It’s a little less than 2 months before i head back to the US. I still have to finish up this semester first though. The time here has been going by very quickly. It will be 2 years living here and studying Korean. I’ve learned a lot, but still have a far way to go to be really good at Korean. I’ve grown a lot here too confidence-wise. Overall living here has been a good experience for me, but i feel it’s time i get back to working, getting a house, starting a family, etc. I could find a job here as an English teacher, but I want to do something more creative like making websites again. And i’ve been somewhat homesick lately and want to head back to the US. I think it’s cause i’ve been in the same place for two years straight that just happens to be a highly populated area of Seoul. Most of the times the crowds don’t bother me, but i’ve found myself wanting a change…

So i’ll head back to the US and start looking for work. But before i head back, i’m going to take a short trip to Japan and take advantage of living a couple hours away. It’ll be my first time going there and should be fun. As along as I don’t get lost that is… But i’m sure it’ll be fine I’ve met a lot of Japanese students at Yonsei and Sogang universities, and some have offered me help in basic Japanese phrases. I’ve always wanted to go visit Japan and learn Japanese since high school, but never got around to it. I’ll make sure to take a lot of pictures. I’m pretty excited about it

Woke up early and went to church. At church I still have a hard time understanding what the lessons are about, so I end up just reading some scriptures in English or trying to translate words that I hear or see to try to make sense of things. I’ve noticed that if I do know words well, the people can talk pretty fast and I can understand it better. But there are a lot of church/gospel words I don’t know well or at all and it makes things difficult. After church we had a lunch with tuna fish sandwiches and potato salad sandwiches. The potato salad here is different than what I’m used to. It has apple pieces in it. I like apples and potato salad, but combined… well it’s interesting. And then eating it as a sandwich is even odder to my taste buds. It’s not terrible… just different. There are a lot of foods that are similar to what I’ve had in the US, but with an added twist. For example, the pizza tends to have corn, mayonnaise, sweet potato paste, etc. on them. It’s a little strange, but not too bad tasting.

During the lunch, I met an investigator who is a Korean font designer. I talked with her a little bit and found it somewhat easy to hold a conversation with her in Korean. Although the subject matter wasn’t too deep, it still seemed more or less like a normal Korean conversation to me. I wish somehow someone could follow me around and tell me how my conversational skills are doing; if they’re improving or not. I think it’s improving somewhat… I just hope I can remember it all when I move back to the US.

It rained a lot last night and today too. I woke up late and went out to meet my Japanese friend and her Korean husband for lunch. Since I’m moving back to the US in less than a couple months, it might be the last time meeting up with them. I met her at Yonsei University and we became good friends ever since. We got soon-dae-guk, which was good except for the soon-dae itself (which I think is pig’s intestines…). My friend is very very good at speaking Korean and we spent about 80% of the time speaking in Korean about various things. They met when they were both on a working holiday in Australia, and have been together ever since. My friend is very good at English too and her husband can speak it pretty well also. After lunch, we went to Baskin Robbins and ate a lot of ice cream. It was nice seeing them again and we’ll be able to keep up through facebook.

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School was good today since it is Friday. But it rained a lot on and off. It wasn’t raining when I went to school, but started to storm during school hours. Luckily I had forgotten to remove my umbrella from my bag, so I ended up being well prepared hehe. The monsoon season has more or less started and so the humidity will become very high when it’s not raining. When it rains heavy here, it rains very heavy here. I think the umbrella sellers make a fortune during this time since so many people forget their umbrellas and have to buy a new one or get completely drenched. I remember last year when it rained hard, the wind blew it almost completely sideways so that practically every part of me was drenched except for my face. And that was even with an umbrella. One of those getting-drenched-days walking back from school, a taxi driver hit a big puddle and it splashed all over me. Since I was already drenched, I couldn’t even feel a difference, so the laugh was on him! (And thankfully the water wasn’t muddy).

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It was interview day at school. I didn’t get much sleep and had to wake up earlier than normal. I got to school about 20 minutes before the interview, but my partner showed up just 2 minutes before, so we didn’t have any last-minute practicing chances. I think the interview went well enough. We had to say 3 conversations on specific subjects from a list of 18 randomly chosen. Plus we had to use some specific grammar on each. The teacher talked to us afterwards and pointed out the mistakes we made. For me, I mixed up some of the types of speech that is used. Korean has 3 levels of speech; one for older or respected people, one for normal speaking, and one for close friends or family. Plus there’s an additional syllable you can add to show extra respect for others. (This is a very bad explanation, but it basically means you have to know 3 different types of conjugating verbs…)  After the interview, we received the grades for our other midterms that we took the previous week. I ended up with an 87.8% total and did better than I thought I would. Though had I studied more, I would have done better. And I know I need to study more for the finals because they’re worth more and there are also a lot of words I need to know better.

I’ve been studying a lot for the upcoming interview test tomorrow. I was supposed to meet up with my partner yesterday, but she had to go to the embassy. We met up today after school with other students and ate lunch together. A couple of the students ordered some food and one of them had never tried it before. It’s called kong-guk-su, and you need to have an acquired taste to like it… It’s made from a bean paste. Well, I’m sure people would like it on their first try, but I had a hard time eating it. The other guy who ordered it didn’t like it either and ended up not eating it. So another student, who thought her food was too spicy, shared her food with him. For the most part, I like Korean food a lot, but sometimes it can be spicy, and other times the flavors can be a bit strange for the first timers.

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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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