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 It has been replaced by a combination of Anna’s old Intel MacBook Pro and rewriting my codebase to install and run without a GPU – adversity is the great innovator, as the saying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.

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