Author's note: Every dialogue (including text messages) in italicised, bold words mean they’re spoken in Korean, and every other normal dialogue means they’re spoken in English.

 ‘I finish before midnight tonight. Are you up for some supper?’ Seunghoon’s text comes in as soon as Iza finished up at the store. She didn’t predict she was going to be working at a florist and going home to a small studio apartment for her gap year in South Korea, but there she was.

It wasn’t in her plans to take a gap year, but she felt like it could do her some good. Just spread a bit of her wings in a foreign country, just to get a feel of a few things. She thought that maybe being independent could breathe in a new sense of direction in her, as life was starting to bear her down.

When she first touched down at Incheon International Airport, she regretted her decision to have chosen South Korea. Sure, it’s the birthplace of many her favourite idols and the prospect of getting to bump into any one of them exhilirates her, but she could barely speak the language!

It was evidently so when she tried to take a taxi to the accomodation she had chosen for herself. She could barely tell the driver where to go. Thankfully, she had printed out the address in Hangeul, so she simply showed it to him, after a few minutes of rummaging through her backpack, and a grunt from the displeased driver.

Another buzz comes in, and jolts her back to the present.

‘I’m thinking of udon,’ his text reads.

She wipes her hands clean on her apron and says to her boss, “I’m clocking out! I’ll see you tomorrow!” in very slow, and careful Korean. She took up a Korean class, and she can only go so far in conversing, but she gets by pretty well. Her young boss adores her, and has been very patient with her communicating skills, or rather the lack of it.

“Okay! Since it’s late, hurry back home, and stay safe,” her boss yells back from the back office. She’s usually tied up in her office after closing hours, calculating the day’s sales, and tonight was no different. Fangirls always keep florists busy, especially during concert season.

‘You always think of udon,’ she texts Seunghoon back with a cheeky, tongue-out emoticon.

‘False. I always think of you,’ his reply comes in straightaway. Iza rolls her eyes at the cheesiness of the guy she’s dating. She takes off her work apron, slings on her messenger bag, and steps out of the store with her head down, focusing on her smartphone, typing her next response.

“You’re going to hit a pole if you keep doing that,” a voice speaks out. Shocked out of her skin, she looks up and bumps into a man a head taller than her.

“Oh, I’m really sorry!”

“I told you,” the man says, playful mirth in his voice.

A smile forms on Iza’s face as she looks abashedly into Seunghoon’s eyes. Her heart thuds rapidly against her chest, placing butterflies in her tummy as Seunghoon takes her hand in his.

“You should be less careless next time,” he advises.

“No ones says it as ‘less careless’, but rather ‘more careful’, but I guess it’s a half-asleep and half-awake kind of thing; you just never know which one to properly use,” she opens to correct him, but ends up rambling away.

“Stop, you’re talking too fast again. You know I’m just starting to learning English,” he squeezes her hand, in efforts to calm her down. He knows she gets a little nervous around him, and he finds it adorable. “Have you been practicing your Korean a lot?”

They walk down a familiar street that leads to Seunghoon’s favourite udon place. It’s his favourite because the owner keeps his identity secret and no one who ever goes there knows who he was.

“I learn enough,” she convinces him. “By the way, it’s ‘starting to learn English’, not ‘starting to learning’.”

This was how they both interacted, correcting each other’s English and Korean respectively. Back when they had first met, they didn’t understand each other. She had been walking her way to the YG Entertainment building to get a proof shot in front of it and post it to her Twitter friends, but she’d gotten lost on the way. Her smartphone had died on her, so online maps were a no-go. That, paired with her nonexistant Korean skills, and unhelpfu