Waiting for the bus in Jeju

Patience is a virtue I've never had. If I'm meeting someone and that person is late, I start fiddling with my phone to try and ward off the annoyance, which inevitably works its way up to becoming full-blown anger.

But then I went to Jeju.



Despite being the most popular tourist spot in Korea, Jeju is still everything you expect an idyllic island to be. People walked slowly. Old men fished on the docks in the afternoon. Evenings were spent sitting by the breakwater, facing the ocean.

There were no trains and buses came far and few in between. And surprisingly, I didn't mind waiting for them.

Waiting  for the bus became part of the experience. I actually quite enjoyed hanging around in the island's bus stops, truth be told.

I remember standing in front of this bus stop near the pension house I stayed in and loving the fact that it had glass for walls, allowing me to see the lovely view behind it: the sparkling blue ocean.

Then there was this time I felt utter delight upon seeing this rundown bus stop surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of hydrangeas somewhere in Seogwipo. It looked like it was something straight out of a fairy tale.

But my favorite bus-stop-memory from the trip was of me just sitting in a city bus stop, waiting for my ride home. The vehicle was supposed to arrive at 5 PM, but didn't get there until over an hour later. Normally, I'd be livid, but after just a few days in Jeju, I'd already learned that the best thing to do in that situation was to sit back, relax and just wait.

In the time I spent waiting for my ride, I smiled at a cute young couple in school uniforms cutely arguing (I think); saw three old women with the exact same haircut and wondered if all Korean women over the age of 60 went to the same hair salon; saw the setting sun bathe my surroundings in a nice, warm golden glow.