Busy Weekend

My transition between host families has been one of extremes. I got used to spending a lot of time by myself, and now I am a member of a busy, close family. And when I say close, I mean it. Put a family of five (plus another daughter who lives away from home) in a 17th-story apartment, and you will see a lot more interaction than you typically do in American homes. Not that this apartment is small, but there aren't really a lot of places to go to be alone. So I often see my 23-year-old host sister and my 14-year-old host brother sharing a chair and the computer screen while the rest of the family settles elsewhere in the living room with the news or a Korean drama on for the evening.

Saturday, my host parents took me hiking at the mountain near our apartment. Upon reaching the top, we found an assortment of Korean-style outdoor gym equipment - a sit-up bench, pull-up bars, and a hoola hoop. While my host dad hoola hooped, my host mom and I sat down to do sit-ups. When we were finished, she asked me in Korean how many I did. I told her "42," and she said. "I did 100." I sat back down and kept going. After hiking, we went to the grocery to get foods that I like and the ingredients for me to cook American food for dinner - BLTs, per Dad's suggestion!

Today, we hiked again, this time with my oldest host sister, Ja-Hee. At the workout park, I sat down to do my 100 sit-ups, stood up when finished, and answered my host-mom's question with "100, this time." She smiled and said "Today, I did 200." Drat.

I cooked the BLTs, and they were a huge success! As I was waiting for the bread to toast and the bacon to fry and the whole family was telling me how hungry they were, I was getting pretty nervous. After we started eating, though, all I heard was "Oh, tasty! Oh really tasty!" in Korean [*side note: one thing kind of strange about the Korean language, from a foreigner's perspective, is how frequently people verbally express their current feeling with one word. I can't count how often I hear "Oh, tired / hungry / full / hot / cold / stressed." So in translation, a meal in my home-stay sounds to me (as in, to a person who can't understand more complex utterances) like,"oh hungry, hungry!" "oh, delicious, delicious!" "oh full, full, so full!"] Also, the BLTs earned me the third and fourth English phrases I've heard from my host brother. The first was when I introduced Eddie to my host family on Skype and Jun-Myeong asked him "What server do you play on?" regarding Starcraft. The second was a bashful pre-BLT "Thank-you!" and the third an enthusiastic "Wonderful!" in between bites. He devoured two and a half sandwiches! 

Above, counter-clockwise from the bottom left, are Jun-Myeong, 14, My host-mom who I call "Oh-ma," my host sister Ja-Hee, 23, my host-dad "Ah-pa," and Min-Hee (Minnie), 16, who is also my student.