오 이 김 치

I stayed at SooMan's house this weekend. His mom taught me to make Cucumber Kimchee. We made tons too... I am still eating it with my dinner every night. First, you wash and cut the cucumbers lengthwise. However, when cutting them, you do not cut all the way down. Instead, you leave the slices connected by just slicing down the middle. The creates pockets, which then allows the spices to permiate the cucumber. Next, you put the cucumbers in a container with some rock salt and let me sit about 20 minutes. While the cucumbers are sitting, you make your spice. Heat one cup of water with one tablespoon glutenous rice flour (I didn't know there was rice that had gluten in it) to make a thick slurry. Next, cut up any vegetables (we used leeks, red and yellow bell pepper, and onion) and put with garlic. Poor the flour slurry over the vegetables and mix by hand. Then, add red pepper powder to suit your taste. I like the red pepper powder here because it is much stronger than at home, which means you don't have to use as much. In fact, just opening the bottle might cause your nose to burn and your eyes to water. So, needless to say, my mouth is on fire while eating the 오 이 김 치, but it's so delicious, I can't help but enjoy it. Sometimes I need rice just to soften the heat.

Sunday I went to meet Jina at Noksapyeoung at 9:30am to study Korean, and help her with free talking in English, before church. However, like last Sunday, I couldn't find Seoul International Baptist Church. I thought that we should just skip church like I always do and go to eat lunch at Subway instead. Well, Jina felt that I shouldn't miss church, so she picked one and we went in. This church was on the 5th floor. When we arrived, we saw both the African American pastor and African American congregation. I was thinking "woopsie," but before we could turn around and leave, this rather large woman came to give us a hug and welcome us into the service. I knew how awkward Jina was feeling, but we went in and sat down anyway. After several "Halleluahs", "Amens," canned priase music that neither I nor Jina knew, dancing, shouting, and tamberine shaking, the pastor, with sweat on his brow, settle down for just a moment to start his sermon. He spoke about the greed of wealth, the corruption of money, and God's desire and will for us to have abundance instead of lack. Well, if everyone is suppose to believe that God wants us to have abundance and blessing, and that He will give us that, when it doesn't happen (as life goes), they will wonder where God went. In other words, I don't care for fluffy sermons. Instead, I want the real ones that answer life's questions. Finally, I told Jina that we should just go. I figured we were polite enough to stay for an hour, but we had an appointment. So we quitely scooted out the door. when we were outside of the church, I said to Jina "run!" The lady that came to give us a hug before came outside, so while I was running far ahead of Jina, Jina polited told her that we have an appointment and we were very sorry to have to leave. When Jina and I got out of the building and started walking away, we noticed that the lady had run down stairs and was following us yelling "wait; stop; sisters!" Jina and I turned around to explain one more time that we were quite sorry that we had to leave, but the lady was so insistant that we stay, she pulling my arm (quite forcefully), yanking me towards the church. "Don't let Jina cause you to miss your blessing" she would say to me. This went on for about 10 minutes before she finally gave in and let us go. I held my own, but had she went on any longer, I think I would have had to be frank. Not only is that rude to me, but it was totally culturally inappropriate to Jina.

After that fiasco, we went to eat lunch at Subway, where we met a journalist from Holland who works for Radio Netherlands, a division of NPR. She had been in Korea for less than a week and was going to have an interview with a former North Korean prisioner who currently lives in South Korea, but her translator canceled at the last minute. She had the phone number of this guy, but couldn't contact him because he doesn't speak any English. Jina is studying to be a translator, and had done some volunteer translating jobs in the past, so the fact that we met this woman was such a coincidence! Jina and the journalist exchanged information so that she could work as a translator for Radio Netherlands for this interview. This journalist had apparently also been to North Korea as a tourist and took many pictures that she showed us. There were many people, towns, cities, and her hotel room. We talked about the division of North and South, and the dfficulties that would come with any sort of union between the two. But we also talked about the similarities between the two as well. It was a really neat conversation. Before we knew it, it was 3:30pm, and Jina had to go to church. So, we said our goodbyes and hopped on the subway to go in our different directions. She lives north on the blue line and I live south on the blue line.

I had a three-day GEPIK (Gyeonggi English Program in Korea) retreat/workshop this past week. I was great! I met many foreigners from Austrailia, South Africa, New Zealand, England, and Canada, but surprisingly, most were from the US. We all have coordinators specific to our region, all of which are Korean, but many of which have grown up in English speaking countries. Some foreigners were new (green name tag) and some were returns (white name tag), so there were two different tracks to take at the workshop. The GEPIK contract, lessoning planning, and cultural barriers were main topics.

At one point, the newbies were broken up into region, which made a nice small group for us to get to know one another. In that group, we talked about cultural differences and lesson plan ideas. We worked with a partner to design a lesson plan that we would present the following day, and both my partner and I were voted best from my group. Our lesson was for third graders and was titled "How Many Cows?" We talked about numbers, animals, and plural nouns by using power point, free-talking, and games. One the coordinators told me that I was very animated, which made for an interesting class. That made me feel really good.

The food was great. Chicken enchiladas with hot sauce, spanish rice, potato curry, cabbage salad, and more. They took the best of Korean food and mixed that with foreign food. Not literally, but at different times of the day. The GEPIK coordinators did a fantastic job at putting together this workshop restreat! The last night we all got together for a "get to know your coordinators" time. We would all have to find three people from out region and sit down, find five people with our eye color and sit down, or find fifteen people that came in the same bus and sit down. The last time we played that game, we had to find twenty people (anywhere) and sit down. This was our group for that night. Each group was assigned a coordinator, and each member assigned a number. Each group practiced cheers for their coordinator, and were assigned points based on the loudness of their cheer. Then, random numbers were called, and the group members with that number had to dance to K-pop (Korean pop music) for their group. Each group then picked two people to come on stage and dance. Wouldn't you guess that I was one of the two people picked. One by one, the two team members danced to K-pop on stage for the 200-some people that game to the GEPIK workshop. Somehow, each time our team needed to be represented on stage, I was picked to do so... I had lots of fun doing it though.

One more thing before I go. Not to freak you out or anything, but I definitely got hit by a car this morning. The traffic light was red and the pedestrian light was green, so I proceeded to bike across the cross-walk. At the same time, this car whirled around the corner, hitting me with the front right or his car. For whatever reason, Koreans find it necessary to constantly run red lights. SooMan even did so this weekend. My legs hurt and are buised, but no cuts, no blood, so my bike and I are fine. Had he come around the corner a few seconds later, he could have hit me dead on.

Some of my classes are in the last lesson of the semester, lesson 8 "What will you do this summer?" So, I took the liberty of giving them a cultural lesson about American football by talking about, and showing them a youtube video clip of, Alabama Football. I talked about the importance football plays in the south, what color crimson is, why we are called the "Crimson Tide," why we yell "Roll Tide!" to our team, and how we came to have an elephant as our mascot. The kids had fun and so did I. It certainly made me long for a chance to see a live Alabama home game.