Without ceremony, I checked my answers one last time and turned in the last section of my final exam, thus ending my first semester here. I’m pretty confident that I did well overall on the final, about what I could have hoped. I was told that we’d be given a chance to review the graded test next semester, but it’s really moot right now. The semester is in the books.

I expected, perhaps even hoped, that we could get some sort of commemorative photo of the entire class after the final, but the class dispersed individually as they finished the test. Everybody in M33 is continuing on at least another semester (assuming they passed), so there’s a 20% chance that I’ll be with any of them next semester. I’ll miss quite a few of them if we don’t wind up together again. Even if they speak Korean too much during class, they’re all pretty fun people. Even the “shy Korean girls” that I mentioned soon after starting class. Also, I finally learned everyone’s names!

There are a lot of things I don’t know about the next semester; who my classmates will be, who my teachers will be… It won’t do me much good to try to guess right now, but I’m certain that whoever my teachers will be, they’ll be good ones. And I’m pretty sure that I’ll have some good classmates, even if they’re different from this semester’s.

For now, it’s a two week break. I have yet to plan anything, but knowing that I just have one more full week in the dorms with its unchecked freedom, it’d be foolish not to do something. For short term, I know I’m going back to the Ghibli Museum tomorrow morning, as a gift to myself for making it through the exam. Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll spend my maximum four hours at a monthly video shoot at work. I think I’ll play things by ear after that, depending on the weather. I need to give my camera a workout.

I’ll give a more detailed “review” of the KCP program after I’ve finished both semesters, but if you haven’t picked on the undertones, my general feeling is that of maniacal approval. Although I’m lucky that I was able to squeeze six months over here in what I originally perceived to be a tight schedule, I’ll still feel pretty sad when I turn in my next final exam. Until then, I just need to make sure that I’m taking full advantage of opportunities that I would later regret taking advantage of. In particular, I’m really not kidding about attempting to do a special course every day instead of just Tuesdays and Thursdays as it has been this semester. This depends on what courses are offered, but from my experience with Intermediate Kanji and Calligraphy, the special classes are run with as much care as the rest of the school is run, so it’s definitely worth the relatively small time investment.

Tonight I’m doing nothing, but it’s the good kind of nothing. By Sunday I’ll start getting restless again and crack open my JLPT preparation books. It’s the same restlessness that drove me during the first six years of studying this language, except now I have something resembling a direction, as well as another semester of classes and a building full of teachers to look forward to.