Well, I've had Monday-Wednesday off this week. I had thought about going on a day trip somewhere, but I ended up just staying around here. One of my goals for my time in Korea is to learn to play jazz piano, so I made a plan to practice for 45 minutes, five days a week. So these last three days have been filled with playing jazz piano, working on some projects in Logic (my music production software), finishing "Surprised by Joy," and going on some walk/runs in the park.

Last night, I went over to Mrs. Kwon's (the korean teacher who is in charge of me) house for dinnner. She lives up in Anyeong, which is about a 30 minute train ride from here. On the way out of the apartment, I ran into Nikia, who is a girl from Philly that lives on my floor. She was heading up to Seoul and taking the same train. So what is usually a pretty boring train ride turned into a nice talk about korean women, my music, and whether parents should force their kids to go to church. Mrs. Kwon's son was waiting for me at the subway station (by the way, kids of all ages run all over the place by themselves here. You see 6 year olds just crossing the street by themselves. And it's not stanwood. Ansan is a city of a 600,000. Just crazy). So, Kim Won found me at the station and we walked the 1/2 mile or so back to their "home." They lived on the 19th floor of a apartment building that was surrounded by many other apartment buildings. Everybody lives in apartments. I was curious to see what dinner would be like. After beginning a game of chess with kim won, we sat down to eat. We had pork, breaded squash or cucumber, kimchee, rice, and the little fried, whole fish that I had tried last week. I didn't try them this time. In the traditional korean way of eating, you would take a piece of lettuce, put some meat, some sauce, and whatever else you like inside of it, and then eat it up. The meal was pretty good.

A couple of interesting things I learned about Korean culture from this time at Mrs. Kwon's house. High school students have an insane life. They go to school from 8 AM-10 PM!! They have an hour break for both lunch and dinner. And after school, many students go to an academy till midnight! And then they have homework!! This just blows my mind. They can't be getting any more than 5 hours of sleep a night. Education is huge here. Another thing is that Koreans work very hard to have a decent life-style. Mrs. Kwon's husband is a surveyer, and he got home from work after we finished dinner around 9:30. He leaves at like 6:30 in the morning and gets back at 9:30 every day!! Dang! And the women all work too. Even when there kids are young. I was thinking that would be hard to have much of a family life, but I guess that's just custom here. It's making me think twice about raising my family in Korea. Just joking, mom.

Well, I'll finish this up. Tonight, I had the best Korean meal yet. It was a Korean BBQ place, that was all-you-can-eat meat. You go up and grab as much raw pork and beef as you want along with a slew of veggies (including some funky mushrooms that looked like string cheese with a bunch of heads sticking out of it), and bring them back to your table (my legs just love these places where you sit on the ground) and cook them yourselves on the little grill built into your table. It was great! We ate and ate and ate. (pics below) After that, we went out to a bar that has instruments in a corner, and I got to sit in on a song on drums. It was pretty fun. But now it's late (12:43), I have to work tomorrow, and I'm going to bed. Peace out homies.

P.S. It's good to hear that many of you are actually reading this. I'm impressed. Thanks.