The languorous, muggy heat of the Korean afternoon sun was what greeted me after 13 hour cattle-class flight from a cool, sensible Helsinki night. The goings-on in Ukraine, and associated political turmoil, meant taking the scenic route – avoiding Russia and instead passing over Turkey, Kazakstan and Mongolia – with legs contorted into unnatural positions and sleep an unattainable dream. Tired and disoriented, I relied less on Anna’s expert knowledge of the Korean language than her patience for my jet-lag-induced bad mood and brain fog. We waited an hour for a bus to take us from Incheon airport to Yongsan central station in the heart of the capital. It was 35 °C.

I’ve been here for a month. Anna has found work, starting in November; I have found the need to modify my working habits. Gone are the comfortable, temperate offices on St Giles’, replaced by an ever-changing diorama of cafés, hotel rooms and libraries. Lugging around my enormous HP Pavilion, known affectionately by some as ‘The Dominator’, proved to be unsustainable.

It’s thesis-writing time for me, so any programming I do is just tinkering and tweaking and fixing the litany of bugs that Lucy Vost has so diligently exposed. I had planned to run Ubuntu on Parallels using my MacBook Air; I discovered to my dismay that a multitude of Conda packages, including PyTorch, are not supported on Apple’s M1 chip. It has been replaced by a combination of Anna’s old Intel MacBook Pro and rewriting my codebase to install and run without a GPU – adversity is the great innovator, as the saying goes.

There have been a few other changes. My hours, minutes and seconds are the newest: fresh off the press, straight from the factory line, unused and unsullied. In that regard I’m ahead of the curve, so to speak, but it does mean that meetings tend to be very late at night. I’m a morning person, more sloth than owl at night, so job interviews for European companies come with an unhealthy dose of caffeine. My diet has changed, too, from roast chicken, boiled potatoes and steamed broccoli to bulgogi, samgyeopsal, and tteokbokki. My body has had to adjust to an influx of rich meats, spices and sauces which caused some discomfort, but I’m not sure that I’ll ever eat unfermented vegetables again.

Alongside food inevitably comes drink, and drinking culture. Having almost no knowledge of Korean culture, I had not expected such an affection for beer – or Mekju (맥주) – but it is consumed in vast quantities here, at home, in pubs, restaurants and Noarebang bars and outside convenience stores. Perhaps the only drink more popular than beer is Soju (소주), a clean, refreshing rice wine, which upon mixture with Mekju becomes… SoMek (소맥). Portmanteaus are an institution here. Bars are probably the most at-home a Brit can feel in Korea.

By far the biggest challenge has been language. I spent the preceding three months on an internship in Zurich, but a simple ‘Hallo’ will elicit a response in perfect, if heavily accented, English from almost anyone. I had been lulled into a false sense of English not as the lingua franca, but the lingua universalis . It is a trap into which my monolingual compatriots have doubtless fallen countless times before. Some say it betrays a certain English arrogance.

So far the friends I’ve made have been English-speakers. I’ve made some efforts to learn how to read. Designed by King Sejong in 1443, Hangeul is an intuitive, phonetic alphabet which perfectly fits the needs of the spoken language. Anna became fluent in university, but the best way to learn is by being thrown into the deep end (‘immersed’) and I am always next to my linguistic lifejacket. Woe is me.

I’m grateful for the chance to be somewhere so friendly, vibrant and exciting, but I miss Oxford. I miss the UK. I’ll be back soon to tie up my DPhil. I should really find a job.