No, Apparently I Can't

Well as many regular readers of the blog will know, I no longer have a girlfriend. For those of you just now finding out, yeah it's true. That kinda sucks given how excited about it I was last time. It seems like we were only dating a short time (which I guess is not untrue), but it was actually about 2-3 months in total and I just took forever to post about it beginning. I'm pretty bummed, but it's been a couple weeks now and I've tried keeping myself as busy as possible (I did too good a job) which prevents me form dwelling on it too much. I'm actually going to avoid talking about the breakup here in part due to I don't want to make a permanent record of it, but mostly because I have other things I want to mention. If you want to hear more, feel free to set up a time to chat with me though. I can do Skype or just instant messaging; both are fine. I'm more than fine talking about it like that. In fact, I've already done it several times. I'd like to thank the people that gave me some good perspectives on it also (you guys know who you are but I can edit in your name here if you want everyone to know, haha).

But anyway, it's been a busy month. I'll start with the trip to China that I took last month. I went to Beijing with Brandon, the next-youngest teacher English teacher here. We went over Korean Thanksgiving (Chuseok), so just a quick 5-day trip. Neither of us speaks Chinese, but Brandon has a friend studying in Beijing who is from Canada, but is also Chinese so he speaks both English and Chinese fluently. Having him was extremely helpful. I don't think I'll go to China again unless I have help translating like he did. It was almost impossible to navigate to new places without his help. We got to see a lot of cool places like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, and other cool places around Beijing. We also got to hang out with friends of this guy, which was pretty cool. I can go into more detail about it or show pictures, but they're also on my facebook in the meantime. It's hard to describe what we did exactly because we just had a lot of fun the whole time. It was a good adventure.

Since I've been back, I've just been working and trying to get ahead on lessons and stuff. My work has been starting to pile up recently. We split our lesson plans evenly, but somehow it worked out that I needed to do two whole chapters of lessons in a row because they were topics within my expertise (technology and environmental crap). In addition, I'm also planning our other classes' projects at the same time. Then this week, I found out my night class (Macroeconomics) is coming back, so I've had to start planning lessons for that to try to desperately get ahead. I'm managing to stay ahead without having to rely on working for more than 2-3 hours on the weekends or losing sleep so far. It would better if I had more time, but my Korean classes are eating up a lot of that.

Speaking of which, I've joined a private school for my Korean lessons. The ones I had at school were becoming irregular because the teacher that's tutoring me has been busy this semester so I've only gotten to see her a couple of times since summer vacation. Brandon actually also just started going to this private school this month too. He's the one who found it and everything and learned the process of how to apply, so I have to credit him for that. After hearing he was doing that, I considered the idea of doing it myself, but I then figured I was probably too busy (this was before I got a night class (I figured between having a girlfriend, self study, and my private lessons, I would be fine)) so I chose not to do it. But then that following weekend, my girlfriend broke up with me and I guess I should say the short story of it is that she was stressed out about the language barrier (it wasn't that bad, in fact we were set up because she was so good at speaking English and the people that set us up knew I was studying Korean). At any rate, I wound up deciding that I would take classes on the day she broke up with me. It took until the following Monday to get a time for a placement interview though. I think the guy placing me at a level was having a hard time because I learned a lot of stuff in a logical order, then forgot about half of it, and then started just learning whatever through private lessons and self study, so my knowledge is kind of all over the place. I wound up getting put at Level 1, class 5 which it takes 5 months of classes to reach. Considering I only really ever took 4 months of official classes at Yonsei and that was two years ago, I figured that sounded more than fair to me.

Class is going really well. The problem is that it eats 6 hours out of my day three times a week. On class days, it takes 3 hours by subway round trip to get there. The class itself is two hours and then there's another one hour (split on either end of the class) because the subway leaves from here so infrequently that I have to get there super early or late every day then subways traveling as far as my stop leave very rarely from the middle of the city so I have to wait about a half hour after class too. Overall though I'm learning a lot and it's pretty fast paced which is nice. I'm looking at going up to classes five times a week possibly during school breaks or if the time is convenient then I'll do it during the regular year. I need to be rid of my night classes first though.

So my normal schedule is drastically changed. Mondays-Fridays, I have work from 8-4 every day (that hasn't changed) but now I've added my night class (M/W 4:00-6:00) and my Korean class (T/Th/F 7:00-9:00). The only place where I have more free time is Saturdays since that's no longer date day.......ㅠㅠ

Anyway, Brandon and I still get to hang out a fair bit which is nice. We've also started hanging out with the Chinese teachers more. It's been nice to hang out with them because I really like talking with them. I don't know what exactly happened that we finally started considering inviting them to stuff, but I'm glad we did start.

Other than that, life is okay. I'm not totally bummed out permanently or anything. I think I'm past drinking myself to sleep at night (I'll let you decide whether I did do that for possibly a few days to a week...). I figure I'm going to just work hard and get gold in League of Legends and then maybe get back out there after the season ends or more likely after my night class ends (season ends on 11/11 and my night class ends on 11/26). I'll be online during my usual hours. If you see me, feel free to say hi. Otherwise, leaving emails and messages always works too! Until later, peace out.