Thursday, January 02, 2003

Its 2003!!!

Happy New Year to all. I hope your NYE was as much fun as mine ie: jolly good fun.

This year has the potential to be extremely good and I am highly excited about the prospects for the coming year. The biggest thing that is going to happen this year is I am going to move to America. All I need is to win one measly scholarship and I am on my way to Stanford USA. (Yay!!) The decision for the scholarship is late March/early April. I have never been to USA but since I had living in US or Europe on my "things to do before thrity" this is very timely. And after having to defer my entry last year in order to save more money I am more excited than ever about my upcoming studies and travel.

In view of this big change I have several goals for the year. Firstly I need to concentrate on getting fit (health body = healthy mind) to enable me to better handle the late hours and stress of study. This includes more marathons (10km and half) this year beginning from March 30th.

Secondly I am going to concentrate on getting smart by reading a greater number of non-fiction books and committing more time and energy to my Korean study.

Thirdly I need to ensure that not a moment is wasted in my last months of Korea. Although there is no doubt I will be back I still feel that I need to make some committment to ensure that weekends and free time are spent visiting tourist sites and other exhibitions, shows, etc that I haven't gotten around to doing as yet. For this I have my trusty "Traditional Ceremonies and Street Festivals" calandar booklet issued by the Seoul Metropolitan Government which is highly recommendable. You can also access information about festivals and the like from The Culture and Toursim Office. There is also a booklet from the KNTO which gives a great run down of mountains, museums, historical sites and more to visit in and around Seoul.

Fourthly, I am going to try and read some US authors and read some books about US in order to prepare myself to deal with any culture shock that I may expereience on entering the US. So far I've been told its expensive and the food servings are enough to feed a person for a week and I know about US-Korea relations. But I suspect there is more to learn.

Currently reading:

"Hell" by Yasutaka Tsutsui