Posts Tagged ‘seoul’
Makeshift offices and portable magic
A late night dinner of delicious beer and chips, washed down with an episode of Stranger Things. A micro-brewery in Seoul.
In July, while I was in Seoul, I bought a gadget that has made my freelance life better. I bought it in the only Apple store in Seoul, which I first visited in 2018 for a business feature I was reporting, a feature that paid out very well. Anyway, in July, in this Apple store in Seoul, which is located in the Gangnam district, on a famous street called garosu-gil, I bought an iPad Mini.
Seoul is a good place to pick up Apple products. You begin with cheaper starting prices compared to the UK and you also get a 10% tourist tax refund at the airport. I picked up an iPad Mini, a Bluetooth Logitech keyboard, and a Pencil.
I have found the iPad Mini a great addition to my gadgetry. It syncs seamlessly with my iPhone SE, so websites opened on my iPhone can also be found on my iPad browser, for example. The iPad Mini has an extremely fast A12 processor chip (the top-of-the-line iPad Pro has the A12X), a True Tone screen, and is a relative bargain compared to the overpriced iPhones.
I also downloaded the GoodNotes app which I use with the Apple Pencil to sketch down ideas, create PDFs and make annotations. I have Apple Arcade which I enjoy — playing Sayonara Wild Hearts paired with a PlayStation 4 controller, and headphones, is serious fun: an aural and visual delight.
In Singapore, I relaxed with a can of Harbin beer, at my friend’s apartment where I was staying, lounging on the veranda in the tropical evening, watching Netflix on the iPad.
I also use the iPad Mini for work. I find working in vertical orientation quite pleasing, and typing on the Logitech keyboard on the Mini is fun. I can put the iPad and the keyboard into a little sling bag, and it is a very portable set-up. I remember pulling it out for an impromptu typing session on the street using an outside table in Seoul. The machine is fast and capable and battery life is very good.
Using my iPad Mini in a Dunkin Donuts in Seoul.
When you’re freelance many tables can become your office. And some of the tables I worked on when I was traveling seemed innocuous enough. The Dunkin Donuts “office” reached by escalator and opposite the Gangnam-gu Office subway station, in Seoul, offered fantastic doughnuts and decent coffee.
The café with a window which overlooked the river.
A café where I worked one afternoon in Singapore.
The wooden “table” where I placed my notebook and wrote one of these blog posts.
A makeshift office.
All of these, despite being banal and somewhat mundane things — a table, a chair — have picked up a kind of retrospective magic.
The work is the reward
Dear reader,
I write you from Seoul, Republic of Korea.
I want to talk about a few ideas that have been coalescing in my mind. They are to do with money: income and expenditure. But I eventually realised it wasn’t really about that, at all. Money shouldn’t enter the picture.
(I caveat this by disclosing I have no dependents, no mortgage, and no desire for those things at the moment.)
To that end, let’s just talk about work.
I enjoy my work and I don’t mind doing some of it every single day. But there are some things I need to get better at. These are:
- To get better at continually stringing together series of commissions.
- Find more “anchor clients”.
- Re-orientate my thinking so that I believe the work itself is the reward, rather than thinking the money (or acclaim) earned from the work is the reward.
- Take time off to focus on my own writing — creative writing.
Let’s talk about the craftsman attitude: this is where you devote focus to your craft and take a rarified approach to the work. The theory is that if you adopt this approach enjoyment, flow, and meaning should naturally arise. Then the material rewards — such as money and acclaim — come about as mere byproducts.
The main reward is simply the reward of focusing deeply on what is in front of you.
Second point: taking time off to focus on my own writing. Another problem of being a writer is professionalisation.
Writing shouldn’t only be thought of as a source of income. Writing is a craft and an art. But writing only articles and being a professional writer — that is being paid for written works — can diminish the feeling of it being a source of enjoyment and pleasure.
To that end, perhaps I should take more time off to concentrate on my own creative writing. I believe that might be very important to my ongoing journey as a writer.
I believe, then, my sense of time might expand. And the anxiety will diminish. Chase only the work, the process, nothing else. Find the joy in being lost in all the opportunities, and creative problems, that arise from being a valued writer.
Forget everything else and bring your focus to bear on the task at hand.
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Being Home Again
These are not our horses.
I’ve been at home, living at the parent’s place, since the first week of December. The last time you encountered me was in Vietnam I believe. From October to November I was traveling. I went to the Philippines, Vietnam (where a friend joined me), and Malaysia (where I joined three other friends). I then went to Hong Kong and crashed on a couple of friends’ sofas for two weeks before finally heading back to wintry Beijing. I stayed there for a bit, did some work, socialized, collected much of my things, and then flew to sunny England.
While I was traveling, doing my “location independent thing”, I soon marvelled at how those travel bloggers and so-called digital nomads do it — not the work side of it, but the ceaseless moving around.
Anyway, now Christmas is over and soon this year will fold away into the past. And 2018 has presented me with some genuinely strange memories. Tragic, sad, wondrous, indelible.
I remember when I was in Seoul, Korea, on a vacation/assignment. I would do my reporting in the day when that was required of me, and meet up with a local journalist who I’d made the acquaintance of via Twitter. Damin is her name and she works at The Korea Times. We watched Mexico play Korea in the middle of Seoul, sat on the lawn, drinking beer with all the other Koreans, at midnight.
Other times I was alone, so very alone. And it often happens that when I am abroad and alone I sometimes feel lonely and a little wretched but these feelings are seldom overwhelming. But then I always look back on those times with positivity. As if that alone-ness was the utmost luxury: just pure freedom.
I’d walk the streets of Seoul. Just walking, lots and lots of walking. I think I averaged around 25,000 steps a day. When I’d eaten dinner, I’d walk for an hour or so, and then start thinking about heading back. I was staying in the lovely apartment of someone I met in Beijing who’d found a job in Seoul (he was out of town when I visited). When I got to my destination subway station, of the apartment, I’d head to a convenience store across the street where I’d buy a creamy bread and a couple of beers. I’d walk home with that. I’d load up a football game on my laptop. This was late June and the World Cup was on. I’d eat my creamy bread and watch the game and drink my beers. Then I’d go to bed and try to sleep but often wouldn’t be able to until around 4am. I’d wake around midday and repeat the process. Lots of walking, in the June heat. See a few sights. Have dinner. Buy creamy bread and beers for midnight supper. Football. Bed.
On my trip to the Philippines, which was surprising in many ways, I remember one day being taken to a beach by a local. I was on the island of Palawan, in El Nido. We arrived late in the day, just in time for the sunset. And then we walked on the beach while the sky turned from orange to beige and deepest navy, and she told me her sad story about her French boyfriend who she had a baby with and who wanted to marry her but she didn’t want to marry so young, and he had terrible mood swings, and so she abandoned him, and I listened while the surf washed softly over our feet.
It’s those kind of moments I remember.
That are full of adventure, soulfulness, spontaneity.
That gorgeous beach near El Nido, Palawan.
Lu-Hai Liang 