My final class at EF finished less than an hour ago. I still have to go back to do final paperwork, get paid and other sort of finishing up tasks. Can't believe it's over.

Tonight Tom and I will leave on a trip to St. Petersburg, Tallinn, and Helsinki. I've wanted to visit these places for a long time so I'm really looking forward to it. So I won't be updating for a few days (not that anyone will notice), but I'll hopefully have lots of cool pictures to post and stories to tell upon my return.

The outtage the other day appears to have fried my computer speakers. I actually don't mind that much. I was trying to decide anyway whether to leave them here or haul them all the way around the world with me. One the one hand I really like them. On the other, they're kind of bulky and the transformer alone weighs about 100kgs or something like that. Problem sovled.

As I said before, this week is all about the goodbyes. Here are a few pictures of some of my groups.



My Monday "Prospects Advanced" class that I share with Nashezhda. From the left: Anton, Mike, Alex, Kristina and Arseniy.





Olga, Sasha, Katie, Sonya and Dasha (Polina was absent).
My Tuesday "Prospects Advanced" group. This group is hands down my favorite class, partly because they're all mine. It's the only teenage group I don't share with another teacher. And there's the fact that they're kick-ass, totally awesome, amazing girls.





Kristina, Viktor, Natalia, Lena, me, irina, Alex, Alina and Jane
My Tuesday-Thursday evening group. I've taught Jane and Ira longer than any of my adult students. I started with Jane back in level seven and just finished level 10 last night. The others joined up during Levels eight or nine.

As it turns out, yesterday's power outtage went on much longer than I thought. Some of my students this morning reported their lights didn't come back on till just after midnight. CNN is reporting some people may have been without electricity till early this afternoon. One student said she was in a four-hour traffic jam yesterday, and had her car vapor lock on her. A fellow teacher was stuck in the centre, but managed to get a taxi back home without too much difficulty.

So far I've had final classes with three of my groups, and will have two more tonight. They have been anti-climactic so far, which is a good thing I guess. The classes tonight are (to be perfectly honest) the last two I really care about. Friday is a teenage group I share with another teacher, and Saturday is the business class I only teach every other week, so I can't say I'll miss either of them all that much. Is that bad?

Oh and, Carrie Underwood, congratulations. Personally I was rooting for Vonzell, but I'll admit you deserve the prize. And anyway, Vonzell's daddy love was getting a little bit creepy.

About half the city of Moscow was without power for about five hours today. I had class at nine this morning and when I finished at eleven, I was going to go straight home, but decided to try and go shopping instead. When I got to Auchan however, the lights were off and they were making some kind of announcement to everyone. It still took me a while to figure out the power was off everywhere, not just at Auchan. When I got back to my apartment of course the elevator was out, and I didn't know how to ask to use the stairs--Guess I should explain that to use the stairs in my building you have to go outside the main entrance, around to the side and re-enter through the garbage room. Nice huh?-- My next plan was to just go hang out at EF for most of the day, but when they heard my plight, Tanya came back to my building with me and arranged to let me take the stairs up to my apartment. Thank god I live on the 7th floor and not the 25th.

Once home I took a cold shower in a dark bathroom. It was all very Catholic. What was decidedly un-catholic was me then hanging out naked on my bed, drinking Coke and watching the season finale of 24 on my laptop.

It was not bad as powerless afternoons go. Certainly I had a lot easier time of things this time than when I was in New York two summers ago. The short version of that story is that I arrived in NY during the great blackout of 2003. I got to Penn Station at 11pm and then could do nothing except wander around mid-town Manhattan for the next several hours. I was interviewed during the night by both CBS and AP radio, spent part of the night in front of the Time building at Rockefeller plaza, saw the back of Matt Lauer's head during the Today Show broadcast, and took an afternoon nap in Central Park. Shortly after I finally arrived at my friends place the lights came back on, and the rest of my visit was excellent. The coda to this piece is that one year to the day later Kristen, the friend I was visiting had a baby girl.

I was going to put some pictures of my New York misadventure here, but they all suck. So instead I'll post this one of Yoko Ono that I took two days later in Central Park, near Strawberry Fields.

Note: If you're starting here, please scroll to the bottom and go up.

That's it for my three-hour Moscow statue hunting trip. I wanted to include this ad poster because whenever I see it I think to myself, "well, at least Calista Flockhart has gotten some work since Ally ended." Hope you enjoyed the pictures.

Finally, here's a sportsman.

This construction worker is probably my favorite of all the sculptures in the staion.

A studious young man. The full size photo doesn't look nearly creepy as this small version. I'd really like to take these pictures again. I think if I held the camera a little higher the pics would turn out much better. Given the time I have left here, I'd say it's unlikely I'll get to do that.

The final leg of my tour took me to the Ploschad Revolutsii Metro station. The platform features bronze statues of men and women in all stages of life. Here are just a few of my favorites. The picture here shows a father and child as you can see. The station was dark, and the reflection of my flash off the metal gives the statues a glare I'm not to happy with, but there wasn't much I could do about it. I had my flash on the lowest setting and everything.

Annnnd a little more Kremlin.

More Kremlin

It was while crossing the Moscow river that I began to think about all the other places I've been and all the cool stuff I've seen. I can't even begin to list all of it. This may sound a bit heady, but I kind of feel like my whole life is a tourist trip. The religion I grew up in believes we existed as spirits before we came to earth, and some people like to speculate what they may have been doing in the pre-existant state. I like to think I was off in a corner reading my copy of Lonely Galaxy: Earth. Anyway, I'm a lucky/blessed fellow, and I thought about this fact while looking at this scene.

This monument to Peter the Great is pretty recent. Part of returning honor to past heros I suppose. The monument is in the Moscow river just outside the sculpture park. From here I walked up the river embankment a ways to the next bridge.

Women seem to have been severely under-represented in Soviet art. I did find this girl though.

Same guy, only much much closer.

Once again, I'm not sure who this guy is. He looks sort of like a writer though doesn't he? To me, he looks as if he's holding a seat for someone, maybe his girlfriend went to the restroom and he's waiting for her to come back.

Three guys looking kind of pissed off about something, maybe because people are walking on the grass. It's kind of shameful I guess that I don't know more about the works here. I thought these dudes were workers, but now I think maybe they're soldiers, or some combination of the two. I don't claim to be either an art critic or a historian, I just like to see interesting things.

I assume this is a kind of war or military monument. The Kalashnikov is kind of a giveaway.

A grouping of several monuments from back in the day.

I'm sorry, but whenever I look at this I think of Ronald Reagan waking up and screaming, "Where's the rest of me?!"

I didn't see any depictions of Kruschev, Andropov or Chernenko.

A closer view still. See what I mean?

A closer look at the stone faces.

This other Stalin monument stands right next to the one in the previous post. This statue looks more modern, although I can't really tell. Interestingly though, behind the statue is a definitely modern work with faces carved out of stone and placed behind barbed wire. Again, my trusty Lonely Planet book says it's a representation of the millions killed in the purges. It's eerie and disturbing.

I was feeling artsy so I took the photo of this Stalin statue from a sharp angle. It's sort of like being under the heavy hand of a dictator. Or whatever.

I wasn't sure at first if this was the one, but it was confirmed by a student that this statue of Felix Dzerzhinskiy was the one formerly in Lubyanka. Dzerzhinskiy was the founder of what became the KGB. My guidebook tells me the monument was removed by angry mobs after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. It is now located in a sculpture park outside the New Tretyakov gallery.

This is why I wanted to go to Oktyaberskaya, to see the communist revolutionary who needs no introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for V.I. Lenin!

Seriously, before I came here I was under the impression that all the Lenin statues had been taken down. Obviously that's not true. There are still a few around, but this is the biggest one I've seen.

Once I left Yuri, I was going to hop back on the metro, but decided instead to take a walk up Leninskiy prospect as I was reasonably certain it would take me to Oktyabrskaya, which was the next destination on my tour. On the way I spotted this bust of a guy mounted on the side of a building. Sorry, but even though I can sort of read the Russian, I have no idea who this guy is, or why he's worth remembering.

A not very clear closeup of Yuri. Look at him though, it's like he himself is standing on a rocket waiting to be launched to the stars.

I just love this thing. It makes me think of Ayn Rand novels for some reason.

So the Long Walk on Sunday started at Leninskiy Prospect and the Yuri Gagarin monument. Gagarin was the first man in space, in case you haven't kept up on your space race facts, or haven't watched Jeopardy lately.

This is a billboard for the Russian version of Big Brother. I haven't seen the actual program, I just like the advertising because it's creepy and weird.

Today I went on a long walk in Moscow, from Leninskiy Prospect, all the way to Ploschad Revolutsei. The entire walk took close to three hours, though of course I wasn't walking the entire time. During the walk I was reminded of similar walks I've taken in several different cities, like New York, Montreal, Seoul, Osaka, Bangkok, Paris, and Edinbourgh. I guess I'm really lucky to have been all those places and had time to explore at a more or less leisurely pace.

So along the way I took a bunch of pictures and I was about to post some here, but as I was about to do so I discovered that Flikr has a facility for hosting photos and posting to your blog, so I think I'm going to redo my pics and try it their way. I've been using a French site called Espace-dream, which has worked fine so far, but I really dislike having to shrink my pics to make them fit in the blog space. Hopefully with the Flikr method I can post a thumbnail to the blog and link to the fullsize photo on the Flikr page. In fact, let's have a go now and just see how it works out.....

.....ok, that appears to work just like I hoped it would. Didja like the pic? So the thing is, I just got through editing all the photos I took today so they'd be small enough for my blog, but now I think I'm going to re-edit them so they're a little bit larger. Nice one!

UPDATE 12/05/2006: For whatever reason, the images I posted using flickr's "Blog this" feature don't show up, so I'm reposting them today as plain old photos with links to the originals on blogger.

It's all about the sightseeing these days. I only have like 19 days left here or something like that, so I've been trying to squeeze as much tourism as possible into my remaining time.

On Friday I went with Masha to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art. Unfortunately I forgot my camera, but here are pics of two of the paintings in their collection that I found online.


The portrait shows a doctor who treated Van Gogh after the ear thing. Van Gogh made this painting for him, but the doctor was less than impressed (no pun intended, well ok, maybe a little), and used the picture to cover a hole in his bathroom wall. I tried to find this story online to verify, but I couldn't find clear information, and frankly can't be bothered to dig further.

There was another Van Gogh that I quite liked, showing a field after a rainstorm, that I couldn't find anywhere online. Of course, no picture can ever do justice to a Van Gogh tableau because of the incredible texture of his works. Seeing them in person, they have an alomst three-dimensional quality.


This painting is "Red Fish" by Henri Matisse, done in 1912. I don't know much about it, I just like the pretty colors.

Besides these, there were others I was stuck by, like the ballet dancers of Degas, and a work from Picaso's blue period. The museum was just ok overall, but with some remarkable pieces in their collection.

Today I went out and took some pictures of statues around the city, and tomorrow I hope to get out and get some more. I'll put some here, but I think I'll wait till I have taken a few more.

Indulge me for a moment.

I want to give a little more information on the kind of thing I'd like to be doing when I get back to Korea in a few months. A blog I mentioned before called North Korea Zone, has published two group interviews with North Korean refugees in Seoul. The interviews were conducted by an English teacher named Brendan Brown. I wish I knew more about this teacher, since he's doing what I hope to do in the not too distant future. Anyway you can read the first interview here, and the second here.
As I've said before, I'm not getting too political about this, at least not right now. My main thing is that I want to do something to help some people.

Of course my main purpose in returning to Korea is to teach. Based on what I've said here, it may give the impression that I consider teaching merely a peripheral activity to fill in the time when I'm not doing other things. Well, I can't deny there may be some truth to it. All I can say is when I'm in the classroom I'm (kinda sorta almost) wholly devoted to the job at hand.

Speaking of other activities, I gots to clean today. When my home is sloppy, I feel sloppy, and right now it is and I do.

Good news today! I got confirmation on the summer camp job I've been applying for. It's double good news in fact because right in the contract it says air fare will be paid up front. One major less thing to worry about. Also, I heard back from a uni job I applied for, but it was just an acknowledgement really. No idea if they're actually interested. Still no follow-up on the public school job.

My 2-3 repeat readers may notice my new blog template. I can't find a template that suits me, so I'm trying different ones. If you see this--and if you're reading this now, I can only assume you have--let me know what you think.

My mind is wandering. I'm having a terrible time staying focused tonight. In fact I started writing this, then got distracted by no less than four tangents in succession. Guess that means it's bedtime.

Well, not quite. As far as NK goes, Seoul and Pyongyang have restarted talks, which have been stalled for nearly a year. NK is in desperate need of fertilizer, so the south is hoping to use that as a (litteral?) chip to get the north to give a little. I'm witholding commentary on these events. Plenty of other people do a better job of that than me.

Since it's Tuesday barely, that means I haven't had a drink in 80 days. Like, wow! Having said that, I'm going nuts on the caffeine and sugar again lately. Whatever it is I want out of life, I guess I don't want it badly enough to stay off of all the junk I put into my body. I'll keep working though.

On Sunday afternoon I went to have coffee with a few people I know. Here's a picture I took on the way, of a church steeple. I thought it looked kinda dramatic-like what with the clouds and sunshine, not to mention the white and gold "Russian-ness" of it all.



It was a nice little meeting. It certainly recharged me to have contact with good people. Last week I was alone for like three days in a row and it suuuuucked.

About 3pm we went our separate ways, and I dashed back home to change clothes for the opera. I got tickets for Tosca for Masha and I. We met at five and had an early dinner at Fridays in Kurskaya. Of course we sat and chatted too long so we were nearly late getting to the theatre.

Here's the world famous Bolshoi theatre.


I had meant to get a picture of myself in front of the building, but like I said, we were practically running to make the curtain time. Anyway, we weren't at the Bolshoi proper, but at the New Stage which is sort of behind the main auditorium. The New Stage is like a smaller version of the original Bolshoi, but done up in green instead of red, and without the Soviet icons everywhere.



As you can see we were in the nosebleed section. Well, for ten bucks a ticket, what can you expect?

As for the performance itself, the music was wonderful and the singing was brilliant. Still, the production seemed awkward to me. I never felt drawn in to it as I had with Mazeppa. Also, Tosca's costume in the first act was ridiculous. She came in wearing a big ol' pink dress with a giant hat and a staff of some sort, like Little Bo Peep on acid. Well, I guess opera isn't about subtlety.

So that was my outing this weekend. Over the next two weeks I need to get in some serious sightseeing. In Moscow I still need to see the Kremlin, along with the the Armory and Lenin, and the Pushkin museum. Then there's the trip I hope to take, and finally I'll be going back to the Bolshoi for Eugene Onegin just a couple of days before I leave.

Whoa! Missed a couple of days there. Oh well. It's not like anything really interesting happened. Had a class today because the Tuesday/Saturday switch thing that they pulled last week. In a country of weird things, this is definitely one of the weirdest. Only four students showed up, but it was still a good class. The next two weeks are going to be pretty busy in fact. Trying to squeeze in extra classes, racing to get through a text book with one of my teenage groups, and trying to get stuff organized for packing and getting outta here.

Looks like I'm going to take a trip after all. Tom, my colleague and I, will likely do the mad dash to St Pete, Helsinki, and Tallin together. Two snags though. I will have to clear two days of classes off my schedule by arrangeing coverage or moving classes around, and I need to get my damn registration back before then too. Well, there's no use worrying about it right now.

Tomorrow I'm going to Tosca with Masha, my coworker. It's in the new Bolshoi, not the old one, but I'll still try and get a pic of myself in front of the theatre to post.

By the way, does anyone actually read this thing? Just wondering.

At the moment my DSL connection is out. It could be because the bill was due today and I forgot to pay. Or it could be a normal technical difficulty and have nothing to do with my bill. Fortunately I still have some credits on my Comstar account, so I still have dial-up access. What sucks however is I was halfway through downloading the latest American Idol. I'm almost positive Anthony is leaving this week. Everyone knows it in fact, even Anthony I'd bet, but I still want to see the show. So if you know anything about it, please don't tell me. I did however get to see the season finale of Scrubs tonight, so I guess that's something.

Maybe without Internet toinght I will make a half decent lesson plan for tomorrow, or read a book or do something else worthwhile. My computer could use a night off anyway.

Today was not bad. I tested myself on the entire first unit of my Korean studies, did a decent amount of exercise, and had a pretty good class with my teenagers this afternoon. Not too much to report other than I'm cruising along and feeling pretty good today.

WOD

Remuneration - Recompense, pay

Ok, I've known the meaning of this word for quite a long time. The thing is, until very recently I've been reading it as renumeration, reasoning that the word somehow shared a root with the word number. Like, it's payday so I got some numbers, 20s mostly. Ok, it makes no sense, fine. The worst thing is now I have to cut the president some slack when he says nuke-ya-lar. Wait, no I don't. He's the president. He should know better. Fuck him.

What I did today

Remember how I said I was going to try to make Monday a little more productive than Sunday? Yeah well, not so much. I managed to clean up and get some laundry done, and did some exercises in the morning, but man I ate shit yesterday. I only left the apartment for less than an hour all day. Even my private lesson cancelled.

However, just about an hour ago I spoke to the recruiter in Korea for the summer camp position I'm applying for. It seems like it's pretty much a done deal, although I guess I won't know absoloutely for certain until I hear from the camp program itself.
I also just realized I forgot to ask if airfare is paid up front or if I have to foot the bill and get refunded later. Doesn't matter so much I guess, only if I have to buy my own ticket I'd rather do it sooner than later.

Ok that's it for now. I've only slept about an hour so I'm going back to bed. Maybe today I'll try and get some pictures taken to put up here. I wonder if I'm getting any readers yet.

What a waste of a day this was...well nearly. I defrosted my freezer, so I guess that was something. But seriously, I didn't clean. I didn't study. I didn't do any lesson prep. Hell, I didn't even bathe today, not that anyone needs to know that. I mostly sat around, checked e-mail about a million times, and ate and ate and ate.

Oh well, I also sent my resume to a university in Jinju, Korea, so I guess that was something too. I won't get the job. That's a near certainty, but it doesn't hurt to apply. The process itself is valuable and anyway, you never can tell.

For tomorrow my bright idea is I'm going to throw out the sugary stuff I bought today, do some exercises in the morning and clean up my place really good. I have to tidy up a bit at least since my private student is coming over. It's a holiday tomorrow so I'm not going anywhere. But, I can't repeat what I did today. That would be beyond ridiculous.

What I did today

Last night I tried to tweak my template format, with a modicum of success. In other words, it sorta worked, but not really. Today I sent a really long e-mail to my friend jennifer, that I may post some of here later.

The recruiter I mailed my application to sent a short note and said they'd be in contact about interviews and stuff. I hope I don't have to travel too far for this. If I can interview in San Francisco or Seattle that's fine, I just don't want to have to make a special trip to like Los Angeles or someplace like that. Although I suppose it wouldn't be so bad.

Last night also, I finished the first unit of the Korean lessons I'm doing, although I need to go back through it for more practice. When I do get to Korea I'll probably enroll in a real Korean language course. From what I've seen on the Internet the university courses are the way to go.

Sooner or later too I want to begin a TESOL Masters degree program. I wish I could start in January, but maybe it will have to wait till next September. So as of now I plan to study Korean, volunteer to help refugees, write a novel, pursue a Masters degree, work out at a gym, keep myself spiritually centered, and oh yeah, work a full-time job. Honestly, why do I kid myself about all this stuff. There's no way I can do all of this. Or rather, there's no way I would do all of it at one time. Well, we'll call this the 'golden ideal.' If I can make my reality even close to this I'll feel like I'm not doing to bad.

Just a few moments ago I sent in my application for the Seoul public school job. When all was said and done it comprised a whopping ten attachments for a grand total of 1.4 megabytes! It took about two weeks to get everything together, mainly because I didn't have my reference letters already in the bag. Well, here's hoping it pays off. This really would be a dream job for me. Oops, I shouldn't have said that, the fates will hear. Shhh!

Furthermore, I also applied for a summer camp position this week. They responded and said they want to talk to me. I gave them a couple of windows when they could call me, but so far they haven't done it yet. Again, it would be super duper excellent-a-mundo if this thing panned out. It starts in late July, so it would mean less time killing time in Portland. Not that I'd mind an extra month in Portland, but the accomodations would be hard to pull together and after the first few days, what am I gonna do anyway?

Ok, I'm like exhausted. I had good classes today, but it really takes a lot out of me to be able to pull that off. Thank god there's a holiday this weekend.

What I learned today

Three nights ago I put my mattress pad on the floor just as an experiment. Turns out it was just as comfortable, if not moreso, as my evil divan. So it looks like I'll be camped out on the floor for the rest of my time here.


What I did today

This afternoon I found a posting for a summer camp job in Korea. It's too soon to start making plans around it, but it did look like a pretty good deal, so I sent my resume and stuff.

I had two cups of (caffeinated)coffee yesterday and one today. I've got to cut that shit out. I didn't suffer a headache for like four days just to get myself hooked on that crap again.




Bright ideas I've had

I'm feeling a little embarrased now about getting all manic about North Korea over the weekend. My opinion hasn't changed any, nor has my determination to do something to help out. It's like my fantasies, the ones I said I would start writing here so as not to over-indulge them, remember? I get these brilliant ideas, then a couple of days later realize they were either just plain bad ideas, or they were good ideas that I will never in my life have the strength nor the will to carry out. What's best I think is to stay focused on the core idea, and let the periphery go. Maintain a singularity of purpose in other words.

What all this means is I realize I'm drifting away from my original goal, which was to help North Korean refugees living in South Korea. In my mind I had myself smuggling food packages into Manchuria, or leading groups of escapees all Rambo-like through the jungle to Freedom in Laos, or wherever. yeah, like that'll ever happen!

No, I said I was going to help refugees, and that's what I'm going to do.

I'm falling asleep on my keyboard so I guess that means I should sign off.

Brian

A couple more pictures that I took today.


Here's a view of all three buildings in my "project" for lack of a better word. The one on the left is where I live. It also gives a general view of my neighborhood. This photo was taken outside the entrance to the Metro stop.



EF has it's own square on Arbat street. How proud am I?

Update to my last bright idea.

What was I thinking with that North Korea blog thing? I don't mean it was a bad idea. It was an excellent idea. In fact it is such an excellent idea that numerous people and organizations have beaten me to it. Here are some links to what I've found online in the past few hours.

The Dainly NK
North Korea zone
One Free Korea
NKnet.org
LiNK: Liberation in North Korea

This has been an informative evening to say the least. I've learned a lot about the current situation in North Korea in the past few hours, and it has convinced me more than ever that this is a cause I want to pursue. More about this later.

A couple of pictures



My building, as seen from the school where I teach. The red circle indicates my apartment.



The church I mentioned in my previous post.

That's all for now.

What I learned today

Kleptocracy - government by theives

Technically I learned this yesterday, but whatever. This was in a short article in an old New Yorker I got a hold of recently. They obviously were using the word to describe Russia and the former Soviet states and allies. It's not necessarily true, but I can see how it fits.

What I did today

Today is Russian Easter Apparantly they do a marathon all-nighter at church the night before Easter, so the bells at the church near my flat were pealing damn near all night. It's a beautiful sound, but does get annoying after a while. Just before midnight the church was all lit up and there were people outside in a procession with candles. I thought about going to get a few pictures, but in the end couldn't be bothered. Around 2am though I went out on my balcony and could hear a choir, which sounded really cool.

Yesterday I had two cups of caffinated coffee and drank some sugared fruit juice. It wasn't too much, but see the point is I don't want to have any of that stuff. Today I'm back off it. I'm shooting for seven straight days.


Bright ideas I've had

This morning, in keeping with my idea to do something to help North Korea, and North Korean refugees in particular, I got the bright idea of starting a blog specifically aobut this situation. The idea is I would collect news stories about these situations, and maybe comment on them, and basically try to make the site a sort of clearing house for information on Human rights in NK and the plight of North Korean citizens and refugees. The thing is I don't want it to be just a mediablog. Also, I don't know whether I'd include information about the whole Nuke-ye-lar thing. My main interest is in human rights, not politics.

By the way, just to clarify, this Bright Ideas section is a place for me to write all the thoughts I get during the course of a day that may or may not be completely crazy, and that I may or may not follow up on. Mainly I want to write them down so I can go back later and decide whether they're crazy, or worth doing, or both, or neither. Got it?

What I did today

This morning was my bi-weekly Saturday Business English lesson. I prepared for all of like 15 minutes late last night, and it showed. Luckily this is a good group so we basically just talked about stuff. Either I'm getting good, or I'm getting lazy. Either way, my lack of preparedness sort of forces the students to do more work, so I guess it's a good thing.

Last night, when I should have been preparing my lesson, I worked on my application for the Seoul teaching position. During the day I asked my old boss in Korea to send a reference letter, and he responded within like two hours. Chances are he copied at least part of the letter from something he had written previously, but I'm sure part was really about me as well. He said some really nice things about me, so I really appreciated it. Now if I could only get my current boss to complete the letter I asked her to write...

I'm up to Unit one, lesson six in my Korean studies, though to be fair, all of lesson five and half of lesson six was all about numbers, and I already know those. Tonight I'm going through the lessons again to try and catch some things I might have missed, or have forgotten already. So far I've learned, to walk, to run, to jump, to dance, to run away, to race (I think) to swim and to read. I've learned the prepositions on, under and inside, plus a whole bunch of nouns. I suppose I could write this whole list with the Korean translations, but remember what I said above about being lazy?

My apartment is disgusting. Most of the week I kept it orderly, but it always falls apart toward Thursday or Friday.

Bright ideas I've had

Should I try to go to St. Peterburg next weekend? Should I try to go to Tallin or Helsinki at all? What do you think?

Labels: EFL teaching, The life of Brian