In America!

I have been starting and abandoning posts regularly since my last one in may, on my identity as an American and a resident of Asia, on my growing understanding of Korea as separate from China (bringing some more definition to my picture of Asia), and a couple of times just simple "here I am" updates. I have been distracted by the advent of Beach Season on my island, and also just switched over into quieter and more face-to-face forms of mental processing.

But this week is the first of my visit home this year! I flew into Chicago on Saturday and spent a lovely Sunday with a dear friend exploring and am now in Ames. If you are in or near Ames, too, please don't be unhappy with me for not spending time with you yet. I have been almost entirely at my mother's house sorting through and condensing yet again all the belongings I left here. I will be down to a few boxes of books and notebooks and one tub of a few clothes and toys I want to hand down (I think). My mother is moving out of her house, and I am living in Asia for at least another year. So everything I own is future-use-only or coming to Asia, and I don't want to leave much sitting in other people's space.

I am telling you this now because I am also dealing with some jetlag. I did an excellent job of sleeping (only) during the night while in Chicago, but in Ames I have been staying up later working and been more anxious. I find myself now at 5am, with a skype date in three hours, a dinner date eight or so hours after that, and lots left to do in the meantime. I have run into enough walls trying to decide what to keep and ship and give away that I know I can't make more decisions tonight, and all the work that doesn't involve decisions is rather clunky, and I don't want to interfere with my mother's sleep any more than I have. Anyway.

Packing for a year or more (well, I left almost everything in Korea, so it's not exactly packing) always brings a lot of anxiety; I feel like I have to make all the decisions about what I will read and use and do in the next year or so RIGHT NOW. That isn't actually true, of course, but it feels like it.

My life in Korea is good. Christian is probably coming back to Korea a couple months after I go back at the end of August. I am living with a Korean family right now (or rather, my things are) and will probably be finding a new place to live on my own when I return. (My current apartment was supposed to be a sublease and has turned into a homestay, and though the family is all-around lovely I really want to have my own space.) I live surrounded by beaches. I am studying languages (once my books get to Jeju, also hydrology!) and working towards being ready for grad school. I am so grateful to have this stint in the Midwest again to see everyone. I hope I see you soon, wherever you are!

Beginnings and Endings, right?

The end of my two-and-a-half-year relationship last Saturday was not out of the blue or in anger, and though I have had some pretty low emotional points about it in the last week, overall I'm feeling very positive that it was the right decision and I am moving in the right direction.

This week has been an explosion of options. I realized that boyfriend-man was a major, though not the only, thing pulling me back to the US. I think I am not moving back this year, and I am re-exploring options for the next few years. Here are some of the options on my mind:

For the rest of this year and the beginning of next:
1) Stay in Korea and keep earning my Native English Speaker dollars and paying off my student loans
2) find a job in the Midwest to be close to family and friends, and keep paying off student loans

For the year after next:
1) Move back to the US and pursue grad school/teaching certification. This has been the plan I've been building most of this year, though I've been having trouble deciding whether to pursue Montessori or a state teaching certificate, or both.
2) Move back to the US and pursue grad school in Environmental Science or Engineering. I could still make tutoring a regular part of my life, and perhaps have the more individual affect on their lives that I would not be able to have if I only saw students in classes of 30.
3) Move to China under a Chinese Government Scholarship and pursue Environmental Science or Engineering at a Chinese University. This would put me in China with some long-term stability, and I could make/continue solid friendships and start a life as an international science liaison.
4) Move to China and get Montessori certification at the teaching center in Hangzhou. Teach in China and return to the US when/if the job market increases with enough teaching experience to be competitive
5) Other things yet unthought of that will give me opportunities to teach, travel, and keep involved (even vicariously) in scientific studies.

I posed a couple of these on facebook the other day and got a lot of excellent feedback, much of which supported my feeling that I don't want to teach in the US right now. I really, really would like the right answer to bring me closer to home, but I also don't want to move home and feel stuck. So, right now I am leaning towards things that will keep me on this side of the globe for a while longer.

Here safe!

Hello all!

I am safe in Korea-- I flew into Seoul (the Incheon airport) this afternoon, where I met TaLK program folks and was painlessly placed on a bus to Jochiwon, our orientation site. We'll be busing back up to Seoul tomorrow for the opening ceremony, which is apparently going to be on national Korean television.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

:P

1am, and I am in transit again

Not a complaint, though the thought of finding a place to live in for more than a year at a time makes me ache a bit. I'm getting pretty good at packing, getting pretty good at not being attached to belongings and being ready to let things go, and I love always having new things to discover and new people to meet. But I would love to make some friends and know they will be around, that I will be around. That we might celebrate each others' birthdays more than once together.

That's a pretty angsty thought, given that before this year I lived in Iowa City for five years, and that before that I had lived my whole life in Iowa. But living around college students is a constant transition of relationships. Everyone is still deciding who they are and where they are going, and holding on to any one person too tight risks losing yourself.

We had our HNC commencement ceremony this afternoon. It was really nice. I have been so caught up in disappointment in myself, frustrated that I have been struggling so much with my own things (I am full of FEELINGS and sometimes it's a problem) and not taking full advantage of where I am that I have often lost sight of what a unique program I am in this year. I received (in an unashamedly fusia cover) a joint certificate in Chinese Studies from Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University. Stephen Roach, the Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and Zhang Yibin, Nanjing U's liberal arts vice president, were our commencement speakers. My classmates are truly warmhearted and have a lot of vision and commitment. I know that I personally really need a break to figure out how I want to use this experience, as well as my undergrad degrees, but this has been an incredible place to be. I am qualified to call myself a China expert, of sorts anyway.

I am looking forward to traveling and being around people I love in the next month and a half, and very much looking forward to the reflection and clarity of mind that both of those things bring me. Next year is going to be a more personally focused one. I am hoping to write a lot (knock on wood; if I set myself up with expectations now I'll drown in them by august) and clear my mind out a bit. Hopefully one of my next entries will begin to outline possible writing for the next year. I'm looking forward to it.

Love!

Quick Update

Among my methods of schoolwork procrastination has been changing my mind repeatedly about my summer plans, and obsessively looking up plane tickets on vayama.com. These culminated tonight in the purchase of a round-trip ticket from Seoul to Des Moines and back- putting me in Iowa or thereabouts from Tuesday, July 6th until Sunday, August 1st.

Hope I'll be seeing you soon!

Spring Illness

Howdy, all. I've been having a pretty slow-moving month. I finally got that "travelers' diarrhea" the doctors all warn you about, and spent a lot of time sleeping for about a week (I'll spare the details to those of you I've not already burdened... I love you, Mom!). Then I had a long enough reprieve to have an excellent trip to Shanghai for the HNC Career Day, where I listened to panels of people working in Legal Services, Consulting, and Green Business in China. I learned some things- to begin with, what "consulting" is- and made a cool connection. I spent the rest of the weekend at a Baha'i friend's house, doing homework, taking advantage of her FANTASTIC speakers (my iPod earbuds are seriously making me sad now), and at the Naw Ruz party with the Shanghai foreign Baha'is association. All good times.

I got up early Sunday to get to the train station and buy a ticket back to Nanjing. Got home around 12:30 and at 2pm met a lovely young couple I'm going to start tutoring in English.

Kind of read (have I mentioned that I have more reading than is humanly possible? Have I mentioned I spend a lot of time doing other things? heh) for a while, hung out with friends, went to bed, went to a couple days of classes, thought about papers and jobs and worried about what I'm doing next year. Caught a cold, and have spent much of the last two days lazing around my room. It got cold and rainy again this week, which is I'm pretty sure why I got sick (I tell the most exciting stories about China!). On Sunday and Monday the weather forecast was "widespread dust," Christian actually made me realize this when he said there was a huge dust cloud/storm/something over Korea. I looked out the window, thought, well, the pollution and low clouds are awfully brown today and checked the weather. Widespread dust! I thought these things only happened in Beijing (where the weather forecast is sometimes "Sand," which blows over from the Gobi Desert).

I have been meaning to make phone calls to the US, but need to get up early (ish) in the morning to do so, and with all morning classes and being sick and just lazy, I haven't in quite a while (besides, y'know, Skype contact more or less daily with Christian and every few days with my mother. One can generally assume that I have long-windedly pondered my path and purpose for my mother's benefit in the past couple of weeks.)

I'm still thinkin' real hard about what I should do next year. I will let you know when I have a decision, but honestly I will probably be going back and forth about it for at least another week or two, so don't get too anxious.

Um, so no title song today, but Christian linked me to this cool video of Massive Attack's Splitting the Atom earlier today, which you might enjoy.

Oh man! And to help you appreciate better how awesome AND nerdy (if those terms can be separately, really) my awesome nerdy boyfriend is, read this post about the card game he invented to teach English to his students: Sorcery: a Collecting

Plan B! Plan B!

Well, Christian and I are waiting on responses from two or three schools, but we've each been rejected from enough programs that we will definitely not be able to attend school in the same place next year. And, aside from that, I pretty definitely need to spend a year away from school and use my brain in a different way for a while, so on the slim chance that one of the schools I have yet to hear from accepts me, I'm going to defer.

Which means, dear ones, that I am figuring out where I WILL be next year, and it almost certainly will not be in the US. I have found a couple of things I would like to apply for here in China, and the Hopkins-Nanjing Center has a resume book which is circulated around many firms in China. If nothing comes of these, I am also applying to both of the programs which place native English speakers teaching English in Korean public schools- which will hopefully land me on Jeju Island with Christian. I feel like I should stay in China to keep using my Chinese and build experience here, so I am going to give jobs here (especially two of them that I know of) my full application effort. But I also feel that I need to do something, sometime soon, where I don't feel like I'm running at full speed all the time, and that it would make my life about 100% better to be in the same country, even, as Christian.

So, we'll see what happens! I am hoping I will be back in Iowa for a few weeks this summer. If I know I will be gainfully employed next year, I definitely have funds for it.

The plan is still almost definitely grad school in Geography whenever I actually get in to a program. I have questions I want to ask in a research setting, and I am pretty sure I want to teach eventually. I have dreams of leading study abroad trips.

Wish me luck!

Back in Nanjing!

It feels like home here, which is stranger than I've been able to put into words.

Coming back was another adventure, of course. Christian taxi'd with me to the airport around 7:30 in the morning on Saturday and we had breakfast in the airport before I went through security for my 9:05 flight. I flew up to Seoul, took a 10 minute shuttle bus loop from the domestic airport to the international one, re-checked my duffel bag and flew to Shanghai (the first flight was only an hour long, the second was two hours. Both uneventful).

China makes itself known pretty quick. I stood in line for about half an hour after getting off the plane to go through customs and then picked up my bag and walked out the airport doors to find myself, along with two or three hundred other people, standing in line for a taxi. the line swept along the curve of the airport building, narrowing by means of a canvas rope from being sidewalk-wide, to a three people across, to two, and down to single file before winding back and forth in a metal queue six or seven times. The wait was only about half an hour, despite what the taxi driver who accosted me as soon as I came out of the building looking foreign assured me would happen. "You want taxi? Come with me. Here you wait two hours." "NO." I didn't even ask him how much he would have charged to take me to the train station, but probable 200 or so yuan. The drive on a meter cost me 53 yuan (just under 8 dollars), and my driver refused even to keep the change from the 55 I gave him.

The taxis were lined up eight in a row. One wave would drive up and the worker standing at the front of the queue directed whoever was next to the first one to stop, and so on until they were all taken. As soon as a taxi drove away another would zoom up to take its place, the driver hopping out to expediate luggage moving if necessary. My driver took me on an expressway through downtown Shanghai and it was wonderful to be moving so fast so close to the ground and see the buildings. The sky was clear and it was sunny and warm. My hair was messed up from leaning on my seat on two planes and blowing in the wind from the taxi's open window by the time I got to the train station, but sometimes I like to give people something to stare at me for other than my skin color.

I got a train bound for Nanjing with less than an hour to wait at the station. There were three or four stops on the way and Nanjing was the end of the line, and miraculously no one got joined our car after we left Shanghai, so the car emptied bit by bit until I was left with a table and five foot window to myself watching the sun set over Chinese cities and hills and fields and factories. It was beautiful.

I took the subway from the train station to the Gulou stop, just a ten minute walk from campus. My duffel bag was feeling pretty heavy by the end (I wouldn't have this probably if I didn't travel with more books than clothes) but I made it back cheerfully and found the German bakery down the street was open and gratefully ate a sandwich.

I am currently trying to decide which classes to take. I think it's going to be Religion Systems in China, Environmental Law, and East Asian Economies, but Chinese Interpersonal Relationships and International Political Economics were both pretty interesting today.

Love from China!

Every step of the way

I'm sitting right now some where in Hour 2 of my 10.5 hours in the Toronto airport. They told me it was no problem if I stayed here overnight, but most of the lights are currently out and there are a couple of people riding floor cleaners (that I'd like to call Zambonis, but are Zambonis just for smoothing ice rinks?) and just a handful of other travelers. One lovely Canadian is on her way to spend two weeks in Jamaica and she and I have agreed to sleep and watch each others' luggage in shifts. She is, right now, looking for vending machines or at least a drinking fountain.

Life is good, even through 11 hour layovers.

I also had a lovely (and relaxing!) weekend in Chicago. We spent a lot of time napping and reading, and buying groceries. It was perfect preparation for a couple days' worth of travel, and what with the huge layover and all, I don't really have to hurry at all to do much of anything. Getting from the Hong Kong airport to where I'm staying in Macau is probably going to be hairy (especially with all this luggage! Why do I have to own things?!), but I pretty successfully stayed cool through ridiculous traffic driving into Chicago, and I don't think it will really be any worse than that. I have to figure things out, but not be responsible for other peoples' lives. In fact, I won't be driving again until at least next summer. That's wierd, friends.