One of the things that I've grappled with a lot over the past year or so is this idea of 'losing my culture' in a foreign country – the idea being that you become so immersed in learning and assimilating to your new surroundings that you forget where you come from in the process. If, for example, you'd told me a few years ago that I'd be watching the sunrise from Hyangiram Temple (one of the four major Gwaneum temples built during the Shilla Dynasty), I would have found that pretty hard to believe. But now it seems like just another adventure.
Change is inevitable and we should embrace it, but I think it's more a fear of not being able to relate to a place where you came from.
Of course, all those things are indelibly ingrained in me and the two years I've spent in South Korea are only a fraction of the life I've spent in South Africa, but I can't help feel that the more I make this place home, the more my South African identity is slipping away, slowly being eroded and replaced by everything that I'm learning here.
