Hibernating

Sorry for the lack of posts lately! I basically hibernate all winter.  I don't do much of anything when the weather is cold.  If I don't have to leave the warmth of my apartment for work or a social obligation, I don't. I'm still working on making friends here, so social obligations are few and far between.

Most of my days are wake up, kill time, go to work, read a bit, go to bed, repeat. My weekends mostly consist of tea, studying, reading, and avoiding going outside.  I've had multiple people from back home express concern that I might be lonely, but as I told them: I have books. I can't be lonely when I have books.  (You might be laughing at that, but I'm serious. Books have been my best friends since a very young age and they have never failed me.)

Buuuuuuut it's February now! It's that much closer to warm weather and fun things to read about (or, in my case, fun things to do).

Now for slightly more interesting things.  My Korean finally feels like it's improving instead of just staying where it was when I got here. I had to act as a translator for a coworker during a spot of trouble one night, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I actually did a decent job of working through things. I wasn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I held things together until her boyfriend (who is Korean and speaks good English) arrived to translate more accurately.  I bought a book of puzzles and found a few that don't require me to actually know what the words mean - I just have to find where the given words fit within the puzzle.  When I looked through the word list, I didn't know most of the words right off the bat, but as I worked through them, I realized that when I looked at the pieces of the words, I knew parts of a lot of them.  I looked up the words that I had an educated guess for, and I ended up being right for a little over half of them. Being able to figure out what a word means is just as important as having a memorized set of vocabulary and grammar, so I'm really happy with that.

More stuff, more stuff, more stuff...uhhh....movies? Sure, movies.

I've now seen three movies since coming here in August.  The first one was the last Hobbit movie (excuse me while I shed a tear - I'm not ready for LotR movies to be totally finished).  Next was a Korean movie with one of my favorite actors. I didn't understand everything, but I got the gist of it. One day I'll be able to watch a Korean movie without going "wait, what?" every five seconds. Last night I made a spur-of-the-moment decision while out and saw Big Hero 6 instead of going to a cafe to study.  It was awesome and I highly recommend it. Foreign movies here typically have Korean subtitles, while animated films are usually dubbed. Surprisingly, Big Hero 6 wasn't, so I got to enjoy it in English.

Not much else to talk about for now.  We get new teachers in a couple of weeks, so it will be interesting to see how everything gets shaken up and which classes I get to keep. Hopefully the weather warms up soon so I can go read in a park all day instead of reading in my apartment all day~