Midterm day! Well, the midterms went all right I think. I think I did better on the writing/grammar test than I did on the listening/reading test. And I know I misspelled a lot of words too… Not sure when the results will be back, but I’m looking forward to knowing what it’ll be. The listening test was the hardest for me. The CD we listened to was clear for the most part, but some of the words were said too quick for me to comprehend very well. Which means I need to listen to the CD’s from the books more and more and study more and more.

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After school I got lunch with some fellow students and then went home and studied some. Today was very busy and I didn’t get much studying done actually. I had language exchange where I got to study some words with my friend. She brought tacos and some juice from the local Mexican restaurant and we ate and studied together. After this I went home for about 30 minutes and then headed off to the church to do English teaching. I’ve been helping out with the teaching a few times now, and it’s been pretty enjoyable teaching, even though it’s basically a group of us freely talking on various subjects. There were 5 students there—all ladies, and they all know English very well. I’m always surprised by the large English vocabulary some of the Koreans have here. We talked about different inventions and their various good and bad points. It was pretty fun and the hour of teaching went by very quickly. Afterwards, since it’s at my church, the missionaries give a short gospel lesson to anyone who is interested.

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School was ok today. I was going to have language exchange today at 5. Then it got postponed to 5:30, and once again at 6. But I ran into a problem because yesterday a guy at church invited me and another guy over to dinner, but never told me the time. He didn’t contact me afterwards either, so I thought I would be able to do language exchange at 5 and still have enough time to meet for the dinner if he called to tell me the details. I should have just called him to find out… I did warn my friend yesterday about the dinner appointment that I got invited to. Anyway, the other guy who was invited to dinner called me at about 5:30 saying he could give me a ride to the guys place for dinner. I told him I had language exchange at 6, so he called the other guy back who then called me and told me the details—that we’d meet at 7 or 7:30 for dinner. I told him I can postpone my language exchange, so I called my friend and postponed it to tomorrow. Then I called back the other two guys to tell them I could go. So I got a ride and went over and had dinner.

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Today I went with a friend to a picture gallery at this big art center place. We had to take the subway and then the bus to get there. The gallery was displaying a lot of Pulitzer Prize winning photographs that people took between the 1940’s to the present day. They were all pictures during big historical events and amazing looking. Although most all of them were sad since they dealt with bad news (wars, violence, death, etc.), but some were also nice.

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This week has been pretty slow. I’ve just been going to school, learning stuff, coming home and studying or messing with the internet. Today, however, it rained. It rained a lot. I believe it’s the start of monsoon season, and it’s supposed to rain through the weekend until Monday. Just walking to school with an umbrella, I got drenched from my knees down. And it’s also still hot and very humid, so I get wet from the rain and I sweat too. I’ve officially decided that the weather here is too extreme for my liking. The first year I was here, it got hot and humid and rained too, but it felt too hot and humid for me. I lived through it. And the first winter got cold and it snowed a little, but it wasn’t too bad. Though it got much colder than I liked. Then for some reason, this second winter it was cold for about 6 months… too long. Then the weather switched from cold to hot in less than a month. I was hoping for some nice cool weather for a bit longer than that. Actually, I’ve forgotten how it feels to be in the cold weather already.

I know that many places in the world has had strange weather this past year, but lately it feels like Korea has had only 2 seasons; winter and summer. I really shouldn’t complain, since there are many other places in the world with much more extreme weather. I think I’ve just been used to the weather in California, and not used to weather here yet.

I went to church today, which was good, but I still am having trouble understanding the speakers. Though at least now I’m understanding the subject matter and simple sentences, but there are many words that I don’t know yet. And sometimes people will speak in half or two-third sentences that make things tough for foreigners to understand fully.

After church I went off to my reading/listening teacher’s wedding and met up with my main speaking teacher and 4 other students. The wedding was held in a catholic church and was nice. Since I’m not catholic, I ended up automatically comparing all the similarities and differences between religions.

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Today I hung out with my friend at her work. She sometimes has to be in the office on Saturdays in case people call in to the office. But usually no one calls, or if someone does call, it’s someone from her boss’ church asking to speak to the boss… She gets paid, but it’s only about 30,000won for a full day there. Though she can do whatever she wants at work. So she read and checked the internet and did various things. I did homework and studying and then left around 2:30 to go to my church to help out at an English class. It was pretty fun and we talked about food. I was in charge of the free-talking class where the advanced students attend. There were only 5 students today and they all like Korean food better than Western food. It was pretty interesting comparing foods and eating habits and etiquette between our two countries.

At home I just played around on the computer and cleaned up a little bit. I also watched Korea’s World Cup match. It was exciting, but they ended up losing and are now out of the World Cup. I was hoping they’d win so I could see more of the excitement that people have here.