Korean Culture: My First Church Activity in Korea

As I mentioned last week, we found an English speaking branch of our church and it is luckily only 4 stops from our apartment building. This Saturday we went to a singles activity about Korean culture. It was kind of haphazard, but pretty fun. I’ve found that most things here are pretty haphazard, which is a little bit aggravating for a person like me who likes to plan everything out, but I’m learning to deal. Just go with the flow.

Anyways, we showed up about 3pm, a little late because we were held back a little late learning about making copies and getting books from people with serious hangovers from Friday night’s work party. Hehe… It still hadn’t started anyways. We hung out and talked with some people a while and then they started this Korean game where you had to throw rubber tipped arrows into this vase thing. It was super hard. The red team won with a whopping one arrow in the vase.

After that we learned a few phrases in Korean as well as how to count money in Korean. There are two ways to count in Korean. The one used to count money is actually Chinese, different from the numbers my dad and sister learned in taekwondo. We were given these cute notebooks to take notes in, but I ended up losing mine when they cleaned everything up. Oh, well.

Then one of the girls from the ward performed some traditional Korean music on some crazy awesome instrument.


She then taught us a traditional Korean fan dance, which we were all pretty bad at. I think it would have looked much cooler if we had been wearing hanboks like she was.


After that we learned how to make vegetable pancakes. They were SO good and really easy. All you do is mix the flour mix stuff with dehydrated potatoes (I think… the bag had potatoes on it), add water and cut up chives, green onions, and string mushrooms. You can also add other things like kimchee or I’ve had it with various types of sea food. I like them a lot. I’m going to practice making them so I can make an awesome Korean meal for my family when I come home. Maybe I’ll practice on my dad when he comes to visit in October. ;)

After gorging ourselves on pancakes, we then got pizza from Costco!! It had bulgogi (thinly sliced seasoned beef), green peppers, mushrooms, and some other stuff. Yum yum. I’ll definitely be indulging in that kind of pizza again.

The pizza was accompanied by aloe juice… which tastes just really sweet with giant chunks of fruit in it. Ok. If you like pulp. And sunscreen…

It was fun hanging out with everyone from church. I’ll be living a few blocks away from a girl named Jessica, so we plan on getting together sometime.

Monday starts classes for me. I’ll be teaching Memory giga (early ESL level), and Par Reading (maybe early middle ESL). I only see my Par Reading classes once a week, and I got four classes of that. I see my memory classes twice a week, and I got two different classes of that. So, all in all, I only have to plan three different lesson plans a week! I plan on taking some time tomorrow to prep. It shouldn’t take too long since I’ll be teaching the same lessons I prepped in during training.

Wish me luck starting my new job!! My first job actually teaching… wow.