A different path

It was a cold, freezing winter night when I arrived in the UK. My father, mother, and I picked up our luggage and went straight outside the airport. Because I was in the warm and cosy aeroplane for so long, I could feel the icy night breeze. Of course we were all wearing thick jackets. But still it was cold.

We reached our house. With a 2nd floor, a garage, a garden, lots of rooms, and a wide dining table, I thought that this was a very different scene compared to houses in Korea. I started to feel a bit more comfortable about this new environment. There was an electric fireplace with dust covering it. I blew the dust off so that I could get a better view, and turned the fireplace on. An image of a fire, which looked realistic, glowed with red, orange, and yellow light. I giggled. Then I went upstairs to explore the 2nd floor. I roamed around and saw the bathroom. I found out that I needed to pull the string which was connected to the ceiling in order to flush the toilet seat. Then I went to the bedroom and saw a wide bed. The bed had a wooden barrier on the top and the bottom. It was like the bed that comes out in fairy tales. I dropped on the bed and felt my eyelids slowly closing.

It was in the early morning about 1 AM or so when I woke up. My father and mother were almost done with setting up the house. I went downstairs, opened a few windows, and looked outside. The sky was still dark but it wasn’t black. It was dark blue. I stared at the open sky, which was crystal clear. The moon was now going down and the sun was rising slowly.

I attended a school there. Priory School. The school was so different from my Korean one. It was much bigger. It was difficult to imagine that it was only a single school when several buildings were connected. Most of the buildings were used for student activities and a few of them were for the founder, the headmaster, and the teachers.

Also there was a field which covered about two thirds of the entire school. Very wide indeed. The field included a tennis court, a football pitch, a small human-made forest, and a big mound. My friends and I used to roll down the mound together.

Because I was a fish out of water, I tried to settle in as fast as I could. I thouht that everything new was just something old that was a bit different. The school was just like our old school, and friends were just the same but a different person. All I had to do was do what I always have done. And I would probably fit in, quietly.

Then our family visited a small town called Hay-on-Wye. It is a small Welsh Village in the middle of nowhere. We drove hours to the place where not even a train stopped by. It was just supposed to be a small weekend trip, because we had nothing to do. But the village of Hay-on-Wye had another name; it was known as the Kingdom of Books. Here, many years ago, a man named RIchard Booth transformed his small shepherding home town into the centre of a literary festival which celebrated old books. It was not something anyone could do. The town had been dying out slowly over several decades. Only old people and sheep lived there. But Richard had an idea, and bought old books from all over the country. Everyone said he would fail. But he wanted to try something new. He didn’t want to just let everything remain the same. Nowadays, Hay-on-Wye is visited from all over the world.

When we walked down the small village, every shop was an old book store for a specific type of book. There was a book store for mystery books, a books store for children’s books, a book store for science fiction books, and even a book store filled with horror stories. Every spring, Hay on Wye had a book festival, and famous authors came and read their books. Now, it was a landmark in the middle of nowhere.

I bought an old map there. At the map store where they sold printed maps from hundreds of years ago. Korea was often misrepresented, misspelt, and sometimes even entirely missing. I bought a hundred year old map of Asia. It is yellow and cracked and crusted from time. It still reminds me of Hay on Wye, as it hangs in my bedroom. And I am reminded that Possibilities are not always obvious. They sometimes happen when people least expect it. What would Hay on Wye be without a crazy idea? What would Hay on Wye be if Richard hadn’t tried something new. Everyone said it was going to fail, because nothing like it had ever happened. That was wrong. People think that things might fail because they have never seen it happen.

I decided that my life was always going to be full of things I haven’t tried. From then on, my life in England was always full of new things I had never done before. I played cello in front of many people. I started to learn and play golf in green, fresh fields. I challenged myself into big writing competitions.

By the time it was time for our family to return to Korea, we had actually become more knowledgeable. We travelled to more places than people who had lived in the UK for all their lives. I still take different paths from other people. I dream of going to a foreign school and experiencing the different cultures and environments myself. If I can’t get used to the new things here, I will never be able to do so out in the vast world. And maybe, or eventually, the path untaken might be better than the path taken.

Take a different path

By Justin