Back in Korea

I know it's been horribly long since I updated this. Trying to catch up seems mostly pointless. I had an ambivalent month in November, then a fantastic time in December. When I left here I felt very good about Korea, and felt very comfortable with the friends I'd made. I felt I finally knew who my friends were, and felt close to them.

Since I got back things have been decidedly shaky. Although it was nice to go home for two weeks, doing so made me very aware of time's passing, and since I've been back - almost a week now - this feeling, that I don't have an infinite amount of time here to do what I want to do and accomplish what I want to accomplish, has been bothering me. So I wrote the blog post which precedes this. I wrote it for the Gyeongbuk newsletter, which is put out by the TaLK committee of our province, and which it is semi-compulsory to submit things to. I'm not sure if I'll submit it - they seem to only publish very cheerful things - but I like it as a piece of writing.

Hopefully things will slip back into place next week, when I start teaching again. At the moment this mood has had a few odd consequences, one of which was that I hopped a bus by myself to Jeonju for a night, just so I could feel I was doing something. I've also been a little bothered by some of my friends, the ones on six month contracts who didin't extend, leaving. There are two people - Jun and Tiffany - who I'll particularly miss. It just seems to have added to that sense of turbulence which has bothered me. And that sense of being in a groove, of knowing who my friends are, being confident in what I'm doing, seems to have been lost.

It's strange, because on the one hand some things from the early days, like orientation, seem so long ago. On the other, it's scary how quickly time is moving. The weather - consistently in the negative numbers - hasn't helped any. As is often the case, I probably just need to relax a bit.