Friends

When you leave your family, your friends who have known you for years. When you leave your country, your home, your job. When you give away your furniture, your cats, your books, your clothes. When you pack up a jumble of treasures and store them away. When you leave it all behind, there is really only one thing that you truly need.

Friendship in Korea is transient. There are always people coming and going, and this gives a whole different flavour to the idea of making friends here. Nobody knows what you were like in high school. Nobody can base their opinion of you on anything but the present. Who you are now. The only thing that we truly all have in common is that we have found our way to Korea, which in itself implies that we were all able to leave our families, our homes, our books and treasures in boxes and take off to parts unknown. Motivated by money, by a taste for adventure, by boredom, by unemployment, by youth, by dreams, by promises, by disillusionment, we have all ended up here.

Thrown together in the same city, same school, same apartment complex, same orientation group, we mix with each other. Our differences generally outweigh our similarities. We are different ages, from different countries, different walks of life, with different pasts, different beliefs, different values, different ideas, different realities. I don't want to imply that we're all just one big happy family, or that we can replace the friends in our home countries, but sometimes it just works, and you can't always explain why.

And it happens fast. It has to.

The people I consider to be my closest friends here are from New Zealand, Australia, England, South Africa, Iraq and the USA, with almost a 20 year age range. Even my Canadian friends aren't from "where I'm from" (with the exceptions of Steve, who is from Niagara Falls and Jeannie, who used to live in Montreal). In lighter moments, we laugh at each other's accents (I DO NOT SAY "aboot"!), pick up each other's dialects and slang (It's a "tuque", not a "beanie"!); we may not always know someone's last name, but we might spend 3 hours chatting with them on msn, we plan our weekend activities - and sometimes our vacations - around each other, and will ride a bus or drive for hours just to see the other person. When the going gets tough, we offer shoulders to cry on, emergency cash until payday, solace and help.

How many of these "transient" friendships will last? Even if I look at my friends in Canada, I've really only kept a precious few (moving around, unfortunately, means losing the weaker links) - but that is what my friends, in Canada and here, are: Precious. Rare. Enriching. Fragile.

For those who are leaving, or who I am leaving (or have already left), you know that I will miss you.

May you be one of the precious few.