I'm Back!

Hello everyone! I’m finally back in Korea after 17 days of bouncing around East Asia. Vacations like this are one reason that I sometimes think I want to stay in Korea forever – it cost me next to nothing to visit China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong for more than two weeks. Technically, I got paid to do it, since I used my paid winter vacation!

I’m currently working on blogging about everything I did, but it’s taking me awhile – I arrived back in Daegu late Monday night and started the new school year (the Korean academic year follows the calendar year) on Tuesday morning! I’ll definitely go into more detail and put up lots of pictures, but for now I’ll just say that Taiwan was probably my favorite of the three, with Hong Kong coming in a close second. I tried to learn a few words of the languages – Mandarin in China (except Shanghai, which has its own dialect) and Taiwan, and Cantonese in Hong Kong, even though most people I came into contact with spoke English.

After freezing for the last few months in Korea (and in China, too) the warm, humid weather in Taiwan and Hong Kong was amazing. And now I’m back in the cold again, at least for a few more weeks! My school schedule is still a bit up in the air because they haven’t figured out the after-school programs yet; as of now I have 17 teaching hours within the normal school day. It’s an improvement over last semester’s 20 hours plus two after school classes! However, I’m sure they’ll find something for me to do to make sure they get 22 full teaching hours out of me every week.

Anyway, while I’m working on those blogs, check this out, from ABC News:

“Game Addicts Arrested for Starving Baby to Death”
http://abcnews.go.com/International/TheLaw/baby-death-alleged-result-parents-online-games-addiction/story?id=10007040&page=1

Obviously the couple in this article is an extreme case, but my students are obsessed with computer games, so none of the statistics were a surprise to me.