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“It Felt Impossible, Until I Did It”: One Year in South Korea

Lauren Meeks believes that there is immense value in learning other people’s stories. It all started with an unlikely year of teaching English in South Korea.

I'm a writer currently living in Atlanta, although I'm reluctant to call any place "home." I spent several years abroad as a child, and over the past 7 years I've traveled to every continent except Antarctica (it's on the list!) and over two dozen countries. I travel to experience new cultures and to hear new stories. I firmly believe that everyone has a story worth sharing, and I want to hear as many of them as possible.

I stumbled across my love of traveling almost by accident. I traveled some in college, but I still hadn’t been bitten by the wanderlust bug yet. I was perfectly happy to stick to the tourist trails and then go home to my safe bubble after the trip was over. But at the beginning of my senior year in college, my advisor encouraged me to apply for a Fulbright grant teaching English. Being the good little student that I was, I acquiesced. Since Fulbright only allows you to apply to the program in a single country, I had a decision to make.

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Walking in Hong Kong

  Hong Kong has been one of my favorite global cities for nearly a decade now. This short film focuses mostly on the city’s architecture, which has always been impressive and continues to develop as more people settle from mainland China and elsewhere. The last time I was there, I’d recently seen a series of…

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Do You Ever Get Lonely When You Travel?

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Last month in Hong Kong, I went to the New Territories, a part of the city I'd never visited before. It was only half an hour from bustling Kowloon, but it felt like a totally different region.

On the eve of my departure, before I'd fly to Tokyo and then to Los Angeles, I was feeling anxious.

I went for an hour-long run, my longest in a while. I set out just as the sun was setting and ran along the water, looking at the Kowloon skyline across the narrow harbor.

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The Monster Trip of 2009

Last year at about this time, I took what I called the Monster Trip of 2008.

It involved four continents, driving through Italy in the middle of the night, visiting Iraqi Kurdistan, roaming by train and bus across the Baltics and Moldova, and finally coming home through Asia – where I mistakenly double-booked myself on two non-refundable tickets home from Japan.

What fun that was. Now it's time to repeat the process, although with a completely different itinerary, and hopefully without getting stranded on a faraway continent three days before I'm supposed to come home.

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Bangkok Adventures

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The Japanese man sitting next to me looks back and forth between the video and me. Finally, he takes off his headphones and asks, “Wrong movie?”

Yes. Wrong movie.

The wrong movie plays for nearly three minutes before it is turned off by a flight attendant. She comes on the p.a. after another three minutes. “Ladies and gentlemen… sorry… we can’t find the arrival video for Japan. If you have any questions about Japan, let us know.”

Other than that, the 11-hour flight across the Pacific is uneventful. I arrive in Narita and quickly transfer to a Cathay Pacific flight for Hong Kong. Another five hours goes by as I fitfully sleep in the back of the plane.

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