Coffee Talk

On Tuesday, there is a women's Bible study group in the morning at church. I have been asked, but have yet to (and probably won't) attend one. Afterwards, the ladies go out for coffee and sometimes other people join them who don't go to the Bible study. LeeAnna (the girl who lives in my building) goes to coffee. She has told me about it, but I haven't gone to one of those either.

Last week, I asked LeeAnna to lunch because we hadn't seen each other in awhile and I figured I should. We decided to go on Thursday. Well, she forgot that Lori (a lady who does go to church) was holding a coffee/dessert hour at her house in Sacheon (next town over) because she's moving at the end of the month and is trying to use up all her baking items. So we took a bus to the other side of Jinju, then hopped in a car and drove out to Lori's. This was at 10am mind you. I needed to be back around 2:30 so I assumed we'd have plenty of time.

Lori had lots of treats and it was nice eating "American" desserts because they taste like actual chocolate and not cocco powder. She also had lemon squares and blueberry coffee cake and fruit. It was very nice. The Korean contribution was frozen persimmon that you scoup out of the skin and eat like sherbert. It was ok, but not great. Lori also has the cutest little dog whose name is Maekju, which means beer. So I hung out with older ladies for like 3 hours. The funniest thing is that there are a few "foreigners" but mainly Korean, some who speak very decent English, other who barely speak English. So quite often you sit there with people speaking Korean around you while you're just staring at the wall or something. LeeAnna says it's like that all the time at coffee, but that usually there are enough English speakers that it doesn't matter. Luckily I was next to some English speaking people, so it didn't bother me at all.

And yes, what you see at the top left corner are cherry tomatoes because Koreans consider them fruit and actually put them in fruit salads.

The lady next to me is Mimi and she speaks decent English. She got cold because of the a/c and had to throw on a sweatshirt, so other than American food, it made me feel like home b/c it's something my mother would do.

When it got around 1:30, the ladies decided it was a good time for lunch because they needed something spicy after eating sweets. We drove to this little place in the middle of nowhere and got "black noodles" or ja ajang myeon which is like flour noodles with black bean sauce on them. I have made this at home. The place also gave us free dumplings. The ladies were shocked that I could use chopsticks to pick up a piece of corn and made me do it a few times and they found it hilarious. On the way out, I saw the cook making the noodles by throwing them in the air almost like making a pizza. I tried to video it, but didn't have time, so I will have to go again. It was pretty neat watching him though. Then on the car ride home, the question who was older came up and when I told them my age they were shocked as usual. Then they started speaking in rapid-fire Korean and we heard our names so we asked what they were talking about. Linda (the driver who speaks very good English) said that I have a cute "baby voice" so that is part of the reason they think I'm young. I asked, "You think I sound like a baby?" and they were like, no but a small child. So that's awesome, except not.

I ended up getting to school 45 minutes after I told them I needed to be there. Luckily I had told them I needed to be there about 30 minutes before I actually needed to be there, so I was basically on time. After school I met up with Dan, Cody, Liezle and Cindy and we had chicken salad with yogurt on it again. Afterwards, we went to a frozen yogurt place called Yofruito and debated on what to get, "nut nut yogurt fantasy" was high up on my list, but we ended up splitting the "Rainbow Family Yogurt Icecream" (although the close second was rainbow family yogurt sherbert). We still aren't sure why they add the rainbow because you pick the toppings and the yogurt is all white. It was good, so we really didn't care that much. Then I went home and fell asleep early because I had gotten up so early that morning (comparatively).

Kiwi, peaches, fruit cocktail, strawberry and chocolate sauce. Yum!