cutting bait on Korean

A wise man knows when to fish and when to cut bait.

I have studied Korean for three months. This has been done through weekly lessons with a Korean friend who teaches and is obviously augmented by the fact that I am immersed in Korea. All that being said, I have but the most meager mastery of phrasebook Korean. True, I can read, but that does not by any stretch of the imagination equal comprehension. My friends who have been here eleven months and have studied the hardest have an extremely limited use of the language which, to my appraisal, is only only slightly above that of a developmentally disabled Korean toddler.

So, I have arrived to the conclusion that now that I have a some basic survival Korean skills I ought to walk away. And what to do with the free time you ask? Well, I am already studying hard for the GMAT, but Korean was taking up a sizeable chunk of time as well. I have decided to try to revive what little French I learned and to attempt to build on it. I am planning to Eurotrip my way home, with France being a principle target. I have recruited a coconspirator in this project in one of my fellow teachers, which should help in that it will provide a degree of accountability and someone to practice with.

Yes, I am doing the only obvious thing to do while in Korea: learning French.

Moaksan

With three fellow teachers I hiked up Moaksan, a mountain outside of Jeonju. We originally planned to go to another mountain, but due to the language barrier and our incompetence we failed to get there.

The hike took a couple of hours, and was a bit of a haul, but we had the constant reminder in the form of gaggles of Awjumas (the term for old Korean ladies) barreling past us. There is nothing to put a young man in his place than being bested by a 4’10” elderly woman.

On the way up we encountered something that, even now, is totally inexplicable. A well outfitted Korean hiker (these people take their hiking equipment seriously) was heading back down the mountain with an off-road unicycle. One had to step gingerly up the broken rocks that zig-zagged up the mountain, but apparently this man was either capable of unicycling up or intended to unicycle down.

At the peak of the mountain, which is handily the highest geographic feature as far as the eye could see, there was a massive telecommunications installation. For some odd reason the powers that be thought it a good idea to allow the public to wander around on the building, and so we climbed this too.

GMAT boot camp

I’ve begun studying for the GMAT. This is the standardized test which is required for application to graduate business programs. I scheduled a testing date on December 5th in Busan, in time to complete grad school applications by the January due dates. From my initial studying I believe that I’ll do really well on the verbal portions of the test, but I must spend the next three months drilling on the quantitative portions. I’ve spent two hours of each of the last four days studying, and have made progress, but there’s still a long way to go. Speaking of which, I’d better get back to it!

Japan

I just got home from five days in Japan. Will, Bobby, Alex, George, and I flew to Osaka and then took a bus to Kyoto, which we used as our base of operations. We spent a night in a Ryokan, which is a wood and paper constructed traditional Japanese hotel, and the remaining nights we stayed in a hostel. We spent our days taking in culture: shrines, temples, pagodas, forests, etc and our nights mixing it up. The trip had too many inside jokes and bizarre cultural shenanigans for me to get into here, there were monkeys, there were robots, there were angry Germans. Suffice it to say that we had a good time. Rather than try to describe things I’ll let the mass of pictures I took speak for themselves.