By the first month, I had settled comfortably in the city of Busan.

I kept to myself for the most part, spending my days contently with wandering the city, camera in hand. During the first week, I had explored the streets of the residential area we lived in; street food stall owners quickly learning to recognize my face within the first few days, and soon committing my name to memory.

“If it isn’t the little photographer!” was something I would hear often, with the stall owners waving me over with some tempting serving of chewy tteokbokki or something or another. “Come over here, Youngah-yah.”

Dangerous, was what came to mind when I thought of them—I could eat the street stall food endlessly, but at the cost of my weight. I had little to no regrets, of course.

I usually kept the conversation to a minimum, but the stall owners were unfailingly welcoming every time; I couldn’t help but grow fond of them anytime they called me over. At some point, I began offering my photography services to them free of charge, seeing their outdated menus. In exchange, they began refusing my attempts to pay them for my food.

“We’ve pulled in more customers since we updated our menus, and it’s all thanks to you. How could we charge you after that?”

“But—”

“No buts.”

It was a strange, but I appreciated relationship I had with them; I promised to take more in the future, but they easily brushed me off every time I tried to mention it.

“You’re so young, let us worry about these things instead,” they would insist, and I had to simply accept their words.

I didn’t quite feel at home, but they certainly gave a semblance of that warmth.

The second week in, I began travelling around the rest of the city either by foot or by transit. Rather than making more connections, I was content in simply photographing the streets, the buildings, the people, and the gorgeous ocean view surrounding it. Exploring the city was a novelty that I fully immersed myself in the enjoyment of, feeling a freedom that I couldn’t remember feeling before.

Ease. Contentment. Those were things that I felt at the moment, that soothed my heart and distracted my mind from other thoughts. The longer I stayed in Busan, the more I was able to distance myself from the constant worry that plagued me about my future; instead, focusing on what was right in front of me.

I opened a photography blog section to add onto my portfolio site, documenting my daily ventures and keeping a short, brief diary of my life. I wrote my posts both in English and Korean, partly because I needed to keep up with my English skills, and partly because I needed to practice my Korean; my aunt frequently offering advice on grammar and vocabulary.

I liked to think that my Korean skills were improving thanks to my time in Korea, but I knew it was only a marginal difference—whenever a sentence got too complex for me to say in Korean, I usually defaulted to a strange form of Konglish, which my aunt somehow managed to decipher on the regular. Bless her gracious soul, that one.

Regardless, despite the cultural differences I had with the majority—I wasn’t used to the almost-too-straightforward way that so many middle-aged people would often spoke to me in, or the overly polite form o