Preparing to leave, and what comes after November....

This week has been spent plane ticket hunting for my trip home in November and post-SLP job hunting.

The plane ticket is becoming a rather daunting problem, much harder than I expected. My school will only cover 1,000,00o won for my plane ticket home. Since I'm flying right around Thanksgiving time (I really want to be home for Thanksgiving this year) the cheapest possible flight to Boston is around $800... today.. but rising quickly... that comes out to be just around a million won. Of course those are the crappy flights with long layovers in inconvenient places. To make it even more difficult, my friend and I wanted to meet in San Francisco for a few days before I come home. Under normal circumstances, this would be a simple long stop-over, but leaving San Francisco two days before Thanksgiving is proving quite difficult. I refuse to pay for a stopover, since I have to make a stopover anyway, there are no direct flights to Boston from Seoul. I guess I just better pick a flight today and tell my school that's what I want. It's looking like Hawaiian Air for me.... with a 4 hour layover in Honalulu.

Then there is the question of what to do once I get home. I still seem to keep leaning toward coming back to Korea.... My plan today (which I'm sure will change about 500 times between now and December) is to go home for a month, get a job with either Borders or Macy's as a seasonal worker, since I've worked at both places before, then in January, go to Ecuador as a volunteer at a forest restoration site for a month or so, then home for a week, then back to Korea for Spring semester in the public schools, if I can get in to SMOE (Seoul Public Schools). I've even found that I can fly to Ecuador for only about $400 dollars if I take a bus to New York and fly from there, otherwise it's about a $700 flight with 3-4 stopovers.

I keep dreaming of getting my own apartment... with two rooms... in Seoul... I love my apartment now, but guests are out of the question, it's very nice and modern, but not much bigger than a closet. Some school that would give me key money and rent money would be amazing... having to commute a little further wouldn't be a big deal, I usually take the bus to work now anyway because I'm lazy, or the subway from Gwanghwamun because I have Korean class three mornings a week. What difference if I'm commuting from my hagwon, or from my house? Is it sick that I'm dreaming of my potential amazing life in Seoul, and not in America? But, really, me getting an apartment on my own in Boston with the salary that I can expect is basically out of the question, unless I want to be completly broke all the time. Here I can live without constant money concerns...

Thanks for putting up with more of my musings. If anyone knows of any temporary jobs/internships/volunteer jobs in Latin America.... or China (I've had this notion lately that Chinese would be easy and useful to learn) let me know. Something that at least covers the cost of a room, even if they don't pay for board or a salary... I need to brush up on my Spanish before I lose it!