Seoul Searching : Awkwardlynotmorninganymore Report

Hey all!

I'm acclamated to the MTC fully now. This is no longer the time when the sun blares through my window and I defiantly lay in bed just to spite it. This is the time where I've been awake for two and a half hours (we wake up early on P-days) after sleeping for threeish. My home is no longer my house in Highland, or even my "living accomodations," it is my classroom, where I live for 11ish hours every day. 7 of that is direct classroom instruction with teachers, but the rest is my personal or companionship study. One thing that some of us have instituted (to the apparent disgust of some of the others) is a time during additional study to talk about what we learned during personal study. It's a great way to learn a lot in a little bit of time, and it helps to keep us focused on Christ when we seem to be drowning in Korean.

A couple fun Korean tidbits: they use two different number systems for different things. Chinese numbers are actually super easy to pick up and they're used for things like dates, page numbers and minutes, but Korean numbers were probably birthed by the devil himself and they are used for things like direct counting and hours. Because it makes sense to split time telling between two languages. Naturally.

Actually no. It's because they hate me personally.

Also, thanks to Emily Juchau, who inadvertanly allowed me to learn the word for "to write". It looks like an awkward frog face (^_^ with the eyes not separated by the mouth), which I connect with the pervy sage from Naruto, which I connect to Emily, which I connect to writing.....as sad as it is, this is how I've picked up most of what I know. Long chains of gibberish.

The Archdistrict is still doing great. We are essentially the greatest. We took a bit of time while we were winding down to decide which of us would take which roles in movies like Star Trek, Les Miserables, and the Avengers. I'm Captain Kirk, Thenardier (sp?), and Iron Man respectively, if you were curious.

The latest bit of drama is that the room next to us refuses to follow the rules about quiet time and lights out. I'm an insomniac anyway, but the rest of the guys in my room are kept up every night. My biggest issue is that I feel that when they do this every night it is more of a rebellion thing and less of a mistake. The short version of the story is that we had enough a couple nights ago and went over to resolve the issue. My roomate led off by asserting that we didn't care if they followed the rules or not but that they should be considerate of those of us who are. That wasn't far enough for me, so I jumped in and informed them that I cared whether they kept the rules or not, because they had no right to represent Jesus Christ when they were doing x,y, and z. I'm summarizing of course. Then I told them to shape up and went to sleep. The good news is that they went to sleep. The bad news is that in the room were two district leaders and a zone leader, some of whom took offense at my chastisement. I'm expecting some sort of disciplinary action any time now, so I'll keep you posted.

No major spiritual breakthroughs this week, but I've learned plenty of great proverbs from my dokbanja (companion).

Zac, your cookies were fantastic. I'm saving the last three, but the first bunch went fast. SO good.

Sophie, the words for today are Saja (lion), sheen (which is the ghost part of holy ghost, but doesn't really translate), and pur (fire). We have combined them into a Korean falsehood of the Sajasheen pur (Fire Lion Ghost) as a sort of mascot. It competes for our love with the all English Trocotopusus Rex (which is a tree with eight tiny t-rex arms protruding from it). Another good one is neh, which means yes. A motto of my district is to keep calm and "neh" (which means yes) when we don't know what is happening.

If anyone else is reading this and you are not part of my family, send me a letter NOW. Time goes differently for people in and out of the MTC (and I'm assuming on a real mission too). Outside, two weeks is whatever, but in here in genuinely feels like we've been here for months. We look at what we did in the morning and it feels like it was a couple days ago. Not complaining at all, I really have had a great experience here, but any letters are appreciated.

Also, happy birthday and fathers day to my mom and dad respectively! You are great parents and I love hearing from you.

Daumehpehpgaysumnida!
(See you next time. Figuratively. The figuratively being implied.)