Home-Stay

This weekend the "culture experience" that the CNU program had us do was a traditional Korean home-stay.  We were all assigned a family to stay with from 6pm Friday night until noon Sunday.  My family was a family of 4, the mother was a high school math teacher, the father was an engineer, and they had two children- a boy who was 11 (so 9 in Korean years) and a girl who was 5 (so really 3.) Originally we had all thought that Koreans add one year on to their age but it's really 2.  How it works is that when the child is conceived, it is 1. When it is born it is 2.  I digress.  (Shout out to Kristi with that one... if you read this. :)  Anyway- Sonju (the mom) picked me up outside of the BTL dorms at 6pm on Friday. She introduced herself and immediately said she was pretty bad at english.  It was very choppy and I couldn't understand what she was saying most of the time.  The family lives about 15-20 minutes away from campus, where I met the two kids and the dad at home.  Most Koreans live in this tall apartment complexes.  From the outside they don't look that nice, but inside they are very spacious and nice! The father spoke english the best. He said he's better at reading it than speaking, and the reason he learned it was because of his job. The son could speak a bit of english because he took an online class, but he ended up hating it. That night, they took me to meet some of their friends from church where we had pork and other dishes.  I'm going to go off on a little tantrum right now, which I would like to say that I think this is my first of the trip. But hopefully everyone will have sympathy for me. I hope you're ready for this one.  Koreans ruin all sweets with beans. I'm not kidding. We got cookies a couple days ago... they had bean paste on the inside. I got a snow cone... it had BEANS in it. And this night that they took me to dinner, they got me ice cream and it had shaved ice and BEANS in it. Beans. Seriously? All I want is something sweet to satisfy my after dinner sweets craving and everything is ruined with BEANS. Why Korea? Also this was interesting... the father told me his daughter just had to get 6 fillings at the dentist.... and I almost wanted to ask why because I didn't understand where their fulfillment of sugar came from. Okay, rant over with.

Outside of Gwangju National Museum. (It was bright out!)

That night, the father found out I liked baseball, so he went to the market, picked up some Budweiser and turned on the baseball game. I explained to him that Budweiser is brewed in Saint Louis, and he was impressed. I wanted to talk more to the family, but it was tough for them to understand me so we kept everything pretty basic. I headed to my room around 11pm to go to bed. They were nice enough to let me sleep on a bed, as I was expecting to sleep on the floor. Funny enough... I might as well have. The bed was a piece of wood, and then on top of it was about a three inch thick mattress that I THOUGHT was stuffed. Well, it was wood too. They told me the next day that it was stuffed with wood. I don't know how the stuff a mattress with wood, but they do. And boy was it uncomfortable. I've never had such bad sleep in my life. That was my second rant. Sorry.

My wood bed. That green thing under the white quilt is wood. I didn't know that until I sat on it.

Saturday morning I woke up bright and early and headed to Sonju's high school to meet her students. In Korea, not all schools have athletics, so this school that she teaches at is an "athletic" school, meaning all students participate in sports. Also, in high school most schools go from 8am-10pm Monday thru Friday and then 8am-noon every other Saturday. They also get a 2 month summer break starting in July. She brought me into a classroom of about 40 students.  They all stared at me and giggled and asked me questions. It was actually pretty awkward... 16 and 17 year old boys were asking for my number in Korean and one of them came up to shake my hand and turned it into a "bro" hug. Oh I'm so thankful I went to an all girls school. Anyway, it was cool to see the school. I took a picture with a few students too.

Sonju is next to me on the left. Everyone else is a student at the school!

From the school we hopped over to the Gwangju National Museum where they just had a lot of artifacts excavated from around the Gwangju area. An older Korean man who studied english in West Virginia immediately came up to me when I came into the museum and led me around.  He was so kind, although the museum was kind of boring. It had a whole lot of rocks. From the museum we went and ordered lunch and brought it home.  I told them I liked Kimbop (the sushi I like) and they proceeded to order 8 rolls of it. There are 12 pieces in each roll, so for you non-math-wizzes thats 96 pieces of sushi. 96 pieces for 3 adults and 2 kids who barely eat. This was the style all weekend... they gave me food like every 2 hours. I couldn't eat it all!

Gwangju National Museum

After lunch we went up to Jongju... a city about an hour and a half north of Gwangju. It had a cool folk village and other touristy things. It was a rather warm day, and my family kept apologizing for it. I kept trying to explain to them that it was nothing compared to St. Louis but they didn't believe me. The heat was really bothering the kids, as they were crying and complaining most of the time.  The moral of this is that we barely did anything due to the weather. Jongju has a ton to offer sightseeing and touristy wise, but I barely got to see any of it because of humidity. All well, it was still a cool place to be. We headed back to Gwangju after about 2 hours of walking/sitting around. This is where I came to one of my other realizations of Korea... I have no idea what traffic laws there here.  They don't obey speed limits. (100 kilometers per hour speed limit on the highway really means you can go 150 km/h and be okay.) I'm not sure what the purpose of a red light is, because everyone drives through them. They don't even stop.  And lines for lanes are painted on the roads for show. No one obeys them. Lastly, you hear a honking horn every 2 seconds. Surprisingly, I have yet to see one accident or police car pulling anyone over.

Me with the family in Jongju's Folk Village!

That was pretty much the bulk of my home-stay. We just watched more baseball Saturday night, and they took me back Sunday morning.  They were very hospitable, it was just tough to communicate with them. When everyone was back on campus we watched the movie May 18th, which I talked about in my earlier post. Tomorrow (technically today, it's after midnight) is the 4th of July! I'm bummed I don't get to be in America for it, but we're ready to show the Koreans how we celebrate!

Side-note: I obviously lied when I said all of my postings wouldn't be so long. I'm terrible at summarizing so I'm sorry. :)