First day alone

It’s Adrian’s first day at work today. My alarm went off at 0630 so I could get ready to go to breakfast. There’s no way I would feel comfortable leaving the house here without my hair and make-up done and in nice clothes. We decided to go up to Samsung Hotel for breakfast, it’s gorgeous there and the view is spectacular.  The food is amazing too! We gorged ourselves on the buffet then Adrian went off to work and I walked back to the apartment for my first day flying solo.

After being in the apartment for a few hours I decided to take a walk to the shopping centre to look around and get to know my new home town. Again everyone I see is so dressed up and most look like they belong in fashion magazines.  The shoes I see are incredible!

I do feel a little lonely and isolated walking around here though as no one makes eye contact. One of my biggest fears before moving here was being stared at all the time because of my height and complexion, it’s the opposite though. No one looks at one another and no one smiles.

I started to realise just how far away we are from home because even though this place if full of familiar symbols and logos it’s still not the same. People don’t look you in the eye here; in fact they hardly look at you at all. And it’s not just foreigners they do this to, they seem to like the distance between each other too. I’m the sort of person who looks at people at smiles easily. It’s something I do without even thinking and it feels unacceptable to do that here. So far these three days I have automatically smiled at people hundreds of times but I’ve also started to think about making sure not to look people directly in the eye and certainly not to smile so openly. It’s kind of sad to find myself thinking like that. But it seems most other westerners have caught onto this as well as none of them smile back at me either. You know even the cars over here are tinted so dark it’s hard to see in, it’s like they want to shut you out in every way possible.

As you can tell from my gloomy post the first day on my own has hit me harder than I expected. Counting down til Adrian is home.

Write soon xx