I went to a kim chi making workshop today. There I saw a friend of someone I had worked with. She moved to Florida and apparently is suffering from pretty strong culture shock. All they care about is shopping and other silly things. So she wants to move back to the north. I'm afraid of that sort of thing, too, if I ever go to the south. The biggest shocker to me was to hear about all the AC. Come on, in the cold you can freeze to death, but in the heat you can always moderate if you're not too active and have enough water. I can't stand AC unless it's at a very low level. Electric fans are nice on 100+ days, they don't give the air that strange quality, it's just like wind. "They're soft in the South," someone told me. But then, so many people in the north complain about the weather all the time and never spend any time outside, so maybe not.

So if I go somewhere warm, maybe it will not be in the US. My list of top ten languages I'd like to study would be (including ones I know some of): Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, Sanskrit, Farsi, an indigenous US language (I had wanted to take Ojibwa at the U of MN but never would have had the chance), and... hard to say... maybe I'll change later anyway.