the good and the bad

Bad news: My Hangeul. I feel like my learning Korean is similar to pounding a square peg into a round hole. The only words I use everyday that I’ve really added to my Korean vocab are bathroom, cafeteria, and teacher, and—on a good day, a “how much is it?” My language teachers are energetic and persistent, my roommate, fluent in the language, is willing to help, and between my notes, textbook, workbook, phrasebook, and dictionary I have a decent Korean library. Three weeks into classes, though, I still mess up with pronunciation and forming full sentences. I’m not being humble; I’m actually in remedial classes until my test scores here improve. I have a stack of notecards, though, and I’m hoping next week will be better.

Good news: I'm living on an island in a few weeks. Yesterday they announced our preliminary school placements for next year. I’m teaching at an all-girls middle school in Seogwipo, a small town on the south coast of Jeju Island. Jeju is the only inhabited Korean island. I am really pumped to bike around the island (a 3-day trip!) and walk to the ocean (20 minutes from my school). I’ll be around 12 other people from my program, which is great, and my school comes highly recommended by the Fulbrighter who taught there last year. Here's a map and a picture from the school's website. Pray my Hangeul gets better and I can actually learn to pronounce the names of cute students like these correctly...