Another year in Korea

I need to blog about something. The past couple of weeks haven't been a whole lot to write home about, but I'll write some stuff down about them anyway. Since we got back to Korea I've knocked my soda habit. I've had about one soda per week since we've been here, and I've gone to fully sugared sodas instead of diet ones. I feel a lot better for it. Plus making coffee in the morning is fun. We've also been getting up earlier, enjoying a nice breakfast before work, and exercising more. All of this results in the fact that I've lost pretty much all the weight I gained in the U.S. I'm trying to get down to 185 lbs by this summer and get a bit more muscle definition (read, get some muscle definition), and I think it'll be pretty easy as long as we continue eating the way we have been for the past 4 weeks.

I've also made it to the last few chapters in my DeMYSTifying German book, and I think I have a superior command over the language even when compared to when I initially learned it in college. One of my goals for the year is to master German and get a functional knowledge of French, and I feel like I've almost got the German up to the level I need to maintain. Baby steps, right? When I finish the final exam to my satisfaction in my German book, I'm going to move on to reading Reise um die Erde in 80 Tagen, or as you might know it in  English Around the World in 80 Days. I'm pretty confident that with my refreshed, repaired, and way better understanding of the language I'll understand quite a bit more than I would have if I tried this earlier on in my project. I'm quite happy I spent the $20 on the book at Barnes and Noble while I was visiting home.

Another thing I've decided to work on this year is making some music. As you might remember, Carolyn gave me a beautiful concert size ukulele for my birthday. I played it for quite a while, but at some point we had visitors and it moved out of the living room, and didn't move back into the living room until we had to move bed frames over from my old apartment (more on this in a minute) and it has since gotten quite a bit of use. My most recent additions to my repertoire are Cee Lo Green's "Forget You" (not the edited version though), and today I got a good start on "Lucky" by Jason Mraz. That one's extra special because Carolyn has to sing along, and it's kind of our song. There is word of a forming expat ukulele troupe beginning in Daegu in the next few weeks, I'm hoping that a) it actually happens, and b) I can get involved. I really used to enjoy making music, and it'd be fun to get into it in a very casual and fun way.

One thing I felt a little bit disappointed in myself for at the end of year one is that we didn't eat a whole lot of Korean food. We do like a lot of the foods that the Koreans make, but we don't often try them. This week we went out for kal-guk-su, a noodle soup that tastes a bit like a very light roux with beautiful fresh made noodles, potatoes and leeks. We're definitely going out for Korean again at least once this weekend, as one of our friends is coming up to hang out with us on her way up to Seoul to catch her flight out of Korea and onto the rest of her life. I'm hoping that we're going to see her soon after we return to the U.S. next year...Canada isn't all that far away, afterall.

The big event of the week was the apartment change. our building has 9 apartments. My school rented apartment 203 for me last year, and Carolyn's school rented apartment 201. It was nice to have 2 bathrooms for a while, but we eventually ended up moving into apartment 201 exclusively. For the new school year Carolyn has to move to a new school, and we didn't want to move to a smaller place, so my school rented apartment 201 for the new year, and Carolyn's school is going to pay her the allowance for housing directly (hello, wedding) and we're going to live in the same apartment. So we had to clear out the old apartment, and it was easy enough, because all we had there were the frames for our beds. Easy enough. Carolyn's school owned the refrigerator and washing machine we were using, so the landlady came by and when Carolyn's school took the unused TV, the washer, and the fridge, the landlady moved in (she had her people do it, no we didn't let a little old Korean lady move it all herself, but she totally could have....little old Korean ladies can move damn mountains if they want) the new ones and we're all set and resettled in our own apartment. No drama.

So that's all...das ist alles. Stay tuned for more excitement from our new, more social, more creative, and generally more interesting life in Korea in 2012.