The Search for a Destination

So-eun's first birthday celebration had ended without a hitch, and it seemed as though I might finally be allowed to rest. I wasn't. My wedding to Noona was less than two months away.

So-eun had arrived before either of us had planned for her, and it was Noona's wish to be married in May that had pushed the wedding back a year. Now that postponed ceremony had to be seen through, and there was no room left to breathe.

Part of me wanted to ask whether next year might not be better, but I couldn't. Day after day Noona stood among dresses, happily fretting over whether this one was right or that one was better, and I wasn't tactless enough to say such a thing to her face. I wasn't exactly brimming with courage, either.

Besides, tight as the schedule was, finishing every preparation inside a month wasn't impossible. Money was pouring in from the café and from Mutube, and even with only a month to work in, the wedding was coming together at a steady clip.

A hall that billed itself as premium and charged a steep fee for the rental was easy enough to book. The dress wasn't a rental, either, but a custom order, and once we promised to pay over the asking price they swore they would have it finished — not in a month, but in a week.

Nothing else posed a problem. The wedding photos didn't require an agency; we could simply call in a seasoned, talented freelance photographer. The videos could be left to the staff of the Mutube channel, which made them even less of a concern.

And yet, with nothing else actually wrong, there was exactly one reason I was busy. The honeymoon. Granted, Noona asking me every thirty minutes which dress looked better did its own part to keep me occupied.

At any rate, the task dumped in my lap was to plan that honeymoon, and it had me running ragged. I sat in front of the computer for hours every day, hauling in information on one destination after another, and there was no way not to be busy. It could hardly be called an ordinary couple's honeymoon, which only made it worse. Could we travel with a baby who had just turned one? Could we bring the animals? Was the place safe? Was there any danger of disease? I had to search while weighing every one of those questions, and it was anything but easy.

Desperate for a way through, I started a livestream for the first time in a long while. When grinding through a problem alone gets too hard, nothing beats the wisdom of the crowd.

"Hello, everyone! This is Shinsoo."

"......It does embarrass me, so I'll be ignoring any chat about that."

A subscriber's jab landed before I had even begun, and for a moment I had nothing to say. I watched the chat race upward. The broadcast had only just started, and already thousands of people had poured in. My channel vacuumed up subscribers from every corner of the world, and the window was plastered with every language there was.

"Ah, I'm sorry, but I'm a fluent speaker of zero languages, so I'd appreciate it if you could bear with me. Talking smoothly with our overseas fans is a little difficult!"

I ran what I meant to say through a translator and put the result up on screen.

People chatting among themselves, people desperate to talk to me, people firing off messages that meant nothing at all — every sort was typing at once. The chat didn't so much scroll as shimmer, a strobe of black and white. It wasn't only the viewers who spoke Korean. Volunteers had taken it upon themselves to translate my words for the overseas fans, and the window had them to thank for never sitting still.

"Whew, I can barely look at the chat. Anyway! Why did I turn the stream on today? Because I'd like some destination recommendations."

At that, the chat blinked even faster. Lines flooded past — this place was wonderful, that place had been unbelievable.

"Ah, it won't be anywhere in the country. We're going overseas. A simple outing would be one thing, but this time we're planning a trip to go with the wedding. Rather than somewhere at home we could visit whenever we liked, I want a place where we can have an experience we've never had."

The news that we were going abroad dragged the word traitor out of a few lunatics, but the instant I added that it was a honeymoon, the reaction vanished. What rushed in to fill the gap was chat recommending every country under the sun.

"Afghanistan? Palestine? Iraq? Have you lost your minds, humans."

Predictably, people had popped up recommending impossible destinations just to stir the pot. I didn't feel they were worth humoring, and I banned them on the spot.

"The ban was too harsh, you say? And telling me to take my wife and my daughter, who's barely past her first birthday, to a place like that isn't harsh?"

Once I had banned the people sticking up for the banned ones as well, the chat went clean.

"I'm trying to settle on a honeymoon destination, and there are conditions. It has to be safe. No risk of disease or anything like it. We have to be able to bring the animals. So-eun has to be able to come along. Something like that?"

The moment I laid out what a honeymoon spot absolutely had to satisfy, the chat erupted.

"No, I know. I know there aren't many places that fit what I just said. Even so, there's got to be somewhere surprising out there, right? It's the trip that follows a once-in-a-lifetime wedding. It has to slam itself into our memories."

Whether that had finally brought them around or not, the viewers began to offer ideas.

Of course, the fact that they were offering ideas didn't mean the ideas were sane.

"There really are an incredible number of countries ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠in the world. Liechtenstein? Saint Vincent and the Grenadines? I've never even heard of places like these."

Partway through, names of countries I had never heard in my life kept bursting out of the chat. People weren't typing at random. I only knew the places were real after I searched them.

"Madagascar, huh...... That could be all right too. They say the security's a little rough, but if we hired some bodyguards, wouldn't it be fine? I do want to see the lemurs."

"......That's a bit much."

Seeing lemurs was all well and good. Having those things pick through my hair was where I drew the line.

"What translator could you possibly be using, for it to come out like that? No, more importantly...... Galapagos? You mean the Galapagos Islands, right?"

Still shuddering at the mental image of a lemur grooming me, I focused on the chat that followed. The Galapagos Islands meant those islands crowded with rare animals of every kind — the famous place where Charles Darwin, of the theory of evolution, was said to have watched creature after creature. Even so, I soon shook my head.

"The Galapagos Islands would be wonderful, but...... honestly, I think it'd be difficult. As far as I know, getting in together with pets is nearly impossible."

Fear of invasive species and the damage they might do to the ecosystem made the Galapagos Islands a hard place to enter with animals.

"Yes. If only for So-eun's sake, we absolutely have to go together. So-eun can't last a day without Cheongho, or Yubu, or the Tokkiz. The Tokkiz especially."

Being with the animals at every hour was something that had gone on for So-eun since the day she was born. Because of that, she couldn't endure more than a day without them.

There had been a time I had to set aside two days, because my dad and my father-in-law were raising a fuss about wanting to see her. Taking the animals along was difficult, so I had left them with the staff and brought only So-eun — and that was when I learned it. Part her from the animals for more than a day, and she would wail and fuss about how badly she missed them.

Anyway, just as the talk of the Galapagos was beginning to die down, a donation alert went off. Not one of those small-change donations that popped up between vanishing chats merely to announce someone's presence. This was a high-tier donation.

"......The embassy?"

Someone spending that much money just to talk had caught my interest. I immediately opened a messenger used the world over, so I could speak with the person claiming to be an embassy employee.

A donation alert rang out again, this one rebutting a chat thick with misunderstandings, but I didn't pay it much mind. In the meantime I had logged into the messenger, and before long I was connected with the man who said he worked at the embassy.

"Hello! I'm Kim Lee Park, and I work at the Korean Embassy in Ecuador."

"......Kim Lee Park?"

"Yes. It's a rather curious name, isn't it? So when I explain it to my foreign friends, I tell them it's like Johnson Smith David. Hehe."

Kim Lee Park, who had himself called his name curious, was smiling as if the whole thing amused him. Then the sound of someone beside him speaking came through, and he collected himself and began to explain why he had reached out.

"First, allow me to make clear that the donation I sent during your broadcast, Mr. Shinsoo, was not the will of our embassy."

"You're saying the embassy didn't do it?"

"Correct. I made that donation entirely because the governor of Galapagos Province requested it."

Introducing the man he called the governor of Galapagos Province, Kim Lee Park went on to explain why that governor had steered a donation my way.