This past week has been a busy one on more than a few levels. Last sunday was Easter and we spent the day at my brother’s house. He lives in the central valley of California on farm land. We got home late and the blog didn’t happen. It is happening right now, however.

Easter (부활절) is not really celebrated in Korea. Unless things have changed dramatically since I lived in Korea, Easter is only celebrated by a special Sunday service in christian denominations. There is no Easter bunny or egg hunt or any of the other commercial entrapments that exist here in America.

When we get together as a family for Easter we usually have an Easter egg hunt. My brother’s house is ideally suited for an egg hunt because he has a large, grassy yard around his house. We bring about a dozen eggs per child but this year we had quite a few more than that. We usually don’t do any egg dying but stick to plastic eggs and candy instead. (Hard boiled eggs get old fast… the eating and the sitting in the sun…) This year we decided to dye some eggs.

We decided to not do the grocery store dying kits that are so popular. We did some natural dyes using berries and onion skins. Everyone had a great time wrapping the eggs with various flowers and onion skins to make some cool patterns.

Here is an onion skin dyed egg waiting to be found:

We did a pot-luck style dinner in that each individual family brought a side dish and my brother provided the main dish. The concept of a “pot-luck” isn’t really practiced in Korea either as far a s I know, maybe only in a church setting. Our house guest was introduced to a few uniquely American traditions as well as some that may only be unique to my family. For example, we like to make homemade ice cream. My brother does a great job on that. He is also into photography but in an antiquated way. Instead of embracing the wonders of the digital revolution in photography, my brother has gone retro; his latest thing is large format. Yes, everyone and their brother (not mine) is a budding digital photojournalist. Here is my brother, all covered up:

I think Easter was an interesting cultural experience for our guest. He had a great time hunting eggs with all the other children. But that may be just because he loves American candy…

Wow, I just uploaded this post and it disappeared! Gone! So here it goes again in a shortened version.

I posted about the Korean Children’s Orchedstra coming to town a while back but I didn’t get much feedback on it. I said I would post some instrument pictures to the forum but I am still in that going to mode…

Here are some pictures from the performance rehearsal.

The show opened with drums:

Here is Stephanie practicing the 해금:

The 태평소 soloist:

Here is an interesting variation on the traditional 가야금. It has 25 strings instead of 12. The North Korean version has 24 strings.

I will get these into the forum too. Soon.

We recently had a discussion about house size with our homestay guest. He indicated that he lives in a 32 평 apartment but his best friend lives in a 100 평 주택 (house). One 평 equals about 3.3 square meters or 35.5 square feet. Therefore, his apartment is about 1,100 square feet and his friends house is 3,550 square feet! He says his friend’s house is three stories and that his friends family is rich. I would think that having a house of that size in Korea would qualify as being rich.

A 32 평 apartment in Korea is above average in size, even though by American standards it is small. We just moved out of a 1400 sq. ft.  house and it felt very small. Perhaps that is because there were six of us living there (we have four children). While Korean families typically don’t have that many children, usually several generations live under one roof.

The conversation about house size came up because our house guest’s family is considering moving out of their apartment and into a regular house (주택). He said that he likes our house but that it is scary because it is bigger than what he is used to. He also was a little worried about moving away from the community atmosphere of the apartment complex. In Korea there is not much privacy in life in a typical apartment but moving into a house can be very expensive and one would have to give up many of the convenieces of group/pubilc life in a the apartment. Many apartments are gated communities, they have people who maitain the grounds as well as the apartment itself, they also have common area facilities not unlike apartment complexes everywhere. Despite the appeal of apartment living, however, the desire for ones own land exists in Korea too.  

We live in the country and that has been a concern of several children that have stayed here. There seems to be this idea that bandits live out in the country and since we do too then we are liable to get attacked by these bandits. Even here in the United States there are concerns and preconceived ideas about what life in the country is like. The Korean children that stay with us are certainly getting a unique and hopefully good impression of life in America. It is definitely different than life in an apartment complex.

Winters in Korea are cold. When I lived in Korea the one thing that kept the winters bearable was the warm floors. Korea uses, I think universally, radiant heat as its primary heat source. The comfort of having warmfloors heating the house without the noise and discomfort of having forced air is really nice. The one thing that I did not like about radiant heat in Korea was having to rotate the 연탄 (coal briquettes). I don’t think 얀탄 are very popular in Korea right now though. I think it used to be that every year there were news reports of people dying from carbon monoxide poisoning from 얀탄. Nowadays the floors are heated primarily from a gas boiler.

We finished building our house last year and we decided that our primary source of heat would also be radiant. Unfortunately, here in the United States the radiant heat market is left to some very high dollar specialists, especially here in sunny California. So, after getting some very outrageous bids for the job, we decided to do it ourselves.

A friend of mine builds greenhouses and most commercial greenhouses have a radiant heat system built in. So he was very helpful to us in getting the job done. We literally did all of the work ourselves. I spent a lot of time on the phone with manufacturers and suppliers who were more than happy to help create a system that suited my needs and then sell me the materials to build that system. Here is a photo of the pex tubing once we have zip-tied it to the rebar, before pouring the concrete slab:

The system is powered by a boiler that pumps hot water through all of the tubing in the floor to warm the house. The boiler also does the same thing through a water tank for hot water. It is very efficient. Here is the boiler plumbing setup. It looks more complicated than it is:

The boiler can be seen on the left. Not shown is the indirect water heater to the left of the boiler. 

This has been our first full winter living in our new house. While our radiant system is not perfect, we have really enjoyed having 온돌방 in our house. By doing it ourselves we saved a lot of money (really, a lot) and learned a lot too.

First, I apologize for not getting a post out last week. It was a holiday/long weekend here and well, time just got away from me. I know, no excuses…

Our house guest/extra child has been adapting to life in the Unites States quite well, sometimes too well. He is a very good follower so he is susceptible to peer pressure more than most. He recently got in trouble for booing at a school assembly. Hey, he was just having fun with his friends and he says those friends are more fun. Right. I am sure they are. He is, on the other hand, the best soccer player among kids his age. 

As far as Korean goes, I am finding it interesting the holes that I have in my vocabulary as well as in our “exchange student’s”. This past week we were able to witness the lunar eclipse. We all had the opportunity to learn new words: 월식(月蝕) and 일식. I expected that a sixth grader would know that word. There have been other words as well. When he first arrived here I was surprised that he did not know 시차. Of course, maybe only someone who travels a lot would know that word. My wife keeps reminding me that he is only a grade schooler and that he doesn’t have a large/specialized vocabulary. That describes me pretty well most of the time. If you only speak to kids you will learn to speak like a kid. My children are communicating by using a mixture of English and Korean together so it is a win/win situation as far as Korean goes. English is another story. My younger two children spit out a hodge-podge of words sometimes that don’t really make sense, kind of like our resident English learner.

He tends to do a fair amount of communicating using descriptive sounds like ‘확-‘ ㅅ슈 -ㄱㄱ ‘ ‘very very’ ‘many many’ ‘봉’ and lots of other sounds that are hard to write down but I am sure you can imagine that my arms are flying around while I am making these sounds right now. It is kind of like having a comic book acted out in front of you. So he is doing a great job of combining comic book-like sounds with pantomime to get his point across. But, after being here about a month he is starting to get some complete sentences out too, which is good.

Sometimes we hear things in Korean or English and it doesn’t really matter because everyone involved understood what was being said. Then, we have to think about what language we just heard.