One day in 2010, Miyoung floated something at me — what if we went and lived abroad for a while?
“What kind of nonsense is that?”
“What’s nonsense about it?”
“Things are fun and going well right now, and you want me to just throw it all away?”
“It might be even more fun over there.”
“Ugh, my head’s spinning, let’s think about it later, slowly.”
“There is no later.”
Anyway, this became a recurring dinner-table topic, and we decided to go to Australia.
“But I can’t speak English.”
“So learn it.”
I started Philippine phone-English lessons.
Since neither of us could understand a word the other said, the phone lessons were basically pointless.
It’d usually end with us just lobbing
“What? What? What?”
back and forth at each other.
I took a two-hour-a-day, 6-to-8am working-professionals’ English class in Jongno for about a month.
Zero effect.
This isn’t going to work, drastic measures needed — I quit Ahn Graphics (AG).
If phone calls don’t work, let’s study face to face!
We went to the Philippines and enrolled in CPLIS, a residential language academy.
The system was eight periods a day, one-on-one, locked in a small room talking with a teacher.
At first I thought it made no sense.
It made no sense that I couldn’t speak the language, and it made no sense that a class could even happen in that state — the whole situation just felt fundamentally impossible.
“Don’t be confused.”
Confused?
Kon-pyu-ji?
Jeu?
Jeu-deu?
The teacher meant I didn’t need to feel confused, but telling someone who doesn’t even know the word
“confused”
not to be confused is itself pretty confusing, isn’t it?
But a week — that was about all it took.
Somewhere in that initial murky, can’t-see-what’s-ahead stretch where both the teacher and I were flailing around together, something started to change, slowly, gradually — like your hand starting to feel the water when you’re treading it — something started to feel graspable.
As always, I have this thing where I’m half-assing it right up until something clicks, and then I get obsessively into it.
My English from those three months isn’t all that different from my English now, honestly.
I worked hard then, and once I actually got to Australia, I got lazy.
Back in Korea, I spent the last month saying goodbye to friends and coworkers, going through farewell dinners, wrapping everything up, and then got on the flight to Australia.
Sydney Airport.
Miyoung had booked a hotel, and we were told that if we called, they’d come pick us up.
I called.
Couldn’t understand a single word.
Huh?
What?
It’s definitely English, so why can’t I make it out?
I barely caught the time and place, went there, and waited.
On the ride there, in the pickup van, and at the hotel — well, not really a hotel, actually a backpackers’ hostel — I couldn’t understand anyone’s English around me either.
Wait, what?
What’s with this accent?
Why’s everyone talking so fast?
Why are they clipping everything so short?
God, it was crushing.
Just how slowly and carefully had those Philippine teachers been listening to my broken Konglish, that I actually walked away from three months in the Philippines thinking I was good at English?
Well, nothing to be done about it — it’s a war, and we’d jumped right in.
No avoiding it now.
We stayed at the backpackers’ for two or three days while we found a share-room.
Once we unpacked and cooked our first dinner there, it finally sank in — we’re actually in Australia.
And when the first weekend hit, it really sank in — this is genuinely insane Australia.
Because it turned out both the backpackers’ and the share-room were smack in the middle of Kings Cross.
We hadn’t realized it during the week.
Kings Cross!
And not just any Kings Cross, but the chaos of Kings Cross before the lockout laws hit the clubs.
Our place was on the ground floor, and on weekends the outside wall became a public toilet.
It was just one alley off the main road, dark and tucked into a corner — perfect for drunk guys to duck in and take a piss on their way past.
Now, neither Miyoung nor I are ones to shy away from drinking and partying ourselves, but… hm, this was a bit much.
Definitely not my territory.
I was 34, so I was on a student visa; Miyoung was still exactly 30, so she qualified for a working holiday visa.
We came with exactly $2,000 total.
The plan was: find jobs before that ran out, hang in there, and if the visa situation turned out to be truly hopeless, hightail it back to Korea fast.
Not counting rent, we fixed our weekly budget at $100 — $20 groceries, $50 cigarettes, $30 alcohol — and started job hunting.
Someone might say, just quit drinking and smoking and put that $80 toward groceries instead, right?
Ha — that’s nonsense to anyone who considers booze and cigarettes essential food groups in their own right.
Lucky for us, we discovered roll-your-own tobacco and $9-for-4-liters box wine, which is the only reason that budget worked at all — otherwise we’d have either drained our Korean savings or come straight back home.
Luckily, a loaf of bread was 90 cents and pasta was 75 cents, so we never really worried about starving.
Chuck roll, tough as it was, ran about $5 a kilo, if I remember right.
Not bad, all things considered.
One day, Miyoung was standing at a vending machine in the hallway of her language school, chewing her thumbnail and glaring at the cans inside like she wanted to put a hole through the glass.
“What are you doing?”
“I want one, but it’s $2.50.”
God — the exchange rate was brutal back then, so that felt like about 3,000 won in Korean money.
We just stood there staring at each other for a while and gave up.
Another day, Miyoung called and said McDonald’s had a $1 cheeseburger promo going on right then, and asked me to run over and grab two.
By the time I got to McDonald’s, the promo had already ended and the cheeseburgers were $3.
I called her back — it’s $3.
Miyoung went quiet for a long moment, then just said,
“Never mind, come home.”
God, how pathetic can you get.
Did it really have to come to that?
Some time later, Miyoung and I went to interview at a bar called RAW at Bondi Beach.
We each did a one-hour dishwashing trial — an hour for her, an hour for me.
They preferred Miyoung, since she could speak Japanese, and I — apparently coming across as kind of blunt/unfriendly — didn’t get it.
The round-trip fare from Kings Cross to Bondi was about 7,000 won, and even that felt like real money we hated to spend.
We scoured Gumtree and bought two small old BMX bikes, $20 and $30.
The $30 one we picked up in the city, but the $20 BMX had to be picked up somewhere called St Mary’s.
When I went to buy a train ticket, round trip came to about 12,000 won.
I called her.
“Should we just skip paying and ride for free?”
A long pause, then:
“Let’s not do that.”
“Yeah. Let’s not do that.”
I got off at St Mary’s and walked about 40 minutes through a quiet residential neighborhood.
I picked up the bike, and about 10 minutes into riding it back, the chain snapped with a clank.
Ugh — it’s a $20 bike, I could hardly ask them to fix it, and there was no fixing it on the spot either, so I dragged it along and walked another 20 minutes back to the station.
On the way back, I got a ticket inspection on the train.
Oh — oh — oh, I have no idea how lucky that was.
Of all days, that was the one and only ticket inspection I’d get in all my years living in Australia afterward — and it happened to be the exact day we’d talked about riding for free.
I sometimes think about how I’d have carried that regret if I’d actually gotten caught that day.
Miyoung’s first day of work.
“Oppa, how am I supposed to get there?”
“Let’s bike it, I’ll take you. Google Maps says it’s only 6km — even walking it’d be about an hour.”
“Okay, let’s do that.”
Ten minutes in, I sensed something had gone wrong.
We were climbing the Edgecliff hill, Miyoung was falling behind, and it was steeper than I’d expected — even I was struggling.
I steered us toward Double Bay to buy her some reassurance.
“We’re halfway there now, only 30 minutes left.”
“Uh — uh — uh.”
Then the second crisis hit.
A second hill showed up, except calling it a hill doesn’t do it justice.
It was a mountain.
We were climbing an actual mountain.
A third of the way up, it became clear we couldn’t ride the bikes up this.
We pushed them and ran up the mountain on foot.
By the time we reached the top, only 10 minutes were left, and Miyoung started flooring it on the bike.
Her determination not to be late on her very first day was written all over her whipping jacket and hair, and following behind at her pace, watching that desperate pedaling, my heart just broke a little — this was my fault.
She arrived with ten seconds to spare, flung the bike into the grass, and sprinted into the shop.
I smoked a cigarette and thought it over for a bit.
I dropped the dumb plan of just waiting around and biking back together with her later, and tried to ride my own bike home instead — and got lost.
My phone battery had died, so I couldn’t use Google Maps.
I tried several different paths from the top of the mountain and ended up somewhere completely wrong.
It ended up taking me over two hours to get home.
After charging up, I took the bus back to Bondi, rode Miyoung’s bike home, rested for a bit, then took the bus back to Bondi again and came home together with Miyoung — this time by bus.
What kind of chaos was that, what a waste of energy — that wasn’t frugality, that was just being an idiot.
Severely an idiot!
And that’s how our topsy-turvy Australia life began.