Hello!
First, to answer some of the questions sent to me...
So we're meeting with two families every week - our district president, President 윤성조 (Sungjo Yoon) and our district 2nd counselor President 문경호 (Gyeuongho Moon).
President 윤성조's family has 5 people, and I think the oldest is in high school, with the youngest in elementary school. They like playing games; yesterday, we played a sort of matching game to study English. They had a bunch of cards with a picture on one side, and the English word for the picture on the other. We would say the English word, and they had to find it based on the picture. There was like 300 cards, and we probably played for a good 45 minutes, but they were all really focused, and really, really competitive the entire time.
President 문경호's family is a little bit younger. His oldest is maybe 9 or 10, and the youngest is just starting to say words. They're a little harder to teach since they get bored really easily, but they love brownies. They talk about brownies like every time we come over - "Mom, are we making brownies today!?" President 문경호 owns a "pension" (is that what it's called in English as well?), so basically a huge party cabin that he rents out. We do service there for a couple of hours (he uses a wood stove, so usually finding wood, and then moving said wood around), and then have dinner, sometimes study English, and then a spiritual message.
For 설날, we didn't get to see a whole lot of what goes on. 서귀포 was just kind of quiet; I think most people just celebrate it by getting together with family and eating a bunch; I'm not sure it there's a lot of other traditions that they do. For sure, the stores got into it with a bunch of sales on random stuff, but no decorations or anything.
And yes, I got the mail, so don't worry about that.
As far as birthday stuff goes, I still have a bunch of stuff from Christmas, so I don't really need more food or anything. Hmm... but Elder Brower has this one card game, Citadels, that I kind of want. We play it on p-days when we have time. If you can find a copy of the game, please send it over! :D
What we eat at home is usually really, really simple. I think I wrote about it back when I was in 영도, but we eat the exact same things. Gyoza/pot stickers with rice, curry, eggs and rice, sometimes sandwiches, frozen tonkasu, things like that. Recently, since the members have been feeding us fairly often, we haven't had to do much cooking at all (oh, and after every district meeting, we go out to eat somewhere, so that's another meal we don't have to cook), which is lovely~~.
Members tend to feed Korean food of course - Korea had lot of side dishes, so usually like whatever's sort of the main, along with kimchi, kimchi like things made of radishes, kimichi like things that are made of kind of grassy stuff, any kind of meat cooked in eggs, seeds, sweet beans, weird picked nasty stuff, bean sprouts, hot peppers. Any given restaurant will serve kimchi, something called "water kimchi," hot peppers, and raw onions and garlic with this fermented soybean sauce. As far as main courses go... spicy stir frys, spicy meat stews, and kind of Korean tradition meat, are the most common.
The food here is good. I definitely don't love every single thing on the table, but I eat well for sure. I think they eat more rice in Japan than in Korea though, and so that's one thing I kind of miss - I kind of tend to eat until my rice runs out, even if I can eat more food (because you don't want to eat kimchi without rice. We had a branch activity once, and this less active woman made some kimchi, so she made me eat it. Of course, she gave a huge piece, literally a mouthful. Oooh, I thought I was going to die; it was strong. I seriously considered walking about, and spitting it all out, but I made it after like 4 minutes of chewing through it. Elder Brower suffered the same unfortunate fate as I did. I remember both of us told her, "No, we can't eat it; that's too much kimichi!" but that didn't stop her).
As far as this week goes...
설날 was fine; cleaning wasn't really fun, but we kept busy.
The day right after though, Elder Brower and I got terribly, terribly sick. We both had bad stomachaches, throwing up, things like that (I blame the kimchi soup a member fed us the night before...), so Saturday we did nothing but lay down in our house. That was hard.
But by Sunday, we both felt much, much better, went to church and all that. And today, Elder Brower feels fine, and I'm at like 85%, so thankfully, we were only really out of commission for a day.
And on Sunday, our investigator, 전충식 (name confirmed to be correct!) was able to come to church! He got back from Seoul early, and so he stopped by. He missed most of sacrament meeting, but stayed for Sunday school. We learned about Cain and Enoch, and so I'm not sure how much he understood, but that's fine. I gave him a quick outline about both, so if nothing else, he understood that Cain was a "bad man." (he was flipping through the scriptures, and found a random one about Cain marrying his brother's daughter or something. He was really shocked, showed us the verse, and told us "So evil. I cannot believe this bad man."). But it went well I think. The members were all really nice, so hopefully he had a good experience.
And I guess that brings us up to today! Hopefully we'll be able to spend this week a bit healthier. And hopefully, you all will be healthy this week too! Being sick is no fun (especially as a missionary...). Thanks for all your letters and love and support! Love you all!
- Elder Luke
Notes:
설날: Seollal, Lunar New Year = Chinese New Year.
서귀포: Seogwipo, the city he's in.
영도: Yeongdo, his previous area.
weird picked nasty stuff: I think he meant to type "pickled."
전충식: Jeon Chungsik, the "English spaz" investigator they've been working with for a month or two now.
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