Hangeul and Hanzi
In addition to my graduate coursework, I’m taking intensive Mandarin classes. The classes are excellent, and there’s been a noticeable improvement in my Chinese. My class focuses on spoken Chinese, so I’ve been working on my own learning characters. Learning characters is nasty and not always very much fun. It makes me miss the Korean […]
Scoring in K-League Baseball
Today I figured out how to use my television, and spent some of this afternoon watching K-League baseball. Turns out they keep score differently than we do in the States: strikes come before balls. I’d like to know (a) how this came to be and (b) if the position players are also numbered differently.
Weekend Visit to Nami Island (남ì´ì„¬), Korea
This weekend my work took an overnight trip to Nami Island (남ì´ì„¬, or Nami-sum), an island in the Han River about 1.5 hours northeast of Seoul. The drive from Seoul to Nami-sum was beautful. Our van’s GPS took us on the scenic route (or: we got lost) though a bunch of small towns and villages.
Evergreen Transit Hotel, Taoyuan Airport, Taiwan
On my way to Seoul I waited out a nine hour layover in Taipei’s Taoyuan Airport at the Evergreen Transit Hotel. My flight from Seattle arrived at 5:35 AM, which is 25 minutes before the airport turns on its air conditioning. I worried that I might be sweaty enough to set off the swine flu-sensing […]