If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you may remember that I moved to Portland for grad school.   It has been simmer for about two years, and now I’m finally ready to turn off the crock pot and dish out some fun.  In that sense, I am imagining a renewed interest in blogging.  To be honest, in the past several months, I don’t feel like i’ve really had much to say, so I’ve stayed silent.  But now, like a prism scattering light, my mental energies will be directed in a thousand new directions (interesting ones).

So perhaps I’ll have things to say, and perhaps you’ll read them.

To bring you up to speed: For the next 3 months, I will be taking pre-requisite classes as a crash course in business jargon and financial what-not.  As a humble elementary school teacher, this is mostly new territory.  Then begining this September, I will start a very intense 15-month 75-credit Master’s of International Management. at Portland State University.  One of the highlights will be learning Chinese.  Since I love learning languages so much, that will likely be a running theme here.  Also, the degree really focuses on Asia, which I think is a neat place, so I might write about various goings-on in that part of the world.

Well, I’ve been in Copán for just about 1 week. I’ve had 20 hours of Spanish lessons, eaten lots of refriend beans and tortillas, and been awoken before the sun rose by roosters every day. It has been exciting. The Spanish is coming along. At the moment I am pretty much restricted to the present tense, which while it seems limiting, provides enough challenges.

I am living with a local family. I have my own private room and bathroom, and they feed me three times a day. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

So far I haven’t done a lot of extra activities. My lessons are in the morning. Starting next week I’ll be going to an orphange in the aftnernoons. That was a big part of my life in Korea, and helped me pick up the language much faster. I’m looking forward to what that will look like here.

As far as pictures go, you can see some of them here:

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2317323&l=7d3bd&id=5739740

I’m working on posting other pictures to a more public site but most of the time, it goes frustratingly slow!

Contrary to what you may think, I am still alive.  I am also still in Seoul.  I just haven’t been blogging so muc here. I have been doing it here.  Also, I feel like there hasn’t been a whole lot of things to say over the past fe months.  My life has been pretty consistent recently.

Anyway, I do want to spend some time talking about the recent protests here in Seoul.  Perhaps you heard about them.  If not, read this.  It will bring you up to speed in a very fair way.  The most recent news is that the South Korean presdident has agreed to some of the citizen’s demands.

The recent protests mentioned have been quite a spectacle.  I have dozens and dozens of pictures that will eventually make it on my my flikr site.  I’m also working on a video to share some scenes from a recent march and to translate some of the picket signs I collected.  Look for that in the next few days or so.

Anyway, comments make me feel loved, and probably encourage me to write more. (hint, hint)

I don’t know what to say.  I haven’t been faithful to you.  I haven’t been writing entries.  I’ve been spending my time with other websites like this, this, this, this and this.  I’ve even been making a few movies.

Sunday I am going to Taiwan.  My friend Josh needs to get a new visa to Korea, and I have oodles of time off right now, so we’re going to the land of sub-tropic-democracy-that-flies-in-the-face-of-a-larger-country’s-communism.  Maybe I’ll let you know how it went.  I might even share some pictures!

Yes, it has been ages since I’ve posted.  It’s not that I’ve forgotten about you…I actually did think about writing a couple posts, but then I decided that I didn’t really have anything interesting to say.  But, I guess I do have a few interesting things to tell you about……

But you won’t hear about all of them in this post!

If you recall, I’ve talked about applying to graduate school before.  Last summer, I visited the campus and sat in on some classes.  It was great.  Portland seems like a wonderful city, and the degree (Master in International Management) is right where I want to be.  The small glimpse I got really felt great, and I got very excited about the possibility of studying there.  But I tend to get really excited about things like that and over invest myself thinking about it before it becomes a reality.  In college, I spent 6 months thinking I was going to join the Navy, before I finally resigned myself to the fact those doors weren’t opening.

Anyway, I got back to Seoul and took the GMAT in October.  I was reasonably pleased with the result… I did really well on the verbal sections, and horrible on the math part!  But it averaged out to a slightly above average 560.  I decided to stick with it, since those tests are pretty reliable and the chances of increasing my math score are probably slim!

So, shortly after the new year, I sent off my application, expecting to hear in early February.  Well, as it turns out, schools are e-mailing applicants these days.  This morning I woke up to an e-mail offering me a place in the upcoming class!!

Cool, huh?!

Actually, I am likely going to defer the application for 1 year.  Accepting a space in this fall’s cohort means I’d have to leave Korea ahead of schedule.  It would also mean that I couldn’t make good on my plan to go study Spanish this fall and winter!   On that note, I’ve bought a ticket to Honduras in mid-September.  My goal is to spend about 4-5 months traveling through and studying in Central America.

I’m having dinner with a former Korean teacher tonight.  When I see him, I almost always learn something new about Koreans or their language. See this post for what happened last time.  I’ll let you know what happens.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, here’s another video, this time starring some kids from the orphanage:

If you go to the actual  YouTube page you can find a rough English transcript in the description.

I guess that title has a double meaning, although that was unintentional! I am playing with some different themes for the blog, but I am picky, so it isn’t easy to find one that has everything I want..

But that isn’t what this post is about. I am trying to do a little soul searching to determine “what I want to be when I grow up.” I really believe that people are happiest when they are doing work that really excites them and ignites their passions. I’m trying to figure out what that looks like for me. I know one thing: I don’t want to be an English teacher forever. This is a good job now, but not something that will sustain me professionally!

I also know that I love languages, especially learning them. I have always said that if I could get paid to learn foreign languages, I would really have found a great job. I’m not sure such a job exists, per se, but there are a few ways I see to exploit that interest.

1) An obvious choice would be to become a translator/interpreter. I’m learning a bit about what that entails. There are full-fledged MA degrees to be had in that field. Some cost ALOT of money, others are less expensive. But the biggest barrier would be my language level. Because right now, Korean is my second language and I’ve already invested more than a year studying it, I would make that my profession. That’s great since I really do like Korea and Korean. And I think there is tremendous growth potential for that. But I am really, really far away from being fluent enough to call myself an interpretor.

2) I would also love to learn Spanish. Another plan is to spend a few months in Latin America studying Spanish when I leave Korea – before I head to grad school. That plan fits with going to Portland for an International Management degree where I would also study Chinese or Japanese. But not to the level of being an interpreter. That language study is really just for simple business communication.

I believe that I could get to the necessary level in Korean, but there is a long road ahead of me! In a way, each of those options is a great fit. Both would let me travel the world and engage different people in a variety of ways… ah…

한국어가 아무리 어려워도 끝까지 배우겠습니다!

(I will study Korean to the bitter end!)

I succumbed to temptation today and bought a new phone. No, it is not an iPhone. I don’t think that will be popular here, for a number of reasons. My new phone plays FREE LIVE TV! (Not just some recycled clips available for download and subscription) Just about anywhere I get a cell phone signal (which truly is everywhere) I can new catch up on the latest of Korean TV. Not much English, but it’s good practice. And I only had to pay 200 bucks for the privilege.

Why so much? Because phones here aren’t subsidized like they are in the states. I did learn today that if I had stayed with my previous provider for a total of 18 months, then I am eligible to get a discount on the phone to switch companies. There is also some business about a deposit that I didn’t quite understand.

I’m not sure what I ever expected to get out of the blogging experience. I’ve never considered my self a professional writer (or even an amateur one). But it has been painfully obvious that I am really bad at keeping up-to-date here. I’ve got a couple ideas why:

1. My life here settled into a routine a long time ago, and there isn’t much new spice to liven things up. Much of what surprised me or seemed noteworthy is now commonplace, and now I even struggle to recollect all of culturally interesting anecdotes from the past year.

2. If I do see something interesting, I forget it by the time I get home and can get to my computer. (Lame, I know)

3. In a way, this blog competes with my written journal for attention. Who wants to write things twice? And my written journal has a more significant place in my heart.

At any rate, I really want this space to have a reason and purpose, so yet again, I am resolving to do a better job of updating it. I don’t have a good feel for how often it is even read….so let me know! Make comments, add the RSS feed to your aggregator…

I spent a lot of time with Korean adults this past week, which is sort of rate.  Mostly I am around Korean kids who aren’t always the most interesting conversation partners, either in Korean or en English.  At any rate, I learned something new.Of course, you are familiar with the grading system A, B, C, D, F.  Well, they use the same system here, and as students are prone to do, have come up with their own special code for the meaning of these letters.  Korean students have come up with a “ridiculous” (their word) acronym for that grading system.   Remember, the grades DO mean the same thing as they do in the western world, but in the angst of their failure, and to celebrate mediocrity, students have developed the following joke.
A- absurd
B- bad
C- common
D- desirable
F- fine