Thursday: Day two - shopping and hanging out

I woke up at about 7:00, just as Geoffrey was leaving. I made coffee and breakfast of cheese and crackers and yogurt, read my mail and the Times, edited yesterday's blog, showered and dressed, and called Pat, in that order. I called Pat last to try to catch her home, and I did. She is under a lot of pressure, what with Natalie's father dieing last week, and now her aunt Gerry died. She will be going to the burial, probably this weekend. I will pray for her, Gerry yes but more for Pat; Gerry has everyone else praying for her and her death was not unexpected and probably not unwelcome. 

Planning to do some shopping, I walked down the hill and had lunch at a Chinese place. It looked very Korean, only the calendars were Chinese, but most of the food was Chinese so I asked when I left and the woman at checkout agreed it is a Chinese restaurant. It is called something Cha Jang (짜장) and specializes in cha jang dishes. Cha jang means salty sauce, and cha jang myun was a noodle dish I used to enjoy at least once a week for lunch in Gongju. 

After lunch I walked down by the stream and went to a drug store to try to get some ganmaoling (Chinese antiviral medicine). I brought some and showed the pharmacist the bottle, but need some more as I am fighting a cold. They didn't have it. I then went into Caffe' Bene (Korea's answer to Starbucks) for coffee and just to watch people. They seemed to be mostly university types. I was reading Ko Un and a sijo came to me which I sent to Phil for his 70th birthday this month.

   A tortoise lives two hundred years; a mouse lives only two.
   A butterfly has a summer, a mayfly but a day.
   In the Biblical* three score and ten, we all have just this moment. 

*Psalm 90 in the AV (King James)

I then went to the grocery store Geoffrey suggested and got eggs, cheese and what looked like whole wheat biscuits (probably aren't) for breakfast. On the weekend we'll do some proper shopping. I don't think he eats here much, not much food in the place. Walking back I passed Geoffrey's hair stylist. Geoffrey pointed me out to them last night and they recognized me and bowed, so I bowed back with a tip of my Denver hat; not a very Korean flourish but it felt right.  

"Home" now, I took a brief nap. The plan was to have dinner with Geoffrey's uncle Duke and the team which came in town this week for  installation of new equipment. But Geoffrey called to say he'd be late, thing aren't going as planned, then he called again to say he'd be very late and dinner with Duke and the team will be tomorrow. That is fine with me. 

Geoffrey got in at about 9:30, and soon we went out so he could eat. We went to a pulgogi place at the bottom of the hill and he had chicken pulgogi with a beer. I had a few bites, but I had eaten something at home and on top of that it was spicy so I didn't have much. After that  we came back.

I had been tired but now we wanted to talk.He gave me a Japanese 5 yen piece with a hole in the middle, explaining that "go yen" sounds like good luck in Chinese (Mandrian or Korean Chinese?) and people hold them for that reason. He has two hooks in his room to hold them. I explained a grammatical construction I used to ask to take the leftovers home (the term doggie bag would not have occured) and we got into a discussion of his difficulty with compound (or complex?) sentences. We talked about Gyeongju (plan to go Saturday), church on Sunday, and driving in Korea (Geoffrey says they have been driving only a short time and safe driving in not part of their experience yet). He compared Korean and Japanese aesthetics (to his mind Koreans suffer in comparison, particularly as regards color coordination of clothing). We'll go to a movie next week. We wanted to talk and stayed up until almost midnight.


I decided on this blog as a way to share my experience with Pat and anyone else interested, and to provide a record for me to use to look back on this trip (to live in the past? maybe). It is also a good way for me to process the day.