Today is Buddha's Birthday, and I saw a really terrible movie.

Last year, I announced in class that foreigners could make lanterns at the celebration for Buddha's birthday, and seven of us went to Insadong and made lotus-shaped paper lanterns. Two of those lanterns went up in a blaze of glory when we tried putting lit candles in them at night, destroying in seconds the work of two hours. Etsuko still laughs about it, assuring me that while the lantern-making was fun, the way it burned up suddenly in my hands was really funny.

Of those six friends, two have gone back to Japan and two to North America. Etsuko has a year-long contract to work in Korea, and Gyongli is majoring in business at a Korean university. And I, I am still here too. But this year I didn't go to Insadong, and I didn't make a lantern. Instead, I went to lunch and a movie with Yuri, and the lunch was good and the movie terrible, and after 20 months in a place, you tend not to do touristy things anymore. Cause it's home. You know?

Yesterday I went with Etsuko to our old language school to have lunch with a former teacher. Teachers kept walking by us and starting, because once you leave, you're usually gone. Like, thousands-of-miles-away-and-rapidly-forgetting-Korean-gone. There aren't too many people who stay for very long after they've completed language school, unless they're going through school to fulfill a work requirement, which usually prevents them from aimlessly visiting their old language school on an odd weekday.

I'd heard that they were offering a hanja (Chinese characters used in Korean) class this term, which had never been offered while I was there. (Okay, they did offer it, but in the past six months, when I actually did have time to take an additional afternoon class, not enough students were interested, so no class.) I asked and was granted permission to take the class for free, seeing that they were only meeting six more times.

Hey, that's 50 new characters for me, I figured, and so went to the first class in the afternoon. Loved it. God, I miss school. Learning hanja has been on my list of things to do for so long, I was ecstatic to be finally in a class doing just that. Not to mention that traditional Chinese characters (not the simplified characters that were introduced in mainland China 50 years ago) are fascinating to learn because they are originally pictographs. Built-in mnemonic devices!

I write "traditional Chinese characters" because simplified characters were introduced in mainland China 50 years ago, on the reasoning that the complicated traditional forms were too difficult to learn, contributing to the illiteracy rate. As Taiwan, which uses the traditional characters, still manages to have a healthy 95.8 percent literacy rate (as of Dec. 2003), it's not likely that the complexity of the characters had as much to do with the past illiteracy rate in mainland China as lack of money and resources did. (I think I read this in Lonely Planet China, so don't mistake me for being knowledgeable about this topic or anything.)

Just as a sidenote, Chinese and Korean come from completely different language families; Korean and Japanese are quite similar, and share some similarities with Finnish and Mongolian, but have completely different grammar structure than Chinese. This makes it all the more interesting that 60 percent of words in Korean come from Chinese. Weird, in'it?

Anyway, hanja class is fun. High school students here graduate knowing about 3,000 characters, the ones most often used in newspapers and formal documents. I think I can recognize about 100 now. Just 2,900 to go!

Really, I think that if I could take a break from Asia for a few months or a year and then come back here to study Chinese, I'd be, well, happy. Hm.