Except from email update

My expat friends here are all very nice and are all also very different. I have the Monday night football and beer crowd that are very fun to hang out with and have also made friends with people that are more into seeing Korea and the cultural experience than going out at night. It is nice to have both needs fulfilled as I feel the need to be one of the guys but also want to have people that are also interested in seeing more of Korea. I am going in to Seoul for the first time this weekend and we are all going to go the National Museum for the day. There are literally 20 museums in Seoul that I would like to visit, and I am sure that I will make time to visit them during my stay here. Being on the west coast of the island is nice, though the water quality and pollution levels are high here, Incheon is the port city and there are an abundance of cheap ferries that you can take to the south and southeast of the country. Korea also has a new ultra-modern railway, but it is considerable more expensive. Within the next month or two I am going to try to make my way down to Cheju Island on the south coast of the country to explore the national park there. I have also met a very interesting Canadian (CJ) here that is starting a magazine called Flash. CJ has ran two small magazines in Canada, which is nice as I would not where to begin. The purpose of the magazine will be to document and analyze the social changes taking place in Korea right now, focusing specifically on the youth here. Western culture is very prevalent among the youth and with the large amount of ESL teachers here, there is a great amount of first-hand exchange and this will be one of the major focuses of the magazine. As the magazine will be targeted to both Korean and native english speakers, CJ would like to center the magazine around photography rather than editorial. I really like the idea of this, though have no technical skills when it comes to photography. He assures me that this will not be a problem. I have spent a good amount of time talking to Korean women about their views on how they are treated on the societal level. As you know, the Confusian ideology which has been prevalent here for about 500 years typically treats women very poorly. It seems that Korean women are making great strides towards independence here and are treated better than I had expected. Having said this, they say that the newly found independence that they do have is predicated by financial independence. Because of the growing economy, women are more easily able to find good employment which seems to be driving much of this progress. The most interesting conversation I had was with a 40 year-old co-teacher who was talking about seeing the slow and then recently rapid progression of women's rights in her lifetime. Needless to say, Korea is a culture that is experiencing some growing pains right now but is also moving in the right direction. I am really looking forward to learning more about the people here and immersing myself as best I can. I am studying Korean for about 2 hours a day in my freetime and can know read it (as it is a phonetic language and alphabet). My pronounciation is getting better and I have spent some time learning the grammatical structure of the language, which is actually very straightforward. I unfortunately have an almost non-existent vocabulary, but am sure that I will start to build it up in the near future. Conguation may be another story, but one step at a time.