Please Meet Mr. Yu and Mrs. Chon

We enjoyed a wonderful evening with our landlords/neighbors/new friends. We invited them over for tacos, kind of last minute, but they accepted. Until now we've only given gifts of food to each other so I thought it was time to sit down and enjoy a meal together. They know very little English and we know even less Korean but in spite of that, we made plenty of conversation. It just took longer because we were consulting language dictionaries. We learned so much in a short amount of time. I can't wait to see what this new friendship has in store. I feel our stay in Korea will be greatly enriched by Mr. Yu and Mrs. Chon. Hopefully they will learn from us, as well.  

Mrs. Chon gave me this coin purse that she made. I love it and actually really needed something just like this to keep my Korean currency separate from my US currency. It couldn't be more perfect.

Mrs. Chon is so very sweet. She was very shy when we first met her but she has already warmed up around us. She shed a few tears tonight as we were saying our goodbyes. I hope they were tears of joy. Actually it reminded me of the tearful goodbyes I would get as a child when it was time to say goodbye to grandparents after a long, summer visit. So sweet.



Here's some of the interesting things we learned about our friends this evening:

• he is a high school physical education teacher in Pyeongtaek....coaches the rowing team
• he won a gold medal for rowing in 1985 (Asian competition)
• they have lived out here (in the country) for 6 months
• lived in an apartment in Pyeongtaek the previous 20 years
• their son is a classical guitarist at Pyeongtaek University
• their daughter attends university about an hour away
• they met each other through a friend of hers in 1983
• he was born an hour's drive northwest of here
• she is from Taegu
• they are both 48 years old