Easter Weekend

Again, I wrote this post on Sunday night, but was waiting for pictures. I give up waiting, so here you go:

I had a very busy weekend. On Friday I went to dance class without Krista because she was sick. Class included jumping that day so it was interesting to say the least. If you want to know, we're learning this song right now and actually do parts of the video - not all the floor work, but we do shoot "air" guns. After class I met up with Corinne and we went to the soup place and ordered a new kind of soup. Of course we had some new sides, including pancakes and green tea tofu.

The green tea tofu is top right in this picture and was actually pretty good

School on Friday was somewhat frustrating because I had one class that just drove me crazy. My boss talked to two of the girls who ended up crying and said the reason they were acting out is because they didn't understand what was going on - one girl I believe the other one, not so much. I also was slightly dressed up because there was a party later and I didn't want to change (no pre-outfit outfit for me!), so I had contacts and wide legged pants. One kid said "your face looks better with no glasses" and another said, "you have big pants. They are wonderful." So what I'm saying is Koreans are masters at backhanded compliments.

After school I went home to put on makeup and Dallas came and met me and we cabbed over to GNU for a party at G&U - one of the only "clubs" in Jinju. It was a Red & Black party which was another fund raiser for V-day. I had to work the door and collect money and stamp hands for an hour, but luckily that was during the hour that a friend of Jackie's (and a bunch of other people but I don't know him) played some of his own music. It was interesting, but not really dance music. Then they changed it back to dance music and we danced a bunch. I hadn't eaten since lunch and started drinking soju straight out of the bottle for some reason, so there are bits of the night that I don't really remember. I did get to see a bunch of people I hadn't seen since I've been back for various reasons and danced a bit, so it was fun. We left between 2 and 3 and on the way back to Dallas's apartment, I fell and busted my left knee pretty bad. He put peroxide on it and then the smallest band-aid in the world.

Jackie, Sarah and sporting red and black!

Group pic!

I was supposed to get up at 7, but when my alarm went off I fell back asleep for another hour. I messaged Kylie, the girl I was supposed to meet, and luckily she was still tired too and nobody else was there yet. I ran home, showered and got dressed and went to meet Kylie to prepare for the Easter egg dyeing and hunt. Most of the supplies were at her apartment and we packed up everything in a huge duffel and a couple of other bags and walked over to the Jinju castle museum. When we got to the museum we didn't really know where we were supposed to set up because Jackie was the person who had all the contact with the museum. She told us to go into the foyer area, so we did and just dropped our pile of crap. Then the museum people came out and sort of yelled at us. The one translator says, "He wants to know why you are here and what you are doing." So then we moved everything to a back corner and waited for further instructions. Jackie called and told us to meet her at the entrance to help carry tables, but when we got there, she told us to turn around because the van was just going straight to the museum. The van driver drove up on a cobblestone walkway and freaked out the museum people - in total about 7 of them came out and told him to move. It was kind of funny, but also awkward.

Then the museum people were really nice and helped us set up tables, brought out a huge electrical cord and let us borrow scissors and tape to hold newspapers down on the tables. We started with egg dyeing and set up bowls with different colors, dippers and stickers. We also had colored sand (which I thought was glitter when I bought it) and glue to decorate the eggs. We ordered baked eggs, which is typical for Korea instead of hard boiled ones (although they do hard boil eggs as well). Most eggs here are brown eggs, but luckily the dye still worked - you just had to concentrate it. Some people started to show up and luckily my friend Kyeong He came by and helped us translate for awhile, then some people from the YWCA took over for her. My job for most of the day was to dry the eggs with a hair dryer so that the kids could decorate them after they dyed them. It was actually a really good idea and kept me busy. Kylie and I also made origami cups (thanks Durham Children's museum for the idea) for the kids to carry the eggs home.

What a baked egg looks like - it tastes kind of similar to a hard-boiled egg but with a smoky flavor too

Brother and sister finish their eggs

Kylie making origami cups and kids looking on

This is Sol Ji. She's Kyeong He's friend's kid and I want to steal her. She hung out with us for a long time, made 2 eggs and gave Jackie and I pieces of her peanut butter sandwich. Plus, she's missing a tooth.

Kyeong He made a masterpiece egg as a tribute to her unrequited love for Dallas.

This is what my fingers looked like at the end of the day from picking up eggs out of dye bowls.

These 2 brothers are my students!

Castle cherry blossoms. We couldn't have asked for a nicer day.

Me with my weapon of choice - Kylie's hairdryer.

After dyeing eggs, we had an Easter egg hunt. In my opinion this didn't go as well. It's hard to explain something like this with a language barrier, plus there just weren't enough kids to cover the expense of what we hid. The kids who participated had fun and got a lot of goodies, but as a fund raiser I don't think it was worth it. Then we cleaned up and had the creepy van guy come pick up the tables and chairs.

Sketchy van! The best part was that the tables slightly stuck out so he closed the truck with our electrical cord.

Kylie and I took the rest of the stuff back to her apartment and then went to Kraze burger for dinner. I was really tired and had some sunburn, so after dinner (at 5) I went home and took a 2 hour nap while I ran the washing machine. Then I got up and made pasta salad for the church potluck. I was really happy when I found Italian dressing on Thursday, so the salad was pretty easy to make - veggies (scallions, cucumber, red pepper, tomatoes and celery) with tri-colored pasta and Italian dressing. Then I watched 2 episodes of White Collar and went back to bed.

While this isn't a great pic of me, it does highlight my sunburn pretty well.

On Sunday I woke up around 10ish and turned on the TV and "Top Gun" happened to be starting. So I watched that and ate a Cadbury egg that my sister had sent me. Then I got ready for church and walked to IEC.The service was very good and I had my first communion. After service we had a huge potluck. This time Jamie organized it a bit differently and had people sign up for what they would bring. Of course we still ended up with kimbap and kimchi, but overall the meal was more cohesieve than previous attempts.

Dessert table - those are home-made peanut butter eggs, banana bread and almond pound cake that you see.

My plate, complete with potato salad, baked beans, deviled eggs and kimbap

Left over pasta salad that I ate for the next 2 days.

After lunch, I went with Ilani and a girl named Ashely to a coffee shop. The 3 of us are all doing 180 days reading and Ashely was slightly behind, so Ilani and I offered to read with her for awhile. I read 1 days worth of reading, then wrote some sentences for my Korean homework. I enjoyed spending time with the girls and we talked about some spiritual issues and some personal ones. After coffee I went home, put on some pants (I wore a skirt to church - I know gasp! right?) and went on a walk down by the river. I walked for about an hour and for half the time I listened to music, and the other half was a paragraph in Korean that I was supposed to practice.

Cherry blossom at night lit by a streetlamp.

I had a very fun-filled, busy weekend. I got to celebrate Easter with my church family and introduce Koreans to a Western tradition. Even though I was slightly stressed out ahead of time, these are the kinds of weekend I love!