Deep Peace of the Running Wave to You‏

March 31, 2009

Kudos to whomever can guess what song the title came from!

I didn't write many notes down about what to write you in the email this week. That either means my week was really boring and nothing happened or it was really busy and I just didn't have time to write such things down.

You know what? I really miss handbells. The other day I was doing something and my glove (which is a handbell glove) fell out of my coat pocket and...I don't know....I just really wanted to play. If anyone wants to save up $30,000 over the next 18 months for me to get a handbell set it would be much appreciated :).

So, I had to write my first talk in Korea. 3 minutes. Nope, I didn't leave a zero off there. I had to prepare a 3 minute talk--which was harder than you would think to fill. The thing is that they tell everyone to prepare a talk and they randomly pick who has to present theirs (this is for zone conference). So yeah, I didn't get picked, but I enjoyed the talks others gave. It's incredible to me how this odd hodgepodge of Americans can get together and learn enough Korean to have entire meetings in the language after only a few weeks. Wow.

So, here's a little "Konglish" story for you. Our branch president and one of his counselors speak Korean, but the third counselor doesn't. Most of our meetings are in mostly Korean with some English thrown in, so he learns some phrases here and there. The funny part is that, as terrible as our accents are---his is worse---and if we can tell, that's bad. He is a rancher from southern Utah and even his English accent is bad (or at least different). When he speaks Korean, um, you can STILL tell he's a rancher from southern Utah. Well, there's this phrase in Korean which kinda means "Fight" or "Go Team" or something--still haven't figured out an exact translation. Anyway, the closest way to say it in English is the pronuncation of the word "whiting"(make it a spondee....if you don't know what spondee is, find the nearest AP English teacher and ask---or just ask google). Well, I don't know WHERE he got it, but he started saying it to us but we couldn't figure out what the heck he was saying for the longest time. This is simply because the word that was coming out of his mouth sounded like "hot tang" which sounds suspiciously like "hot dang". It's just funny. Guess you'd have to be there, or be Mary to laugh at that.

Um, other funny language stories, a girl who is half Korean has a few things from Korea she was showing us. My favorite was this random notebook. Well, over there they think english words look cool, so you can buy things with english words on them (just like you can buy thigns with random asian characters on them here. I wonder how much sense our asian characters really make). Well, the problem with this is that the english phrases don't particularly make sense. Here are a few examples:"Happy Zoo" or "You are living always happy dream which is sweet and lovely dream" or my personal favorite "I want to protect you and love with your side". Not sure what that means, but it sounds awkward...

Um...Congrats to Britt and John! Nikki told me you were engaged. Yay you! You get my best wishes. I want pictures!

I meant to write a few of you real letters this week, but napping seemed way more important, so I'll have to get it for you next week. Sorry. Thank you for the letters though. They are awesome.

With one minute to go!

~R~