안녕 친구

Wow, you're still here?

Welcome to the 100th Shayne and Jo.com post. We're going to celebrate by fleeing the country in a few short hours.

As of yesterday we’ve lived here for over a year. It’s a strange situation. Looking back it seemed as if the year passed by in mere minutes. On the other hand, we can remember nights that felt like days and months that seemed to stretch on for years. There were times where we could see ourselves living in Korea for the rest of our lives and times where we were probably one problem student away from hopping on the next homeward bound plane.

But in the end, the good days far outweighed the crappy ones.

To be completely honest, we now consider coming here to be the best decision we’ve ever made. A lot of you know that coming to Korea wasn’t the first choice for what we wanted do with the past year. But life’s what it is and things have a funny way of changing themselves on you just when you see things going in a completely different direction. So as the cliché goes, we rolled the dice.

Luckily for us it all worked out. We managed to build a really good life in an almost totally alien environment. We pushed ourselves to accept things that bewildered us and seemed to lack any reason, and because of this we ended up falling in love with the place. And along the way we found some direction for our futures, got engaged, booked tickets to see a good chunk of Asia, made a lot of friends, chased down a poor geisha, and learned to read (and speak...in a 3 year old kind of way) Korean.

Not a shabby way to spend a year, if we do say so ourselves.

We're going to keep posting while we're on our trip but they may be few and far between, so we wanted to thank all of you now.

It's been a lot of fun doing this blog and you guys made all the hard work worthwhile.

Talk to you soon.

Shayne and Jo (posting for the last time in Korea)