travel and water and running

I'm working on planning out what my vacation plans are for the next couple of months. The only things that are solid right now is that I will be flying to Vietnam on December 29th flying back out of Bangkok on January 20th. I will be climbing with friends at HaLong Bay for a couple weeks, and I REALLY want to go to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, but other than that, I'm not totally sure what I'll be doing. There is the possibility that I will try to take the second level of Thai massage in Chiang Mai, but the idea of some extended beach time sounds really, really nice, too. Once I get to Southeast Asia, it is really inexpensive to travel around so the fact that I'm not totally planned out within an inch of my life is actually okay for the moment. I'm sure that will change in the next couple of weeks as I get more stressed about everything, but I'm trying to approach this fairly openly this time.

In February, I will be taking an intensive language course in Seoul at Ewha Womens University Language Center. A couple of friends and I were talking about the idea, and before I knew it, I was sold. Hopefully this three weeks will kick me over "survival" Korean into a higher degree of comprehension, plus I'll be able to live in Seoul! It will be a totally different way to live in Korea, and since we are planning to study Korean all day and climb all evening, I'm pretty psyched about the whole thing.

Last weekend I visited friends and was taken onto base. It made me pretty homesick - the guys tend to call it Little America for good reason. But in addition to some carefully selected good stuff, I think my water issues will be solved as I was able to get a Brita pitcher. It should be too much of an issue to get replacement filters as necessary, so I feel like since I'm pretty sure there isn't bacteria in the water here (because I'd be having more digestive and skin issues - I'm delicate like that) and it should filter out enough of the other stuff that makes it about on par with other filtered/bottled options without the impact of all the plastic bottles.

For running, I am planning to follow Hal Higdon's Spring Training as a prelude to his half-marathon training program. For me, having a set program to follow helps me a lot - I know that I need to complete x-number of miles, so I have something to accomplish - an assignment - that needs to be done at some point that day. Also, the mileage never gets high enough that it would be difficult to do while I'm traveling. At least for the most part - I'm sure there will be exceptions and I'm okay with that, but it should be do-able, even if the weather gets super-nasty and I have to do the runs on the much-hated treadmill.