Back, and hungry

Last month I got the chance to talk to my ex-grad school advisor for the first time since I jumped that ship. I was feeling rather apologetic about doing so, and was talking to him about going to South Korea, telling him about the Spanish classes I'd been taking this fall. He said to me "Tala, you're just a curious person" and said something about how I have so many interests. This is certainly true, and extremely relevant to the reasons why I've pressed the paused button on the whole grad school idea. I lamented to him that I this was exactly my problem and he laughed, and said that he couldn't wait to hear from me 10 years from now, that when I finally pick something I'm going to be this machine at it and rocket into space.

That felt really good.

But it also makes me wonder if I will - if I will find one single thing to focus on. That sounds so boring at the moment. Here I am in South Korea, and at the moment, I'm still filled with wide-eyed wonder for this new adventure. Apologies for the long silence, I've been so busy experiencing things and honestly I just didn't want to take time from that to record them.

But it's been going great so far (and I haven't even mentioned my pre-Korea travels yet). There are small challenges - my first night I couldn't figure out how to get the hot water going, for example.

But so far, the newness outweighs the frustration. My current "project" is trying to learn as fast as possible how to read menus. It's pretty intimidating, and also frustrating, to sit in a restaurant with a growling stomach, surrounded by all these people happily digging chopsticks into sizzling plates of stir frys, slurping steaming bowls of soup, and in front of you is this menu of gobblygook.

I stole this menu from C's local diner, so I could practice at home (yep, I'm that serious).

Thankfully, I started teaching myself hangul (the Korean alphabet) a few weeks before I came here. Thankfully, hangul is a pretty easy language to learn to read - it's all phonetic, and the characters are clustered into syllable groups, which helps with pronunciation. So my challenge right now really is learning the names of dishes. Hopefully one day I'll be good enough at hangul that I can recognize words, and not have to sit there slowly sounding out each character like a 5 year old. At the moment I survive by keeping print outs of websites like this and this in my purse. The problem comes when I'm hungry and haven't thought to bring my cheat sheets along.

Good thing I also like cooking.

Tonight I made a killer coconut curry.