humble little GIS creation featuring a map of some random part of Western Cape, South Africa.

You gotta start somewhere. Here’s to growth. Happy new year everyone, see you in 2026.

Bryan