It Boggles the Mind

Last night, “Mommy” took Sarah and me out again. This time, her niece joined us and we went out for chicken soup in Incheon. Koerean. The soup is called samgye tang which is a delicious ginseng soup served in an iron pot with a whole chicken (a very small chicken) stuffed with rice, garlic, persimmon, jujube (asian date), and seasoned with scallion. It’s served with the usual sides along with a dish of shaved salt and a light pepper. You kind of dip your bites of chicken into the salt and pepper to your liking. The meat falls off the bones, heck, the bones fall off of each other it’s so tender. You have a bite of fresh green peppers or kimch’i every so often and settle in.


Neither Mommy nor her niece spoke much English at all and my Korean is limited to say the least, so the whole night, we mostly drew pictures, shared facial expressions and gestures. It was crazy in a fun and yummy kind of way.


On the way back, we stopped by a war memorial that was pretty amazing. The architecture reminded me of some kind of ancient Aztec or Egyptian design. It was weird yet beautiful to see a war memorial from the Korean War as an American with Koreans in Korea.


Today was another day at winter camp and I laugh at the prospect of losing my voice if I yell any more. When you have over 150 kids’ names to remember (all the kids in the camp) and no knowledge of how to say sit down or be quiet in the language the kids speak, it’s a funny experience indeed. I just laugh, get crazy, and talk really quiet and wait, that seems to work. Before long the good kids tell the bad kids to be good and we move on. We’re working on plays, one of which is Snow White and I actually got one of the boys to play the wicked queen and he’s AWESOME! The first time he read his part, I just started cracking up, perfect evil queen voice and everything. It’s strange because in some ways, they seem to understand so much about word meaning and grammar, but can’t answer or ask simple questions. The mind boggles.