this is the week i’m supposed to find out either way. whether my experience in korea will include a sweet dream job complete with an ability to be home in time to meet the school bus and spend the afternoons with the kidsters, or whether i get to continue to keep busy during the morning with miss gracie before things get extra busy when her brother gets home. one path means financial padding (and more shopping for pretty pretty things!) and the other means simplicity. like i said before, i’m ok with both. i just want to know.
actually, if it weren’t for the summer months and a promise to jun to spend it in hawaii, i wouldn’t be so eager to know. but the pleading doesn’t stop and i can’t make it stop because i just don’t know. at this point, the ticket prices are so crazy, the answer is still probably “no.” but if really, i have nothing to do this summer but deal with the intense heat with them both at home, i may just have to find a way to make it happen. but i can’t get around to that until i KNOW.
today is mother’s day back home, but it was yesterday for us here. my mother in law was visiting, which was nice. we’d never had a mother’s day with her. she’s in korea for a bunch of stuff, mostly dealing with some property she has down in seoul, so it was really nice of her to come all the way down here for the weekend instead of us going to her. it was different than any other mother’s day.
i wonder how it was for the other family’s on base. i guess they had access to a decent brunch place and stuff, but being off post meant that nothing opened up (especially on a sunday) until noon or so. so captain j was kind of lost. his specialty was taking me out for a big breakfast brunch buffet, after he takes the kids out to play as soon as they got up (jun still gets up between 5:30 and 6 am) so that i can get an extra couple of hours and returns with flowers from a corner flower shop that’s of course been open since dawn. here, taking the kids out that early wouldn’t be tolerated by our korean neighbors because of the noise that early, and there wouldn’t be any flower shops open. he’d only gotten in the night before from a TDY so i don’t blame him for not thinking ahead.
poor guy. he tried his best to keep them quiet. when i got up and joined the family, the kids were already playing video games. a usual huge no no. he’d let them to keep them quiet. and then, with empty hands, he kind of made this grand gesture and said “happy mother’s day! kids, say happy mother’s day.” the kids didn’t even look up from their unusual treat. and then i made everyone breakfast because who else was going to make it? (and no, captain j would not. he SHOULD not. and i don’t like cereal.)
but it was ok, because, i made these
and it was all good.
here, the day wasn’t just to celebrate mother’s though. it’s called uh-buh-yi nal (literal translation: ma-fa day. real meaning translation: mother & father’s day or parent’s day.) the whole weekend, practically was dedicated to parents. so you went from children’s day on the 5th to a weekend of celebrating parents. basically the whole city half shut down to enjoy celebrating each other. how marvelous!
i had no idea this was coming and kind of watched it unfold with glee. first, the amazing way that children were celebrated nearly brought me to tears, so much so that i wrote about it over at kimchi mamas. then, because my mother in law was here, we were out and about where we saw lots of flower buying and huge groups of families moving in and out of restaurants. news reports did stories on immigrants who were far from their families and encouraged kind citizens to remember those who didn’t have families around them. It was kind of like thanksgiving, but people ate out. i liked it!
my parents left our place to give my mother in law some space after spending a noon meal with her and they say they got swept up in it too. as soon as they disembarked from the train on the seoul end, my cousins swooped in and off they went on a big family dinner extravaganza that lasted late into the night. having been away for 40 plus years, they’d never experienced the full extent of uh-buh-yi-nal. i think they liked it too.
koreans are smart, they get it done in one shebang. this was our shebang.
