Not all of them, I thought, smiling to myself. At the station, Jae bought me a bag of sticky buns and announced he wanted me to accompany him and Wook back to Seoul. I reminded him yet again that I wanted to go to Tanyang, even though it was not the correct time of year to do so.
Mayhem ensued, with Wook running back and forth to the ticket desk to prove that getting to Tanyang would be far too difficult, almost surely impossible. I relented. Perhaps they were right. Before we boarded, I managed to buy a copy of the new Korea Herald. We got seats at the front of the bus, directly behind the driver.
Wook sat next to me, while Jae, across the aisle, promptly fell asleep. As we set off, I opened the paper and found my Suwon article. Excited, I showed it to Wook, and he proceeded to read it out loud, very loudly in fact, until the driver barked at him to pipe down.
He tried to wheedle back into my favour by asking carefully polite questions, and then making odd jokes about alliteration in the title, unaware he was breathing over me an overpowering combination of bean paste stew and soju.
Gradually he fell asleep. He thanked me but explained it was unnecessary: he had a friend to lean on. I really had found a friend this time.
