Dinner With Rose and her Family

Most schools in Korea don't have a Math teacher because the homeroom teacher just teaches everything, but our school is awesome, so we have the very sweet Rose, who works specifically with children who have difficulty with Math.

Rose is one of the teachers who speaks English rather fluently, and she happens to be a very social and outgoing person, so we've been good friends since day one. During volleyball, she's always one of my biggest cheerleaders and the first to give me a high five for a good play. Two Thursdays ago, she had promised to drive me to my first Korean class at City Hall after work, but then when the end of the day finally came, she insisted on taking me to the pharmacy first because I looked and felt really sick. She even ended up paying for my medicine.

That week, she had also started asking if I'd be interested in having dinner with her and her family. I said I'd love to, and then it was just a matter of finding a date that worked for Rose, her husband, and myself. That day was this past Monday.

After work, her husband picked us up and we headed to their apartment to pick up their children, aged 11 and 13. Rose's husband said he was relieved to meet me and to see that I was a man, because he thought I was a woman, since Uri is apparently a female name in Korean. The kids, though shy, understood and spoke English with amazing ease. They even had to correct or translate for their mom a couple of times!

The boy plays piano exceptionally well and loves soccer, while the girl is an artiste.

They drove me to a traditional Korean restaurant, where they ordered enough food to feed a village. Now granted, many of these dishes were just side dishes, but I counted 26 dishes in total sitting on that table. 26! There was a beef dish, a spicy pasta dish, actual salad, rice, various types of kimchi, and dozens upon dozens of other plates. My senses were overwhelmed; I didn't know what to eat first!

We also had a little bit of Makkoli, which isn't quite a rice wine, and not a beer either, so I'm not sure what exactly to categorize it as other than delicious. It came in a gigantic bowl, and we then had to scoop it into our smaller drinking bowls.

All in all, the meal was probably the best meal I've had in all of my time here in Korea. And of course, I had to eat out with actual Koreans to find it.

After dinner, we went back to Rose's apartment and had dessert, which was juicy sliced up apples and pears. Rose also told her son to play a song for me on piano, which he begrudgingly agreed to do. I felt bad for him because he was very self-conscious of the fact that 1) some foreigner was standing in his very messy room and 2) he was being forced to play for said foreigner. It was awkward for the both of us, but I tried my best to encourage him to play. I told him anything he played would probably blow me away. And I was right.

He asked me if I knew some famous Chinese movie, and I said that I did not. He then proceeded to play some song from that movie, but it sounded like something you'd hear coming out of a saloon out in the old West--just played really, really, really fast.

After dessert, we chatted for a little bit, and once they could see that I was ready for bed, they offered to drive me home, but not before loading me up with apples from a relative's farm and some sort of pumpkin juice that Rose said would help my throat. (I didn't end up trying it because my throat started feeling better the next day.)

Now I would upload some pictures to show you just how many freakin' plates there were on that dinner table, but my phone seems to be in a foul mood right now, so I'll get around to that later. I'm also going to make sure to ask Rose what the heck we ordered so that I remember it for another time.