Typical Days

I thought I should blog about what my our schedule is like. I'll briefly cover this last Thursday and Friday.

On Thursday Arlene need a bit of help around the house so I left for the office a little later than normal. I stopped by the post office to mail some stuff and then took the sbuway to my office. I worked there for awhile and then met with my friend Donggyu who is studying Korean Shamanism. He and I talked about our studies over coffee for about two hours and then I went back to the Korea University project, had a snack, and then worked a bit more. At 6pm I went to meet with Professor Cho, my adviser, and Professor Yu who is working on her phd (she is currently teaching French literature and cinema at another university). Professor Cho took us out to dinner and then we discussed her translation project. She is looking at some documents left by the French missionaries. Professor Cho will have me present on my research in a few weeks. He thought that if the three of us had meetings together it would help us more than just having one on one meetings. It's a big help to me as I can keep working on my Korean in a friendly environment and I'm learning a lot. The meeting didn't get out until after 9pm so I got home after 10, after

On Friday I went to the office to work and was able to get a lot done. Shortly before I had to go a Chinese-American guy came to our office looking for help. He didn't speak any Korean so I helped him find the little library in our building and some sources he was looking for. After that I went home and made some phone calls, including to Father Yo who will take me to a certain holy site next week that I need to go for my research. Since it was a Friday I would usually go to class. However, class was canceled and Fulbright was having a dinner so we could all meet each other so I went to that. It was fun meeting the other people. I spent much of the dinner talking to a nice lady who studies art. She is in Korea to learn paper making and in addition to being able to paint and draw also makes paper and books and plays the violin. She also does performance art and to do that better (I think) she also learned acrobatics and the trapeeze! It was all very interesting. There was also another lady there working on autism in Korea and a guy who was looking at violence during the Korean colonial period. I'm hoping to talk to him more as his work has some connections with my own. His wife is with him and she is five months pregnant. After the dinner we took a taxi home and again I arrived after David had gone to bed.

So things are goin very well here. I'm hoping in the upcoming weeks to be able to do more research but it's good for my work to also do all these other activities. I feel bad sometimes because Arlene is home alone a lot of the time with David. Fortunately on Friday her friend Na Tata came and took her around.