A Typical Week: Thursday

It's Thursday, a day different from all the other days!  There are some new things and a couple important job-type activities today, so enjoy!

A traditional Korean building made out of Legos?  Now that's what I'm talking about!
There are lots of things happening among the cracks in the schedule I'm writing about,
and I think I'll only ever have pictures to remember the stories by...

 On with...

Thursday

9:00am - 1:00pm Korean Language Class

Today it's Reading & Pronunciation followed by Listening & Speaking.

That's her on the left.  On the right is a friend from Mongolia.
I often have a little "is this real life?" moment
whenever I type something like that....

1:00pm - 2:30pm Lunch with Korean Buddy

For lunch on Thursday, I usually head to food street with my Korean buddy, 윤정 (Yoon Jeong).  She is a person that the language school assigned to me to help me acclimate to Korea and practice my Korean language.  She's done a great job of the former, by taking me to wonderful little restaurants with different types of food, but maybe not so much with the Korean practicing.  She's an English Literature major, so she can communicate well in English, so I usually am the one trying to stick a Korean sentence or two I know into the conversation.  For example, I say, "날씨가  아주 주워요?"  And she might respond, "OOOOhhh, yes, it's getting cold."  Not the best way to study.  However, but she's a lot of fun to talk to and eat lunch with.  We've even brought friends with us a couple times, her friends from various places and my Chinese friends from class.

3:00pm - 5:30pm Work at 새나루 Feeding Center

This is a center that provides a hot meal to about 150 people in need everyday.   They also deliver to about 50 people who are homebound.  I usually help by washing the mountains of tupperware equivalent that come back from the homebound people.  Then they provide us some dinner, and then we usually come back downstairs and help by scooping rice or soup.  It's an interesting place where our "help" is actually slowing the process down a little, but they appreciate that we're there.  The term I keep hearing is "ministry of presence."

We're happy to be here, but we're not so sure about this particular Jesus portrait...

6:00pm - 7:00pm Bible Study with Mechanical Engineering Students

This is a fun group, with some of the same students as the Tuesday conversation group.  Last semester they started going through the Old Testament with Professor Park, who goes to our church and invited me to run both of these studies.  They were using a children's bible study from the internet, which just hits on the main stories we all know and focusses on reading comprehension.  I decided to continue with it, so we are now doing the story of Moses.  The only problem is that it was written with the New King James Version of the Bible, and the study has all sorts of fill-in-the-blank questions using outdated words that we would never use in common English.  How could those ever be useful to a Korean learning English?  They're not!  So now I'm rewriting it every week with the Common English Bible that I have (thanks Covenant and PSF!).

7:00pm - 12:00am Rest/Study/Do homework/Process the day/Celebrate, tomorrow's Friday!

This is the point in the week when I let out that stressful breath, and take my first full gasp of weekend.  As you'll see tomorrow, all I have to do on Friday is get through class!

There's still three more days to go!  I hope your interest isn't waning, because the weekends are great, if too short!

Oh yeah, I did this too.  Bye!