Sorry. I don’t speak Korean.

I’m just a big, tall, white dude with clown shoes on.

Right now, I’m sitting in a (pretty sweet) hotel room in Osaka, Japan. It’s a busy little town of over 2 million, and about 30 degrees warmer than Seoul. The last few days have been very… indescribable. Emotions run high while temperatures run low, and I’ve never bowed to so many people in my life. Here’s the trip thus far:

Day 1

Technically, this is almost three days rolled into one. With the time difference, we left for Seoul on Wednesday, January 6th, and landed in Korea on Friday, January 8th. It was only a 15 hour flight, but it’s still hard to get your mind around. I was able to sleep a bit on the plane between watching movies and playing what looked like a DOS-version of golf or something. They actually gave me a metal knife with my meal, which I thought a bit bizarre – granted it could hardly cut my pancakes, let alone someone’s throat. Our flight landed a few minutes before 6:00 a.m. and we met up with some people from Yum Kwang Presbyterian Church who drove us two hours through Seoul to meet our host families. My family is nice – they speak about as much English as I do Korean, so we don’t have many fireside chats. Come to think of it, they don’t have a living room, let alone a fireplace. The floors in their home are heated (which is sweet) and the commode has electronic buttons that let you control the water pressure and whatnot. I kicked the son out of his room (I can’t for the life of me remember his name) and I sleep on his Pokemon pillow every night. I’ve also cried on Pikachu’s lap every night. The home-stay part of this trip has been very draining on me. On any given day, I had to be an intrusion, and when you throw me, heavily sleep-deprived in a new country where nobody speaks my language and where hospitality is linked to your strength as a Christian, I tend to get even more emotional and tend to stress out a lot. I’ve never been this homesick in my life, but am able to relieve some of the pain when I’m with my team (who are fantastic, by the way). After a short nap in my Korean-sized bed, we went to a welcome banquet at a traditional Korean restaurant. We sat on the (heated) floor and ate Kim-chi and something that translates close to “boiled vegetables and meats”. I even ate a mussel, which was, moments earlier, squirming alive in front of me. I went to bed early that night and woke up promptly at 4:30 a.m. by my host-mother, who woke me up for early-morning service. There was evening and morning.

Day 2

This was probably the worst start to a good day I’ve ever had. Early morning service is at 5:30 a.m. and I fought off tears of exhaustion for all 2.5 hours of the service. I took a short nap before meeting my team (thank God) at 9:30 for a tour of Seoul. Giving the tour were three students from the church, one (whose Korean name I forget) was Jonathan. He is probably my most favorite person in all of Seoul, perhaps Korea. He is currently learning English and is a senior in high school. He wants to go to Taylor next year and works very hard to practice his English. Most students here go to school for about 13 hours a day, some of which so to “English-school” afterwards. Korea takes their education very seriously. Jonathan is hysterical. We’ve been teaching him some slang and how to “pound-it” which he eats up. He says his Korean friends are very jealous because he gets to hang out with us. We kind of feel like celebrities. The church has been extremely hospitable, paying for meals, subway rides, tickets to the Korean National Museum (which is absolutely gorgeous) and many other things. We saw the K. N. Museum before lunch, which took us to an Indian Cuisine restaurant in the middle of a huge shopping district. Here I had my first Korean Coke (it was beautiful) and some spicy chicken curry dish. While we’ve only been here for a few days, it has felt like weeks and any sort of comfort food (like McDonald’s) is a welcomed treat. (Sidenote: Jonathan successfully learned to say “Hey Bro. Pound it. Let’s get some Mickey D’s”. We are joyous.) Our tour of Seoul continued, and took us to this gigantic underground shopping mall (the name of which I cannot remember – this happens quite often to me) where we walked past hundreds of stores and shops that all featured some latest fashion. The Korean fashion is very, very trendy. Think Apple trying to be trendier than Apple – it’s insane. Lucky for them, Asians can pull off just about any look, whether it’s scene, gothic, trendy, hippie, preppy, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s… they can do it all and look good doing it! It’s not fair, really. Which leads me to another interesting point – I’ve seen two (2) people here that one might qualify as “overweight”. It’s such a slim culture! I mean, they eat rice and cabbage every day and walk everywhere. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. We ate dinner at some place whose name I can’t remember (are you seeing a pattern here?) and I officially became a master of the chop sticks. Seriously, give me a pait and I’ll show you how it’s done. After dinner we went home and I was scolded by my host-mother for being “late”. Ahh, just like home. I cried myself to sleep.

Day 3

Sunday was an interesting day, mostly because we spent the entire day at the church. We attended 2 services, the first being the main service, and the second being the college service. Two main points here: 1) Singing the same worship song in two different languages is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever experienced. 2) Korean prayers remind me of speaking in tongues. All that hibbity-bibbity with intense emotional inflections is a little rattling, but still gave me chills. I wonder if, when Koreans speak in tongues, they speak English? Food for thought. Following the college service, the team and I joined an English Bible Study. This was a lot of fun because the students who lead it are learning English and have a strong desire to practice. We studied Matt. 6 and shared testimonies. It was pretty cool. After that we joined the EBS students for dinner at this fabulous little place simply called “Mr. Pizza.” Honestly, it’s some of the best pizza I have ever tasted. They have all kinds of different varieties of pizza, and some even have sweet potato crust! You can get your basic pepperoni, sausage or supreme if you want, OR you can get another (forget the name) that has Cajun Chicken, vegetables, Sweet Potato Crust and a sweet glaze! Mmmph. I went to bed early, after having a spot’o'tea with my host family. Mr. Korean-dad is a policeman and likes to smile, but knows absolutely no English. I was in bed by 10:00 p.m. in order to get up at 4:30 a.m. for my flight to Japan. My host-mother couldn’t understand that I needed to leave by 5:15 a.m., so she made sure I was at the church at 5:15 a.m. which gave me about an hour to wait for the rest of my team to show up. Oh, the joys.

Day 4

Today has been rather slow paced, yet exciting. Our flight out of Seoul was delayed 2-hours due to fog, and we arrived in Japan around 12:30 p.m. I was craving American food, so we stopped for McDonald’s and Subway before getting on a train that took us to Osaka. We had dinner at this little Japanese place where they cook the food right in front of you. It’s not the kind you’re thinking of – this one was potato-pancake style. You choose a meat, and they slap it into a big pancake thing and drizzle it with this sweet BBQ-like sauce. It was pretty good. The Japanese Yen is more than the dollar, and I’m pretty sure my pancake and Coke came out to about $16 USD. Oh well. It’s the price of traveling, I suppose. Our hotel is sweet. It feels like an Italian Villa, and I took a relaxing bath. THe powder I sprinkled in made the water look like Mountain Dew, but my my was it relaxing. I also managed to ruin my iPod headphones by dropping one of the earbuds into the water. Sigh. One still works, thankfully. I’ll just go deaf in one ear, I s’pose. I’m also wearing a robe called something I can’t remember (ha!) and some slippers that would probably be small on my mother. My toes stick out a little bit. I want the whole experience, so sue me. It’s only about 8:30 p.m. and I think we’ll probably go to bed soon. I need a good night’s sleep. The Lord knows I haven’t slept more than 5 hours a night since I’ve been here. Praise God for the Internet, too. This might be my one and only post, depending on when I have access (and time) to a computer with an connection to the rest of the world.

Anyways, I appreciate your prayers as I battle homesickness and miscommunication-galore. Thanks for reading. I miss you all.