Korean Hospitality

           

             This week we did some one-on-one tutoring for soldiers in addition to the many hours we spent greeting soldiers at the USO. Tysha Hart came for help with her writing.

Frank Fykes has a dream to become an officer and is a dream to mentor. He is appreciative of every minute of instruction and returns each week with the homework assigned completed. In the meantime, we are preparing to teach a group of 25 soldiers in a BESEP review course.

                Victoria has come three times for a combination English/Korean study. She helps me with my Korean and I help her with her English. Our goal is to be able to talk to one another without a translator and we are doing well. We are speaking mostly in English but we are able to share ideas and feelings on a basic level.

                On Friday, we were included in the annual High Priest social in the Uijeonbu Ward since some of their high priest’s meet with us on Sunday. Thankfully, Brother Bae picked us up and gave us a ride to the apartment in Uijeonbu. Victoria was there to assist us in communicating and Sister Kuhn (who also meets with us on Sunday) used the more relaxed setting to practice her English. We were able to enjoy a wonderful variety of Korean foods and fellowship with the “Over 60’s.” (I think they told Victoria that the group was exclusive to those over sixty because she just celebrated her sixtieth birthday. Now she just barely qualified to be part of the group. She is such a bright, happy person that she seems easy to tease and joke around with. Most of the humor goes over our heads. We just laugh when everyone else laughs without any clue why.)

                The food was served at low tables with guests sitting on the floor. All the food was in the middle of the table and each guest had their own chop sticks, bowl of rice, and bowl of seaweed soup with spoon. The lettuce served as a wrap for anything you want to put into it. Almost always you include a bit of rice. There was a fried fish, mollusk of some sort, pork, spicy chicken wings, kimchi, hot green peppers, sliced garlic and a variety of vegetables and fried foods. One of the foods was acorn gelatin. We’ve been interested in seeing the actual food they make from the acorns since we watched our neighbors gathering them. We ate slowly and tried to pass the test of being Korean by enjoying the foods in front of us. Wayne ate a chicken wing and told me it wasn’t too spicy. I ate a green chili and found it to be pretty mild. The chicken wing I ate burned all the way down and Wayne drew a chili pepper hot enough to boil water. The meal ended with a plate of wonderful fresh fruit: pineapple, strawberries, and Asian pears.

We both felt like we had enjoyed a taste of true Korean culture compliments of these kind Koreans who know us only as the senior missionaries serving in Dongducheon. They opened their home and their hearts to us and we appreciate their kindness.

The Koreans love to eat together so they planned a meal to follow watching General Conference this morning. They served bibimbap which is rice with lots of vegetables usually decoratively arranged in the bowl and then topped with a fried egg. It is eaten by stirring it altogether. Today we could choose how much kimchi we added and it was really delicious. The Koreans serve fruit for dessert. You can see what I brought. Those two cakes disappeared quickly. We watched more General Conference with the soldiers on post in the afternoon and then another full session of General Conference with our district of missionaries here at our apartment after that. It’s pretty amazing to be able to access the words of the prophets half-way around the world.