It’s really early in the morning here, but I went to study after work today and drank like two grande Tazo Chai Lattes to get a boast. Well, 5 hours later, I’m still wide awake. This will allow me to write about a couple cool things that happened last weekend.
Instead of having individual holidays for each parent, ie. Mother’s Day, Koreans have a day called “Parents Day” which is on May 8th. Typical presents from the children are usually carnations and/or money. Jeong-in asked me to come with her to meet her parents, grandmother, and sister’s family to celebrate Parents Day with them. Before Saturday, I had yet to meet her sister (Jeong-su), brother-in-law (Yu-shin), or her 5 year old nephew (Jin-hyeok) so I was excited to meet them. They were really nice and kind to me. Jin-hyeok, was a cute kid who really liked me after I gave him a mini-soccer ball for another holiday, Children’s Day. We had great food at a buffet style restaurant and when Jeong-in’s father and uncle came late, all the men drank soju, including me of course. Her dad has been so nice to me ever since I first met him. Actually, there was a little drama about it on Saturday when her father seemed a little more favorable to me, than Yu-shin. I think it’s just a little teasing and I think it’s unfair because Yu-shin has a lot of responsibility as he is married to their oldest daughter and had their first grandchild who is a boy. Something else that took place that night was one of the best things of all. Jeong-su asked me if I had a Korean name, since using my real name while speaking Korean is odd, and I said that I’ve thought about one, but never found a good match. After a couple seconds she thought of the best Korean name for me. The way it would be romanized to English is “Ma” taken from the first sound in Meagher and “Geon-woo”, which is very similar to Conor as a given name. But family names go first, so it would be written or spoken like this: Ma Geon-woo. It would be a lot easier to explain if everybody could read Korean writing, but I did my best. I can show you that my name is not legal or anything, but somewhat official as I got my registered name change on cyworld.com, a Korean website that has 40 percent of the country’s total 49 million population registered.
To break away from the madness of preparing for the GRE, Jeong-in and I went to a KBO (Korean Baseball Organization) game. The same league that produced such baseball stars as Chan-ho Park, B.K. Kim, Jae Seo, and Seung-yeop Lee (Japanese League). I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was nothing crazy or really different then going to a Major League game at home. Even the 5′4″ Korean players were on steroids. The only difference that comes to mind are the player depth and fan support. Each team has their own cheering squad and they take turns according to who’s up to bat. Then even have cheerleaders. I had to take a video.
I’m not a big believer in the phrase, “No news is good news”. Any kind of updates are always good. But the last couple of months have been extremely busy. After I take the GRE writing section on Friday, I will have a little more breathing room and let everybody know what’s going on.
