It's Fall!

I never knew that a season could change overnight. For the past two weeks, it has been the perfect weather: mid 70's, sunny. This morning, it was upper 50's, with a dry, brisk feeling in the air. Fall is here. I looked around and almost overnight, some of the trees have lost their leaves. I feel like Fall is coming in a hurry. I have begun to sort through my warmer clothes now that I will need them. This week it will be mid 60's, nice weather.

My Korean language classes have started to become more of a challenge. Yesterday in Korean Speaking, my teacher introduced us to the sentence structure of Korean: Subject, Object, Verb. Within five minutes of learning this, she started asking us questions in Korean and wanted us to answer her in Korean using this structure. It was hard! I took Latin in high school which follows the same sentence structure, so I had an idea about how to form the sentence. The most difficult part of Korean for me right now is to learn more vocabulary. My teachers tell us not to worry about vocabulary, but I want to understand more Korean. I want to know what my pastor says in church, what the Korean students say when they walk by, and I want to be able to talk to my exchange partners in Korean. Argh! I am hoping now that we are talking about grammer, our teachers might introduce more vocabulary into our classes.

In Korean History class next week, I am giving a ten minute presentation about Confucianism and the differences between how the Chinese and Koreans applied it into their society. I am almost done writing the paper, and I have learned so much about Confucius' philosophy. In China, Confucianism constantly competed with Taoism and Buddhism for influence in Chinese society. In Korea, the people found a balance of both Confucianist philosophy and Buddhist spirituality. It was so interesting to learn about how one societal philosophy could be applied in two very different ways.

In a few weeks, I will be joining a bunch of the international students to climb one of the nearby mountains. Korean mountains are never much higher than 700m so it will be a good hike. We are hoping to be able to go when the leaves are changing, should be beautiful.