Jaemin Yi | Travel, Creativity, and the Pursuit of Awesomeness

I’ve always sucked at foreign languages. Don’t believe me? I grew up with two Korean parents (yes, from Korea) and somehow I managed to NOT learn Korean. In middle school, Pig Latin and Gibberish (and the girls who spoke them) constantly eluded me. In high school, I took 3 years of Spanish and all I got from it was “Donde esta la biblioteca?”

In spite of all this, I somehow thought my Spanish would be up to snuff for my latest trip: living for 5 weeks in Medellin, Colombia. Um, no. This is gonna sound stupid, but when I landed I was actually surprised by how difficult it was to communicate. I guess in my previous travels, I was either surrounded by a ton of other English-speaking travelers (Thailand) or lived in a city where English was a common second-language (Berlin, Germany). Not this time.

Colombia was full on Spanish, all the time. And wow, it was such a different experience trying to live in a country where you can barely speak the language. It was challenging, exciting, frustrating, rewarding, and most definitely a time I’ll never forget. Here are a few things I learned from my experience:

Everything becomes an adventure. Getting groceries. Figuring out the metro. Asking your landlady for toilet paper. When you don’t speak the language, the most mundane things can become epic, monumental tasks.

People will think you’re retarded. I wish I could say it’s all fun, but it can be hard at times too. Some people will literally treat you as if you’re retarded. They’ll get annoyed that you can’t get your point across and will think you’re dumb because of it. Brush ‘em off – for every one of them, there’s 99 other friendly people who will want to genuinely help you and get to know you, regardless of your language barriers.

To be honest, I was pretty worried. I was gearing up for my month-long Germany trip but unlike my other travels, I was going to spend most of my time living in one city: Berlin.

I had heard all the benefits of long-term travelling vs. backpack travelling but I still had millions of doubts. How am I going to make friends without staying in hostels? How will I fill my days if I’m not constantly jumping from city to city? Will I spend every day aimlessly wandering the lonely streets of Germany only to return to an even lonelier apartment?

So I asked my friend Lindsay, a fellow traveller I met in Thailand who was living there for a few months. She promised me I’d have nothing to worry about, and then said:

“One thing I have learned is I CANNOT stay in a place long without having a purpose. I hit a miss moment at LubDee [Bangkok hostel], because I hadn’t really found that. But now I’m working on my own fashion line and an art gallery exhibit…I have something that makes me happy, that I can focus my time on.”

And you know what? She was completely right. From that moment on, I decided to give myself a travel purpose for my time in Germany – and then I went on to have one of the most amazing months of my life. If you’re going to travel, especially longer-term travel, you should have a purpose and here’s why:

The sun was already up, I was barely awake, and my voice had given up on me – but I was still grinning from ear to ear as I hit the “upload” button. It was 6am, February 28th, and I had officially completed my insane 28 Day Song Challenge.

I’ve never made a song before. Never played with Logic Pro. Hell, I even had issues about showing others my creative work. But here we are, 28 days and 28 songs later. It was definitely one of the toughest months in recent memory – trying to move out of an apartment, finish two video projects, letting my health and social life down a hole, all while posting up a song a day. But this has been of my proudest and most rewarding months ever: it threw music back into my life 100%, taught me tons about songwriting and beat production, proved to myself that I still got that willpower, and got me creatively engaged in a way that I haven’t felt in over 8 years!

You can check out all the songs on my Youtube channel and although they’re not all winners, just know that those songs represent a monumental month in my life. And without further ado, let me share some of the things I learned in that month:

Wow, this feels good. I just posted all three of my Doritos commercials online (‘The Red’, ‘First Date’, ‘The Breakroom’, and check out behind the scenes pics right here) and now I can call it a wrap. Done. Finito. My first personally funded, professional shoot is now officially in the can. Ahhhh. But before I [...]

photo by cathycracks Ah, the good ol’ “Spec Commercial”  If you’re a filmmaker looking to break into commercial directing, you’re gonna need a few of these on your reel.  A spec commercial is simply a “fake” commercial that a filmmaker makes to show ad agencies and companies that he’s worthy of hiring. Needless to say, [...]

photo by dbuc Things have been crazy for the past 4 weeks with this special, non-freelance project I’ve been working on. But after tonight (our last day of shooting), I’ll be in the home stretch – the editing phase.  Which means for the next few days, I’ll get little sleep and even less sunlight.  Woohoo. [...]