Coming Home

Hello everybody! I admit I've been lax on the blog posts lately, but many things have been happening. Since my last post, I've flown from Korea via Bay Area back to Portland Oregon, and from there down to my country home in Roseburg to recover from jet lag.
There is a part of me that would like to be multilingual and international - this part wants me to go back to Korea for a long time and really get a grip of the language; it also makes me want to spend at least a year in Germany in order to rescue the language skills I learned in college. How great it'd be to move between those three languages - English, German, and Korean - I'd feel quite cool. But another part of me recognizes that that sounds like too much effort. It's a big relief being back in my home state where I understand the culture and the store signs, street signs, newspapers, and magazines are all in my native language. There's a strain to being a foreigner, and sometimes it doesn't seem like a bad idea to save your travel money and stay home.
Oregon is beautiful, too. As obvious as this may seem, it's striking, especially from the air as the plane starts coming down, that there are a lot of trees. Also, the hills are beautiful this time of year with all the soft grays of the oaks. Oregon may not have dazzling fall colors, but the subtlety of the colors in winter are awesome. Though I don't have any winter photos of Oregon right now (my camera having been on my Korean phone), here a few late summer pictures of my state from before I left.