homestay...the first days

I moved in Tuesday evening, with the help of Donnie and Clint. Everyone, including me, was amazed at how much stuff I have, which is sad. It all fits in my room with the piano and a few other things they left in there, but still, I need to get back down to two or three suitcases. I'm gonna work on that. I took my bed with me and left the other furniture and dishes at my old apartment for Treavor and Alina to use. All they had was a bed, so they were glad to get the stuff.

So, living with a Korean family is teaching me a lot already! I am actually pretty surprised about how patient and unirritated I've been. Praise God! The whole family was there to help me arrange my stuff. The dad insisted on helping me move things around. He said a lot of things to me that I didn't really understand and the girls told him to use simple language. I generally understand the topic of what the parents are saying when they keep talking like that and that's it. But, I hope that with more time, that will get better.

On the first night, the girls didn't want to leave my room. They were looking at everything, from my Korean study books to going through each piece of jewelry and commenting on it to opening every drawer. The younger girl made me some labels in English and Korean for my dresser, then she taped them on. They've actually come in pretty handy. I was so tired that night after staying up until three AM, going to school, then moving and unpacking, that I think I was too tired to think anything. The older girl stayed in my room until after 11 looking at stuff. When her mom asked her to go to bed, she said she wanted to look more and the mom just said OK!

The hardest part about living here is eating Korean food every morning for breakfast. I was hoping that the mom just cooked the first few mornings and didn't usually do that, but I asked the girls and they said she cooks every morning. Wow. I'm eating kimchi, dried seaweed, all the other side dishes, rice and soup for breakfast every day. The first day it was fermented bean soup (dwinjang jjigae), the next day beansprout soup, then kimchi stew, and this morning it was something with mushrooms in it. It's really good food, and my stomach can handle it, but i just want to eat cereal or toast and jam for breakfast!

There's an oven here, so I used it on my second day to make cookies. I gave a speech in Korean about how to make cookies (hardly anybody in Korea bakes) and I took pictures of the process for my speech and then took cookies to share afterwards. Of course, the family here got some too and they were impressed. I'm sure there are a lot of things I'm not doing right culturally so far, but homemade cookies can cover up a multitude of errors. The oven in this house had never even been used before!

I could write more, but I'll leave it at that for now. I have some pictures to post, but I don't have internet access from my own computer, so I can't post them yet. Later, I'll post some pretty spring blooms and pictures of our family trip to Hwaseong fortress today soon.