Seolar

Hello Everyone! 

There was lots of holidays this week, especially here in Korea!

The biggest one was 설날(Seolar), the lunar New Year, which I mentioned before, but it lasts for 4 days so it was about half the week. We spent Monday night at a church member's house, eating Rice Cake soup, which causes you to age one year here, so they always eat it on New Years. Also, we got to have a training/ celebration with about half of our mission, which was a lot of fun, especially seeing all the people that I served with in Mokdong.

Mokdong district reunited

Pictures taken in black and white become at least 15% cooler

We needed these pictures for a very missionary-oriented purpose, taking posed pictures is not the only thing we do..

Tripanionship 2.0

Our very...special companion

Another Holiday this week was Valentine's day, which I completely forgot about until an American mentioned it more than halfway through the day, I guess that shows how out of the loop missionaries really are. But actually, Korea does Valentine's day pretty differently. It's not really celebrated at all here, but they do have something called Black Day and White Day. I don't understand it yet completely, but on white Day, the men buy gifts for the women, and on black day, women buy gifts for the men. So White Day is about a week before Valentine's day, and the streets were filled with people selling flowers.

As I mentioned before, my missionary team covers a small English group in addition to our normal Korean congregation. This week, they had an adult dinner so we got to go with them and eat gourmet American burgers. So with American food and American people, I was about as close to America as I'll ever get here in Korea. 

Also they asked us to speak in their group on Sunday, so I gave probably the only talk I will give in English here last week. At this point, speaking in English is almost harder than Korean because as missionaries spent a lot of time here, their grammar patterns start to get mixed up and they start to say things that just don't make since. But I've only been here for about 4 months, so I think I'm still fluent in English at this point..

Forgive my handwriting, I'm new at this whole "Korean" thing

Another thing the missionaries in our district have been working on is an introduction page to give to people on the street. So it explains a little bit about us and why we're here, just to show others that we're normal people just like them. It also explains a little bit about the message we are sharing, since we often only have a minute or two to talk to people. Originally we typed them, but someone suggested that it would be more attention-grabbing if we wrote it ourselves... and it truly does grab your attention, especially because my Korean penmanship is at about a kindergarten level currently.. But here it is!

Have a great week everyone!

-Elder Bigelow