thanksgiving, not yet

Today was thanksgiving day. About 30 minutes left in it. I remembered it was thanksgiving a few times, but for the most part didn't really think about it. Last year, we had a huge party at our apartment. (At that time, all six of us were living together...now I can't even imagine! Hallelujah.) This year, Donnie and Shannon are in Texas, but we're still having a party at their apartment - on Saturday. Christy, a friend from Alabama, is sort of organizing it. It looked like we weren't going to get a turkey (they're very hard to come by here), but she came through and found us one from a friend of a friend on the army base, I think. When I heard about that, I got pretty excited. I like turkey! I'm gonna make corn casserole (I got sour cream at COSTCO...yay!) and cookies, and probably some chocolate mice made from maraschino cherries and hershey's kisses.

Today I went to a mountain on the northwest side of Seoul with Okja and a few people from her church. When we got to the top, even though it was cloudy, we could see North Korea! I almost cried, and probably would have if I had been alone, but we didn't stay too long and Okja was busy teaching me Korean. She's so good at that! We ate a picnic lunch at the bottom of the mountain. Picnic Korean style usually means kimbap - rice and other ingredients wrapped with seaweed. The other people brought two kinds of kimchi, some little anchovies, rice, seaweed, and steamed egg. We all shared everything. That's the way it works in Korea, usually. I like it that way. For dessert, we ate a whole sack of mandarin oranges and one lady made us some instant coffee. Yummy! By the time we finished, we were all bundled up again and starting to get cold, so we headed back. People keep saying it's going to snow soon, but I can't believe it because it's still not that cold. I get excited when I hear talk of snow, though!