<h2>I’ve posted this essay before and this is the edited version</h2>
I stood on home soil technically the nice, waxed floors of Incheon airport for the first time in eight years, after having gone to Australia at the age of seven with my mum and my brother. Or was this truly home? After all, I had lived more than half my life in Australia. Had Korea become a foreign country to me? Was I returning to Korea or just visiting it? Before I could savour this poetic moment however, a familiar face came into view. Wow, you were cute when you went, now youre uglier than ever! my uncle joked well I hoped he was joking and gave me and my brother a customary headlock. My aunt and mum started their game of who-can-blurt-out-the-most-amount-of-gossip-in-the-shortest-amount-of-time on our way to the car. During this walk however, I felt something immense hit me. At first I thought it was the Korean winter teaching me a lesson for my stupidity I had shorts and a T-shirt on from the 35 degree (95 Fahrenheit) heat at Sydney airport but it was something else. I wanted to ask John my older brother if he was feeling it but he was too busy from the barrage of cheeky questions from my uncle; girlfriends, alcohol experiences, partying etc I, not yet 18, was saved this torture however, and left alone to contemplate this thing.
At my grandparents apartment we were showered with hugs and kisses but I noticed significant aging in grandpa. Sure I had received his pictures via mail but to actually see the wrinkles, to notice the difficulty and the ponderousness of his steps was saddening. I was very close to my grandparents because I had lived with them when I was in Korea, and when I was young I often spent time with grandpa playing Go a board game consisting of black and white stones. However it was very late and I went to bed without really talking to anyone.
Next morning I found the apartment empty; my aunt and uncle had gone back to their apartments last night, mum had gone to the station to pick up dad who was coming up from Pusan, John had gone to a friends apartment a few floors up and my grandparents had both gone out. Now that the thrill of being home had worn off, I was getting a little depressed; after all, I had no friends here. Armed with heavy clothing, I decided to go out for a walk, not prepared for what I was about to witness. I went out to the main road and saw a legless beggar, dragging himself across the snow begging for money. I saw an old woman much older than my grandma seated by the street, skinning garlic. I saw two men shouting at each other from their cars in the stagnant traffic because one of them refused to let the other in. And all this was happening in a supposedly affluent suburb with high skyscrapers and people walking around in brand-name coats. Suddenly I wasnt so happy, suddenly I wasnt so proud to call this country home. But this changed during my game of Go against grandpa. After a lengthy game he told me that he was succumbing to age, that his worst fear was to die before seeing me get into college, get married and have children. He said to me in these exact words (translated as closely as possible), Become a great person and do something for this country, and while hes told me this an uncountable number of times when I was young, this time it reached into me. I feigned frivolity and gave him an eye-roll because I did not want him to see that it had touched me it would have been embarrassing but that night I felt that thing go away. I was truly happy to be in Korea; happy to see my mother and aunt gossip for hours, happy to be provoked into a wrestling match with my uncle, happy to be playing Go with Grandpa… Yes, this was my home.
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right now its 678 words… what parts could i leave out?