새해 복 많이 받으세요

Seh heh pok mahnee pah duh sae yo!

"New year's blessings please receive." 

 

Our first night in Daegu.

This is a common Korean New Year's greeting, and I love it. The shift in sentence structure creates a subtle but significant shift in meaning when translated from Korean to English.  To me it means - this new year will be filled with blessings which we are invited to receive. Heavenly Father has great blessings in store for each of us, but we must make an effort to recognize them and receive them. I love a new year. Clean slate. Blank page. Fresh start. What will the new year bring? I can't begin to imagine what new opportunities, changes, challenges or trials may come. I hope to see the blessings offered and accept the invitation to receive them.




A bird's eye view of our
temporary home town.

2013 was very eventful! Okay, that was an understatement. It was in many ways a life changing year for us. We began the paperwork process for another full time mission in January. We were as surprised as anyone else about that turn of events. It was at least seven months ahead of schedule. In fact we had nearly talked ourselves into waiting until early 2014 to begin serving a second mission. We spent Jan & Feb traveling to see family before we left at a still unknown time to our mission in San Diego. Then an unexpected phone call came and our mission suddenly also became "to parts unknown". The end of March we received the stunning and exciting news that we would serve in the Busan South Korea mission. Never heard of Busan, hardly knew anything about Korean. Except that North Korea was threatening nuclear warfare. Charming!

  

Some of the foods we
are learning to love.

A few days after receiving our mission call we left for the rest of our "goodbye to family" trip, or our "farewell torture tour". This round of our travels included a three week trip to Sao Paulo Brazil to visit Jake and family. It was one of those "pinch me" experiences. We had a wonderful time.

 

The series of goodbyes took it's toll on both of us. So many tears! Yet we were also looking forward with great anticipation to our Korea adventure. We have had one blog worthy experience after another in the six months we have been here. Meanwhile back at the ranch... or at least back in the USA... our family members have had their own adventures. Some trials, some changes and countless blessings. The most notable changes have been the migrations. This is actually a repeat of our first mission. While we served in Colorado six of our seven children moved. Two to different houses, the rest to different states. Since we left home for this mission on June 13th, two children have moved into different houses, one to another city and two more are changing jobs which will require them to move to a different state. Coincidence? I think not. At least they let us know their new addresses!

 

This is the year we go home. This is the year our mission is completed. We should be home surrounded by family next Christmas. I love that thought, but I am not trying to rush this year. We love our mission and especially the people we serve. We have 11 months of adventures left here, and I want to cherish each and every one. We have a Korea specific bucket list, which I may share with you soon.

 

We hope for a happy and healthy new year for all of you.

May we all recognize and receive the many blessings the new year brings.

All of them!

Whether they are gifts of prosperity or lessons cloaked in challenges,

may God bless us with a joyous and adventurous new year!

 

 

More of our Korea Christmas

It's the day after Christmas here in Korea, but its been more like Christmas part two! That's because most of the day here was actually December 25th where our children and grandchildren live. Sometimes the time difference makes things weird. It's a mind game! 

Christmas away from home has been interesting. We certainly had a few moments of homesickness. We have appreciated modern technology like never before. We loved  our phone calls, Skype chats, Facebook posts, Christmas cards, American TV specials... everything that delivered some traditional Christmas to our little apartment. Our access to the PX and the commissary proved to be an extra  special blessing during the holidays. It allowed us to create a few holiday miracles and joyful memories here because they carry the ingredients/products we use to produce goodies.

Even with all things American, this was a Christmas we will never forget. Korea is not a primarily Christian country. Most people did not grow up with Christmas celebrations. Those we have talked to said they did receive Santa visits and goodies in a stocking. Otherwise Christmas is mostly a romantic celebration for couples. They are the ones that exchange gifts. We did see decorations at businesses around town, but none in windows of apartments- except ours. Stores do sell Christmas decorations and cards. Still- Lunar New Year or Cheosok are much bigger holidays here. It was both a challenge and a privilege to help provide some traditional Christmas experiences for a few Americans away from home. The most satisfying part of Christmas was seeing our guests enjoy each other. Such a strong sense of friendship and fellowship accompanied the treats and activities. The Spirit of Christmas truly became the Spirit of Christ. We are so blessed to serve here in this beautiful country and to enjoy such wonderful people.
 Here is a glimpse of our Korea Christmas:

Our District Relief Society leadership planned a wonderful activity. Sisters from all over South Korea came, many driving for hours just to participate. We enjoyed a progressive dinner. The music and activities were increasingly reverent as we moved from place to place. Fred and I were the closing speakers sharing a message about the temple and keeping Christ in Christmas. It was wonderful to gather with these fine sisters, most of them so far from home.


 Our mission party was held in Busan. We took a taxi,  a train and subways to get there. It was a wonderful day filled with music, Christmas messages, good food, and lots of young missionaries enjoying one another. We met in one of our church buildings with a  Korean touch- kimchee pots outside the front door and rows of shoes left in  the front entrance.



Our little military branch party was delightful. The food was great, but the real treat was the live nativity presented by our primary children. The six young missionaries serving the branch sang as the children posed in their roles. It was cute and very touching. Santa also sent one of his helpers, a handsome young soldier who did a great job of representing the man himself.

Christmas caroling to our Korean neighbors was one of my very favorite activities. The young missionaries helped us. Elder Jeong wrote a note in Korean for each plate of cookies we had prepared. It explained that we are the Americans in building 108  and we don't speak Korean, but are happy to be their  neighbors. It also included the phone number of the young missionaries (who all do speak Korean) and told them they could get a message to us through them. Then we took the plates and started knocking on doors- which is not common here. Elder Jeong would greet them then we would sing a song and give them the cookies. Most people were hesitant at first, but quickly warmed up to us. It was wonderful.

Christmas day 18 people joined us for dinner, a gift exchange and games. We enjoyed our time with these wonderful people. Our desire was to provide a little Christmas joy but we received much more than we gave.

It was a Merry Christmas for us.

One we will always remember.

Home and Holidays

With Thanksgiving behind us and Christmas a few days away, I have been thinking a lot about celebrations and traditions. I grew up in a family that enjoyed celebrating holidays. We have carried on the love of holidays with our own children and grandchildren. We had lots of traditions when I was a child; we still have lots of traditions. My mind fills with warm memories of  family and friends gathered for Thanksgiving feasts. I can clearly picture the beautiful bright decorations of Christmas reflecting off the glistening white snow. I love the scents of the holidays- The savory smell of the dressing, the sweet spicy smell of baking pumpkin pies or cooling Christmas cookies. I also love the sounds- Family members sharing stories and memories, children playing and giggling, Christmas music, and the sound of our favorite classic Christmas movies playing in the background. Holidays can strengthen family bonds. They can bring some color into our lives. They change the pace and focus for a short period of time. I associate holiday celebrations with home. Though we have traveled a great deal, we have spent nearly every Christmas in one of the two places I feel at home. Either Great Falls or Colorado Springs. I only recall  two Christmas's that I was in any other place. Once when I was a child we spent Christmas in Oklahoma with my grandparents. It was a wonderful trip and a memory I cherish. The other was in Provo Utah, in a motel. We were there to attend our youngest son's wedding in the Salt Lake Temple, the day after Christmas. I remember purchasing a dollar store Christmas tree and a few window clings for the mirror to decorate our motel room. The realization that our son and his beautiful fiancé were being married in the temple of God clarified the purpose for our celebrations. It was a wonderful holiday, one of my favorites.

Celebrating Christmas in Korea will be a unique experience. We sent all of our Christmas gifts home a couple of weeks ago, most have already arrived. We have decorated our cute apartment with traditional Christmas decorations given to us as gifts. I am truly enjoying those decorations. I love serving here, but truth be told... I really do not feel at home here. I feel more like I am on an extended visit. I guess that's true. A subtle longing for home lingers. It doesn't keep me from enjoying the people I meet, the places we go, or the work we do. I will have a wonderful Christmas here. I will not let the shadow of homesickness ruin all I have to celebrate here. This is the time we celebrate the birth of our Savior. He is the redeemer of all of the children of God. As I focus on this miracle of miracles, I realize I have great cause to celebrate. I am grateful for the traditions of my childhood that bring to me such warm and sweet memories. I am grateful for the teachings of my childhood which have built in me a firm belief in the miracle of Christmas.  I wish for each of you a Christmas filled with celebrations, traditions and most of all with the Spirit of our Lord and Redeemer, whose birth we honor.

The Christmas season begins....


We enjoyed the Christmas Devotional for Monday's FHE. The lights you see are in one of our outside windows. Our lights are the only ones in the windows of any of the apartments in our complex. A few of the bushes near our complex entrance have some white lights. There are also some beautiful lights downtown and many out at Camp Walker.


Every six weeks we fix breakfast for all the missionaries in our zone the week after transfers. They are always so appreciative and express their gratitude as they devour stacks of Fred's delicious hot pancakes. The most common response goes something like this, "Whoa!!! It's been __ (fill in the blank) months since I've had pancakes. This is awesome!" For December's transfer breakfast we added a little Christmas flair. We love those missionaries!

More to come!

Fun Fun Korea Adventure

Life in a foreign country is definitely an adventure. Every once in a while something happens that strikes us funny and one of us will say "Yep, we're living in Korea." Not everything is funny when it happens, but with time and perspective we can see the humor in our day to day challenges. The biggest challenge continues to be the language. We are learning and love to try to test out our skills. We know we will never really speak Korean, but we are having fun learning a few phrases and words. We have found a few good tutorials on YouTube. One of our favorites is "Christina's Fun Fun Korean Lessons".  She has several short lessons which are easy to follow and actually quite fun. Christina also introduces random cultural facts as she teaches the lessons. I decided to borrow from Christina and make this post just a few random experiences/facts that demonstrate our fun fun Korean adventure.


Our church held Thanksgiving the Saturday before the holiday. A family made up of soldiers (a few families), college professors, American teachers, federal employees, missionaries and Koreans.  We also held Thanksgiving in our apartment for those who do not have families here. I believe this may be the main reason Heavenly Father sent us here.... to provide a home away from home for some of his children.

The blue trees are vinyl from my daughter.
There are others placed around the apartment.
 Love them!

I received several Christmas decorations as birthday gifts. Thanks to my family, who know me so well. And also to some sweet missionaries who wanted to wish me a happy birthday. I loved decorating our cute little Korean apartment .  This is the darling little tree which is pre-lit and decorated.

Seoman  market- This is one of one of many  displays. Some things at the markets we may never get used to (blood & noodle stuffed intestines). "Yep, we are living in Korea"





Each Monday we have Family Home Evening  We share a spiritual thought, refreshments and games. This week Sup taught us a traditional Korean game called Yut-noli. Its a game played with sticks. We see older people playing it in the parks often. Sup says its a traditional family game played at Chuseok and Chinese New Year. It was lots of fun.



I don't have a picture for this, but want to share a frequent subway experience. Respect for Elders is an important component of Korean culture. I am always impressed when a young Korean jumps up to offer their seat to someone older. It's also quite entertaining to see the "older" people trying to give their seats to each other. They are often quite insistent. In many cases they look like they are the same age, but obviously they don't want to believe it.

Okay, I just want to throw in one more random observation. Here in Daegu nearly all cars are black or shades of grey/silver or white. You see a few colorful cars, but very few. I have no idea why. Maybe I should ask Sup**. The one exception is the blue trucks you see everywhere. They are all blue. Here's a picture.  Oh, one more thing.... everyone parks on the sidewalks. Fred always teases that you better get off the sidewalk or you will get hit.

That's it for this edition of our fun fun Korea adventure.

So much more to come.

 

**I asked Sup and one of the Korean missionaries. They responded it relates to being in harmony and not wanting to stand out. Interesting, and not at all American!

 

 

 

SEOUL TRAIN

Heart shaped shrimp cakes for
a morning snack.

How about a side order of squid
rings. Yum! Yum!

Dongdaegu train station.

Riding the KTX is one of our Korea bucket list items. The KTX is also known as the bullet train because of its speed. I think I have established our continued challenges while traveling in or from Seoul, but for the sense of setting the stage I will try to provide a brief summary. We have traveled to Seoul four times. Seoul is a huge city with crazy drivers and wildly confusing streets. We expected our first trip to be stressful and we weren't disappointed. We got lost, got stuck in traffic and ended up leaving town an entirely different way than we came in. We didn't expect the second and third trips to be even worse. During trip two our GPS took us in a 3.5 hour loop around Seoul depositing us right back where we started. Which caused us to regroup and start again, then drive home in the dark.  Trip three we didn't get lost. We shouted a premature "Hallelujah" as we left the big city. Traffic accidents, road construction and rainy roads slowed us down to a crawl and over six hours later we arrived home to Daegu.



 

Looking out over Daegu from
the train station.

You don't have to hit us over the head.... well, more than three times. As we prepared for yet another trip to Seoul, Fred decided the train would be the way to go. We couldn't get lost on the train and he could relax and not worry about the traffic. Oh, we were so excited. To add to our excitement, we decided to take the slow train to Seoul (about 4 hours) and the bullet train home (about 2 hours). What a brilliant plan and fun way to experience the KTX. We knew there would still be a few challenges once we arrived in Seoul, but we had ample time to deal with them when we got there.

The train ride was wonderful. Comfortable and relaxing. I loved watching the scenery through the train windows. I especially loved having Fred sitting next to me calmly enjoying the ride. Once we arrived, we had to get to the church. According to our instructions we had to take the subway, transfer once then walk about three blocks. It would be so easy if either one had more than extremely limited skills with the Korean language. We have learned a valuable lesson since we have been here. If you just stand at the map and look stupid a kind hearted English speaking Korean will show up and help. It happens all the time. It happened this time. We were able to get on the correct subway, make the transfer and arrive at the church without a hitch. We were pretty proud of ourselves. Our meetings were wonderful and inspiring. Fred gave a great talk. Ironically it was about not being stupid in a crazy world. We were able to reverse our steps and find the same train station we came into. We were 100% sold this was the way to go. Nothing could go wrong now. We had extra time, so we stopped and had dinner before we went to see which track the KTX was coming in on. That's when we found out how Seoul was going to get us this time. We...were...at... the...wrong ...train station! The KTX doesn't stop at that station. "I HATE SEOUL! I AM NEVER COMING HERE AGAIN!"  I might have actually said that out loud. I immediately went from feeling great about our wonderful day to being exhausted, stressed and completely frustrated. Fortunately the train company is very good about refunding tickets. We traded our KTX tickets in for the next slow train, which was about an hour later. The train arrived back in Daegu at 2:00 am. We found a taxi driver who had no idea how to find our apartment and spoke no English. So between a GPS and Fred gesturing and pointing, we finally made it home. We aren't quite sure how we ended up at the wrong station in Seoul. The best we can figure is that the Korean speaking ticket agent that sold Fred the original tickets had tried to tell Fred it would be a different station. I guess we will never really know.

It has taken a few days, but I am finally finding this funny. We are the "Keystone Cops" of travel in Korea. If it was up to me we would never go to Seoul again. But we have duties in the temple one Saturday a month. The truth is, attending the temple is worth overcoming any barriers put in our way. Being in the temple puts things into perspective. The world's problems, small or large, seem manageable and the blessings of eternity seem attainable. I love going to the temple.  So in a couple weeks we will try again. Wish us luck.





SUNDAY SUPPER

 We just passed the five month mark of our mission. Time is passing so quickly now. Our routine is made up of scheduled events which repeat daily, weekly or monthly. We also include planned or spontaneous adventures. These  are the kind of experiences that we will only be able to enjoy here. They are the truly Korean adventures. I enjoy the routine and the adventures.

One of my very favorite routine events is what we have come to call "Sunday Supper". Like everything else we have done here it started as an idea and evolved into a tradition.

We began by inviting a different family from church  to come to our apartment for a meal after church each week. Our goal was to have every family in our small branch in our home for a meal at least once. We almost completed that goal when we began to feel a need to invite the unaccompanied soldiers over for a home cooked meal each Sunday. Then after a couple of weeks we realized that others, not just soldiers, were also alone on Sunday afternoon. That is when it morphed into the "Sunday Supper". Some Sundays we have only two or three join us. Some times a lot more choose to come. So now I just fill two slow cookers, prepare sides or dessert to go with them,  then head to church. Our meetings end at 1:30 and I walk home quickly to take care of any finishing touches and wait to see who comes.

Yesterday we had ten guests. This included four soldiers here without families, another soldier and his wife, a young American English teacher, an American college professor, a  student here from Bangladesh and a young Korean woman who is also a teacher. Our apartment has become their Sunday home away from home. They are so appreciative of the meal, but that is not the real gift. The gift is a sense of belonging, a sense of family, a place to go where they feel welcome, a place to relax. I love to watch them talk and laugh. Its so rewarding to hear them share their ideas, experiences and offer one another support. I am so happy to have them here to share our Sunday afternoons, it keeps us from feeling lonely also.

When we were raising our children we tried very hard to have our dinner meal sitting together at the table. We were mostly successful. As they grew and got busy with sports and school activities it became more difficult. We still had family meals at the table, just not as often. The family meal was and is an important part of our lives. Having dinner together is about so much more than just food. It was true during those busy years raising a large family and its true here on our mission.

            Food feeds the body. Friendship feeds the soul!

Happy Pepero Day

Here's some information about an interesting Korean holiday.

 Pepero Day is an observance in South Korea similar to Valentine's Day. It is named after the Korean snack Pepero and held on November 11, since the date "11/11" resembles four sticks of Pepero. The holiday is observed mostly by young people and couples, who exchange Pepero sticks, other candies, and romantic gifts. Lotte denies starting the holiday and instead states that they noticed a bump in Pepero sales around November 11 and after continued popularity they decided to then encourage the holiday with special gift boxes and other promotions.

Lotte usually does about 55% of their Pepero business in November every year.
 

Lotte is a huge corporation here. Lotte Mart can be compared to Walmart. The one we go to here in Daegu is smaller than the average Walmart back home, but similar. It includes a Lottetteria! I bet you can guess that is their in-store cafeteria. They don't sell burgers or subs, but traditional Korean dishes. Lotte also has a huge amusement park in Seoul called Lotteworld! I have also seen apartment complexes called Lotte Castle.

So it appears that marketing is alive and well right here in South Korea. Who else has a holiday built around a type of food? Well I guess America has a few, doesn't it! But not necessarily a holiday for one brand of food. Maybe we should start Oreo Day. My son-in-law would promote that one. So what date would Oreo day be celebrated anyway? Since we don't have a month that has four zeroes I would suggest February 21st. That is the birthday of the son-in-law previously mentioned!