power plant park

Yesterday I went on a field trip to a landfill-turned park and power plant. These tubes go into the landfill and extract the methane, which is converted to electricity. Koreans love parks. Even on a Monday afternoon, their were people everywhere. I guess when you don't have very much open space, you appreciate it more. Or maybe there's a really high unemployment rate.

Every Korean male has to be in the army or police force for at least two years. I guess alot opt for the police, and as a result Korea has an unnecessarily large amount of cops. While in the States, a pair of cops drive around in a patrol car, in Korea, they travel in buses. Three or four buses full might, say, make sure everything's calm at a street festival . They park somewhere near the edge, then a few dozen 18 and 19 year old policemen hover around their buses for a few hours. Other times, they do random patrols, but always in groups of 5 or 6. They guard all the post entrances, but so far none of them have yelled at me for not waiting for the green walking man. They're probably too busy thinking about how to break up underground-decaf-coffee rings (as artificially decaffeinated products are illegal here).

Today one of my classmates told me that she didn't think I was American because I'm not fat.

school

Husband gets home tomorrow. It's been just me the past ten days. I'm busy, so its not too lonely. Though I did almost get a puppy. I know we should wait-- we have a small apartment, it'd be hard to go on trips (not that we've gone on any yet, but I'm hoping), I don't know how to train it, and it could have a bizarre Korean disease that won't let it come to the States.

I go back and forth between being excited about and then overwhelmed by/frustrated with school. I'm excited about my project, which I don't like to admit. I'd rather keep an angsty, complaining profile and pretend I hate landscape architecture. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I'm forced to do it, I decide I can't stand it. Recently I've come to like wearing business clothes, so the only problem I can see now with actually becoming a landscape architect some day is having to work 9 to 5. I refuse to sit down or do the same thing that long. And I'd have to get up way too early to run.

But anyway, I am actually excited about my project. There's not a ton of things I feel strongly about, but the sinister evils of suburban sprawl is one of them. And the army's quirky reproduction of it in South Korea. So I'm going to tell them how to do it better. Except that I'm not actually going to tell anyone anything. I don't even think my professor cares what I'm doing. I feel like I'm painting a masterpiece... on a wall getting ready to be plastered over. Not that my project will be a master piece, just that I'm doing alot of work for no one to see.

The other frustrating thing is a research project for my other class. Every idea I have my professor tells me is good, but keep thinking of other ideas. We're supposed to do a small-scale "experiment" to write about in a publishable paper. I could... see how long it takes me to be detained for suspected terrorism from taking sketches, pictures, and measurements on base.