An interesting night last night. I was invited to a house-warming party for one of my beginner students, Sung-hun Kim. He and his wife married about two months ago and they've moved into a new apartment. This would be my first visit to a Korean home. I went home from the plant at 3:30 and basically vegetated for an hour. I was getting a ride to the party with one of my other students, Teddy (Yung-muk Nam). Barb was also coming, but she didn't come home after work - she went for a walk or something. So I met Teddy and Barb at E-Mart. E-Mart is this huge-ass Korean department store. It's quite a ways from our apartment, but still only a 4500 Won ($5.26) taxi ride. God bless cheap Korean taxis. So I met them at E-Mart and we went shopping for house-warming presents. Barb and I bought a bottle of French wine (no Canadian stuff available - too bad). Teddy purchased traditional Korean house-warming presents. In Korea you give people more practical presents. Teddy purchased laundry detergent and dish soap. He explained that this symbolizes that the hosts' home will "bubble over with wealth." He also bought toilet paper, but I was afraid to ask what the symbolism of this was.

We arrived at Sung-hun's house at about 7:00 and there was only one other guest there - a young man. He was apparently an extra in a Korean comedy and was bugged about this all night. Their apartment was fairly small, but well furnished and decorated - most likely due to the fact that Koreans only give cash at weddings. Sung-hun's wife was slaving away in the kitchen preparing food for everyone. We were treated to mandu (similar to Chinese dumplings or Japanese gyoza), sweet-and-sour pork, chicken wings, chapchae (Korean vermicelli-like noodles), oysters, gomak (little spicy clam things), and of course gimchi and rice. All the food was served in the living room. We were seated on the floor at little Asian tables. People continued to arrive and soon the house was stuffed. Good thing we were there first - we got to eat all the food.

There were a few of my students there and everyone knew some English. Sung-hun's wife and a couple other women also cut up a bunch of fruit and we were then served desert. After that came the ceremony/games. The young guy (the extra) welcomed us to the new home - or so I assume, it was all in Korean. After that came what I can only describe as the "games." First, the extra took an egg and gave it to Sung-hun's wife. Sung-hun had to put both hands behind his back and his wife had to put one hand behind her back. She then had to put the egg under the cuff of Sung-hun's pants and try and get it up through his clothes and out the neck of his shirt using one hand. She broke three eggs before giving up. Next she had to put one of the raw eggs in her mouth and try and pass it into Sung-hun's mouth without breaking the yolk. This also failed.

After the games we sat around talking while - uncharacteristically and nontraditionally - two of the men did the dishes. We got to look at the couple's wedding photos. Wedding photos are a huge deal in Korea. The albums are massive and weigh like 10 puounds. They spend thousands on the cheesy glamour photos. The ones in traditional Korean costumes are pretty cool though. At around 8:20ish people started getting restless. They were apparently waiting for their "team leader" to show up (supervisor at LG). He showed up at around 8:40, sat down, had some food and drink, and then at 9:00 he said something in Korean and everyone got up and it was time to leave. Can you imagine having even you parties controled by your boss? It was good timing for us though, as we had to leave, so we ended up getting a ride.

We had to leave because we had our third Korean language lesson last night. We are being taught by a very nice Korean guy named Juni. Juni speaks English fluently and runs his own language school. We met him through our friend Ryan. Juni meets up with Barb and I, plus Lucy from London and Rhoni from Wales/Scotland every Wednesday at a bar in Gumi. We had our one-hour lesson where we learned past tense and days of the week. We are well on our way to being able to form full sentences. Korean is one of the hardest languages for english-speakers to learn. The structure is completely different (subject-object-verb) and article use is very different also. But I can read Hangul (Korean characters) so that's half the battle.

So, all-in-all a succesful Korean night. Not much sleep though.