Settling into a Routine and Learning the Language

Well, I have to say that I feel I've finally settled into a routine. Its a pretty nice feeling actually. I fear though that I'm running out of things to write about in the blog since many days are pretty much the same and probably not very interesting. I want to keep the blog interesting and fun for my family and friends who are reading. I think I've now reached the stage of living Korea where many things are no longer new and exciting. I feel that this is a good thing but it certainly doesn't make interesting reading for someone else. To be honest though, I'm starting to like the routine that I've been getting into.

I feel like my next big challenge, now that I'm comfortable with my job, is to learn to speak Korean. One of my primary reasons for coming here was to learn about the culture and I can't do this unless I learn the language. My biggest reason lately is that I feel like I'm starting to get more involved in the climbing club, but I can't communicate with them. They are all fantastic people and I really want to get to know them and speak with them, but I can't and it's very, very, very frustrating. So far, I've given learning Korean a half-hearted effort, learning a little bit here and there, like 90% of all the other foreigners here, but now I'm determined to break the norm and to put all of my free time and effort into it. I've been studying hard for the past couple weeks and it feels like its already coming along. Learning the language in general has been very frustrating for me primarily since my memory is so bad. I just can't remember any of the words! It's starting to come along, though slowly. Korean is tough at first since you have to learn a completly different type of alphabet, but at least there is an alphabet! The Chinese just use thousands of individual characters! I think the other tough thing is that the sounds are just completely different than English. The picture above is pretty much my view of most of my time, that computer program, my two books and my ever growing stack of flash cards. It's a slow process and I hope the reward is worth the time.