Here in Korea, the lunar new year is the second biggest holiday of the year, so it's like new year's all over again, except it's 4 days long. But We're right in the middle of it, it lasts until tuesday or wednesday. Some of the traditions for this holiday include: Traveling to visit your grandparents( who usually live in the countryside, which leaves the bigger cities virtually empty), buying large boxes of SPAM for your boss, eating rice cake soup, and wearing 한복(Korean traditional dresses/clothes). As a mission, we will do a training/celebration this week, which should be fun!
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| 설날, the only time where missionaries get to wear special clothes. Pictured here is Korean traditional clothing, known as 한복(Han-bok) |
Some other highlights from this week included an invitation to a Korean buffet. In America, buffets have kind of a negative stereotype, but it is quite the opposite here. Some of the nicest food is found at Korean buffets, and a member of our ward invited the missionaries and a bunch of others. And this was probably the most confusing dinner I've ever been to, on account of the fact that there were people from 4 different countries represented there, speaking 3 different languages. We had 6 American missionaries, 4 Korean men, then a member from Uzbekistan who would sometimes have conversations with the other member from Moldova in Russian, we were quite the spectacle in the restaurant.
Another cool thing this week is that my companions got to be models. Someone we are teaching is developing super fancy face masks (Koreans wear face masks a lot to block the dust and other pollution) and asked my companions to model them since they have blue eyes. My eyes were too close to brown which I guess isn't interesting enough, but we all got a free fancy face mask, they're valued at around 50$ so we consider ourselves pretty lucky.
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| The fanciest masks in all of Korea and arguably the world |
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| Our English group in Incheon! I'm the silhouette on the end... |
My favorite part of this week though was the people we were able to talk to. We started teaching someone new, and they are progressing really well so far. But we still don't have a lot of people to teach, so we did a lot of talking with people this week. One night, we said a prayer before we started so that we would be able to be led to people who were ready to hear our message, then started walking. The only man we were able to talk to that night was trying to speak Korean and English but was too drunk to do either and ended up just being unintelligible. So we went back to our house that night a little sad, but we tried not to get discouraged. Then the next day, we tried talking to people on the subway after saying a prayer and we were extremely successful. I had two of the best conversations of my whole mission, and we got several phone numbers, along with several people who have already set up appointments to meet with us. We essentially had people just wanting to give us their number or meet with us, it was a little bit out of the ordinary but I know that it was an answer to prayer. Being able to experience the increased guidance from the Spirit as a missionary is an amazing blessing, and I'm so grateful to have this calling.
Have a great week everyone, 세복 많이 받으세요!
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