I was standing outside the other day, just looking around as I do sometimes, and something hit me that I had never noticed before. Nothing particularly unusual was going on at the time, it was just another typical Korean autumn day. Which is to say a hazy but clear sky, no wind, and fairly chilly. And that’s when I realized I haven’t seen a thunderstorm all year. Not one bolt of lightning, nothing. I started thinking about it some more and realized it’s very rarely even windy here. When it rains, which it does far less frequently than I thought it would, it’s usually big fat drops coming straight down from a grey sky, followed by a day or so of drizzle and fog. After that we’ll have another month of cloudless hazy days.

Being from the Midwest, I’m accustomed to big fat thunderstorms on a regular basis. I think we literally had one every other day most of the summer one year when I was living back at Whiteman. You also never see the ever present haze you have over here. I’m always startled by how close certain things on the horizon are when the sky clears up as it does form time to time. I’ll never forget how huge the sky was down in Texas, it felt like you could almost see past the horizon at times. Even the sunsets are different here. American sunsets have that classic defined look to them, a blaze of colors followed by a fade off to the deep purple of night. Korean sunsets are huge and soft and take over the entire sky, again I assume due to the haze. They invoke a different feeling.

It’s interesting, because you can draw a lot of parallels between the Korean people and the Korean weather when you actually start to look at it. I wonder how much of an effect the weather has on a culture? I’ll say this much, it certainly has an effect on me. I realized that these sorts of things are a major contributor to feeling like a visitor. It’s just foreign for lack of a better word. Odd stuff that you would never think of until you find yourself thinking of it.