Well, par for the course, I seem to be a lazy blogger once again. But right now it's a lazy Sunday and nothing happening for awhile except ramen and maybe some videogames. So, what have I been up to lately....
To start, I've just finished a month of Korean class. I do feel like I'm learning and improving, but sometimes the class is frustrating due to the lack of speaking practice and activities in general- it's very lecture oriented. Some new students have joined, so the class will probably be up to 5 people now... which could be good or bad. Previously it's been pretty much just me and one other guy, and we're kind of on the same page as far as ability and opinion about the class, so we both felt pretty comfortable getting our teacher off-topic a bit and trying to have more informal conversations during class time. But, with a bigger class, maybe the teacher will introduce some more group activities (I'm not betting on it though). Anyways, I think I'll stick with it for a couple more months and try to get into Sogang University's evening program starting in December.
Work has been going well. Had a field trip earlier in the month for Chuseok; I was in hanbok and so were all my students. We went to an old palace. It was neat. I've got pictures on facebook... still trying to figure out how I want to do pictures for this blog. Work is pretty busy but no real problems. It's just a whirlwind sometimes. The upside is that the week goes by pretty fast. Gonna get paid in a couple days, and it'll definitely be nice to have a full paycheck. Need to pick up a few things for the apartment: rice cooker, router, an extra PS3 controller, more pillows, and maybe a floor table.
Lots of things going on in Seoul this month. Yesterday I went to a Korea-Japan Culture Festival and got to eat some delish Japanese street food while listening to some kinda bad outdoor karaoke. On Friday there were fireworks to kick off the Hi Seoul festival, which I watched with a group of coworkers on our rooftop. Next weekend there's gonna be more fireworks, and through the week there are performances and concerts all over town. The whole thing is one of those "ah, so this is what real big city life is like"- things are happening and you can watch them from the top of your building.
In general, I've been having fun. Eating lots of great food (I tried snails last night, by the way), enjoying good company, and doing some neat things- the aforementioned plus hiking, watching a movie in Korean w/o subtitles (really hard, but I did better than I thought I would), reading comic books, went to a TESL conference, etc.
