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Focus only on your own growth.
GapYear is a time for growth and happiness.
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23rd GapperKim Ju-won
Gap year period:2009–2011 and 2012–2014
Experiences during the gap year:Working holiday and world travel
With odds even more unlikely than winning the lottery...
From my birth until my early twenties, my range of activity was Busanin Jin-gu, Gaegum-donga 3 km neighborhoodwithinwere allcompleted. I completed elementary, middle, and high school, university... and even my military service at the places nearest home.
One day during my military service, I received a postcard from a friend in India and fell in love with the Goan beaches pictured. After discharge, I went to India alone for my first trip abroad. When I planned a 40-day trip and left, I felt proud and bold — going to India for 40 days from my neighborhood (not a short 3 nights and 4 days) seemed like an incredible and audacious plan.
However, I met travelers in India who told me they had been traveling for six months or even one to two years, and I was shocked, like a frog in a well seeing the ocean. I realized that, in this era where people live to 100, spending about a year to experience a wider world and meet various people would be a necessary and valuable part of my life, so I prepared for a longer trip.
'How can I travel around the world now, in my freshest, youngest days?'
After meeting long-term travelers in India, I, in my mid-twenties, developed this dream.
But I heard that to travel around the world for about a year you need roughly 20 to 25 million won in travel expenses. As a college student, it seemed it would take about three years of part-time work in Korea to cover the costs, and I was worrying when I saw an online news article...'Port Lincoln, the city with the highest proportion of millionaires in Australia'I saw that article and read a short piece saying that tuna farming was the main source of income in that area.
Australia?!I thought, 'I could go on a working holiday visa, and if I work in that area where there are many millionaires, wages must be high so I could save travel money faster, and I might even live in a really luxurious place like Beverly Hills in LA,' and with that big dream I took the 1.5 million won I'd saved from part-time jobs and went to Port Lincoln, Australia.
But...Port LincolnPort Lincoln, however, had none of the luxury I imagined; there were no department stores or shopping malls... It was a very small fishing village where McDonald's had been open for less than a year. When I arrived I didn't have much money, so I tried to find a hostel or a share house, but since this town wasn't a tourist spot there were no hostels, and because it was the kind of place where you'd hardly see an Asian person in a day, racism remained and no one would rent me a room.
In the end I had to live in a tent for the first three months, and after that I moved between the homes of local friends I met while working, about four or five times. That's how, over the course of a year, I wandered around the small town of Port Lincoln working at a tuna factory to save up travel money.
Exactly 360 days after arriving in Australia, the full-scale...world tripDeparted.
The first grand spectacle I encountered on the trip was Argentina's Iguazu Falls. I stood watching for about ten minutes, my whole body and face soaked by the spray rising from the 80-meter drop, trying not to forget that scene.
Images of the dreamlike places I would soon see around the world and the difficult moments in Australia flashed by and I started to cry; fortunately the spray kept wetting my face, so I remember crying my heart out without holding back.
After that I spent a year traveling around the world without major difficulties, meeting, eating, enjoying, and experiencing everything I had anticipated, and then returned to Korea.
Again, a gap year!
One year after returning to Korea, I went on another working holiday.
The 'chicken' kept coming to mind, so I wanted to learn the recipeI thought that if I learned it and opened it in Korea it'd be a huge success. To raise the funds to return to South America, this time I went on a working holiday to Germany.
I thought that if the Peruvian chicken became a hit I'd be too busy to take vacations, so I considered it my last long trip and saved money tenaciously. Because I had worked well with locals in Australia by reading the situation more than using words, I was confident this time too, but in Germany I lost out to unexpected competition from Turkish and Eastern European migrant workers and couldn't find local work. Unfortunately, I ended up preparing travel funds over seven months by working a harder job than in Australia at a Korean mill in Frankfurt, making rice cakes, tofu, and sesame oil.
Before learning the Peruvian chicken, I learned to make egg tarts in Lisbon, Portugal for a month, and then spent eight months traveling through Europe and Latin America revisiting places I had enjoyed on my previous trip to learn their recipes. AndFinally!I went to that chicken alley in Peru, ordered the same chicken as last time, and took a bite.
But...It was the same shop, and business was still doing well, but the chicken tasted completely different from the one in my memory from the previous trip. I couldn't eat anymore and after pondering why, I realized that on the previous trip I had eaten it as a genuinely hungry traveler, while this time I tasted it with an entrepreneur's thoughts—'could this flavor survive in Korea's cutthroat chicken market?'—so the experience had to feel completely different.
It has been five months since I returned to Korea.
Currently, I sometimes give lectures for those preparing for or curious about world travel, and while working and living at my brother's traveler cafe & guesthouse that I learned about through my travels, I am preparing my travel stories into a book. And during my past travels, not only Peruvian chickenbut also various dishes I learned from around the world—I am refining and perfecting them and planning my own shop.
Gap year, thatafter that.
I am not afraid to step into a new world. I had never been more than 3 km away from my neighborhood from birth until adulthood, but during the gap year when I gathered my courageOnce I took that first step, surprisingly more positive things happened than worst-case scenarios, and I received a lot of help from unexpected places, resulting in people I will never forget throughout theworld.
And after traveling,I realized that the range of emotions I can feel became much wider.If I had not left and had accepted it as my fate in Gaegum-dong, Busan, the range of emotions I could have felt—joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure—would have been as small as my neighborhood. In contrast, the fear I experienced when stepping into a new world and the exhilaration of overcoming it and achieving success cannot be fully expressed in words. ^^
And whenever I see, hear, or taste something, the round-the-world journey I experienced comes to mind.
For example, even when drinking a cup of coffee or a glass of beer, the flavors I tasted locally in each country during my travels flash through me and pass down my throat—that ecstasy and pleasure! Ah!
Let's all do our best!!
A gap year is an unseen period of preparation for living a better life.
Compared to friends around you who are struggling hard in society, you may feel scared and anxious, and because there are no clear results you might feel like you're being left behind. However, if you have dreams and goals, it will be a time to develop your own distinctive strengths and competitiveness.
R=VD
R(Realization) = V(Vivid) D(Dream)
If you dream vividly, your wishes will come true.
– From 'The Attic of Dreams' –
Even if reality is a little tough, I hope we can all admire the person we've become after achieving our dreams!!
To all of us preparing for or experiencing a gap year—let's do our best!!
