It's hard to believe November went by so quickly. In fact, I've noticed that all of the months seem to go by quickly since I moved to Korea (or more specifically, since I started working again). I guess I was super-busy in the first three weeks of November (language class in morning, teaching in afternoon, studying at night, and trying to fit in time for a girlfriend) and then the last week I have been on "vacation", though I seemed to be just as busy anyway.

I finished teaching for the month on the 21st (since the GRE was offered on the 23rd). I was really excited to have ten days off from teaching. As it turned out, I probably only had two or three days to just "sit around and do nothing", but I guess I should be happy to even have those.

So what else did I do with my vacation? I still had my language class and wanted to use the spare time to study vocabulary and practice more. I didn't do as much as I had hoped to, but I am almost caught up on the vocab, which is the important thing. That, and listening skills. In class we occassionally listen to audio tapes of conversations, and then we have to answer questions about them. I am horrible at it. I can read and write and speak just fine (given my limited vocabulary: probably about 500 words) and I can usually understand the teacher but I can almost never think fast enough to keep up with the audio tapes. Even when I try to have conversations with Vivi, I have to ask her to speak more slowly. So I will definitely have to work on that.

I saw Vivi about five times over the ten days, which is quite a lot for us! She is really, really busy with schoolwork so any time we get to spend together is a big bonus. Things with her are going great. Like most couples, we hit a few snags every now and then but we always manage to work things out. She should be finished with all of her assignments on Dec 23rd and then she has two months off, so that will be great.

I told a number of people that I planned on doing some writing over the break. I wanted to write some things for the class I'm teaching, but that didn't seem to happen. I did, however, finally get around to starting a "tour guide" of Seoul. My roommate and I have been throwing ideas around about doing something like that, and I started with the thing I know best: bars. I managed to rate and write descriptions for the 40 or so bars in Seoul that I've been to, and you can see the listing at http://www.geocities.com/seoulbars/. It's still in need of a few minor tweaks here and there, but I'm pretty happy with it so far. I need to start "marketing" it somehow (getting people to put links to it) and then hopefully get people to contribute to it. I guess I'm hoping to be able to say to Lonely Planet or one of these other tour books, "Hey, look what I've done? Can I have a job?"

As I've mentioned to a number of you, Thanksgiving came and went without too much notice around here. Koreans generally don't eat turkey anyway, so finding one in a store might have been difficult. At that, we don't even have an oven so it wouldn't do us much good anyway! Rob, however, did find a Thanksgiving buffet at one of the hotels. It set him back around $40 but he said it was fabulous. I was pretty jealous when I found out that they had pumpkin pie. I had dinner with Vivi that night at a Korean restaurant but didn't even remember it was Thanksgiving until after we had eaten.

Well, tomorrow I go back to teaching. The GRE isn't offered in Korea again until March, so I suspect that I won't have many students in December. Which is good because it means I will have very few papers to grade! However, I really hate it when I only have one or two students in the class. I would much rather have a big audience. Ideally, though, I would have no students. Because I still get paid even if the class is cancelled!

Chris