the blog

Life This Week in South Korea: December 30, 2024-January 5, 2025

Mon, Dec 30 Korea is certainly having its share of issues – this time, the terrible tragedy of the airplane crashing and killing over 170 people. Those poor families 🙁 The (3rd) president (in the past month) declared a period of mourning in Korea through January 4. New Year’s celebrations have been
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Happy New Year: The One Where All Koreans Turn One Year Older

Did you know that in the traditional Korean age system, when a baby is born they are considered one year old…and each year their age increases by one year on January 1 instead of on their birthdate? So technically, a baby born on December 31 is One Year Old at birth, and
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Life This Week in South Korea: December 23-29, 2024

Mon, Dec 23 An uneventful day. I’m reserving my energy for tomorrow. And I know it’s only been two days since the winter solstice, but I SWEAR it was brighter when we walked out of class tonight. Tue, Dec 24: Christmas Eve Class, yadda yadda yadda. I set out in the evening
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Life This Week in South Korea: December 16-22, 2024

Mon, Dec 16 I think the most exciting (and I use the term loosely) thing today was going for a short walk after dinner. Woohoo. Tue, Dec 17 Today I broke it to my tutor that I have to go down to once a week. I think my bank account has a
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Life This Week in South Korea: December 9-15, 2024

Mon, Dec 9 So. I don’t know if it was the good break or what, but I have been uncharacteristically (wow, that word’s a lot longer than I remembered) motivated and productive. Class was good. I’m keeping up. I partly (partially?) understand what the teacher is saying. I’d intended to go out after
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Where Bloggers Live: The Best Gifter

Welcome to this month’s edition of Where Bloggers Live. It’s kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…Bloggers! Who doesn’t like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes, interests, and lives? Every month a group of seven bloggers share their work-spaces, homes, towns, and thoughts, with posts based on
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Life This Week in South Korea: December 2-8, 2024

Monday, Dec 2 I slept. And napped. And slept some more. Not sure what’s going on but suddenly I need All The Sleep. I got up to meet some friends for dinner at 7. It was a goodbye dinner for a lovely young French woman, who is literally a ray of sunshine.
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The Best Seasons to Travel to South Korea: Part 1: Autumn

“Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile.” — William Cullen Bryant What’s the best time of year to travel to South Korea? Well, when it’s NOT monsooning (June-July), swampy tropical heat-ing (July-September), or unbearably freezing from the dry winds coming down from China (January-March). Which leaves spring (March-May), aka Cherry Blossom Season, and
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Life This Week in South Korea: November 25-December 1, 2024

Monday, Nov 25 Got up early-ish and headed by bus to a park in Gangnam that looked pretty on Instagram. The Bus. Sigh. When I put this park into NaverMaps (Korea’s GoogleMaps) it basically said there was no way to go by bus from my house to that park. Well, THAT can’t
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An Autumn Visit to Unhyeongung Palace in Seoul, South Korea

One November day when I was in the Jongno-gu area, I took a quick trip to Unhyeongung Palace. I’d heard it had some nice fall foliage – and I was on a mission to see and photograph all I could this fall! I’ve been to Gyeongbokgung Palace, which is overwhelmingly enormous, and
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Life This Week in South Korea: November 18-24, 2024

(get a snack, this is LONG) Monday, Nov 18 My weekend of not-studying really hit me this morning as I reviewed for the speaking test with the tutor. I actually contemplated not going to the final cuz…I’ve already failed…if I got a 100 on the speaking test I still wouldn’t pass the
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Life This Week in South Korea: November 11-17, 2024

Monday, Nov 11 Just a day. Tutoring, class, remote work, homework, studying, memorizing my presentation. The best part of the day was…every week the teacher “randomly” changes our seats, putting us next to different people with whom we do all our exercises. I say “randomly” because of the 10 weeks of class,
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Why & How I Moved to South Korea

I know to long-time readers that this will be redundant. But recently I’ve had people on social media ask me why and how I came to be living in South Korea…and rather than saying “read all my blog posts from April 2020 to August 2023,” I thought I would just consolidate the
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Life this Week in South Korea: November 4-10, 2024

Monday, Nov 4 A peaceful start to the week. I had the tutor in the morning so didn’t go out to chase leaves with my camera. My brain is overfull of Korean. You know how you do pour-over coffee? Like you have to pour sloowwllyy or the grounds just fill up and
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Where Bloggers Live: My Sleep Routine Z-Z-Z-Z-z-z-z

Welcome to this month’s edition of Where Bloggers Live. It’s kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…Bloggers! Who doesn’t like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes, interests, and lives? Every month a group of seven bloggers share their work-spaces, homes, towns, and thoughts, with posts based on
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Life This Week in South Korea: Oct 28-Nov 6, 2024

Monday, Oct 28 Was supposed to go have a ct-scan follow-up to my kidney procedure back in June, but I cancelled. Hey. If I’m not gonna leave my box to go see leaves, I’m certainly not going to leave it to spend three uncomfortable hours in a hospital. Stayed in bed a
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Life This Week in South Korea: Oct 21-27, 2024

Note: I have self-nominated this post as the post with the least interesting pictures ever. You’ve been warned. Monday, Oct 21 Here we go again. I thought I was going to have an exciting story to tell you about a DATE, but he got a little annoying at the last minute so I
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Life This Week in South Korea: October 14-20, 2024

Monday, Oct 14 Ahh. Today were the writing and listening portions of the midterm. I MIGHT have passed writing. I MIGHT have done okay. But I think maybe I just passed. Listening?? HA HA HA HA HA. No. The dialogues are SO FAST. I can’t keep up At All. But at least
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Life This Week in South Korea: Oct 7-13, 2024

Monday, Oct 7 Today I did not do A Thing I had planned to do in the morning and I’m very annoyed with myself. THEN I had a “try not to cry” day in class when I TOTALLY did not understand what was going on and the teacher was determined to MAKE
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