Gung Hay Fat Choy

Look what we did today...

A friendly Korean church about an hour from us

invited Korean adoptive families to a Lunar New Year Celebration.

They made Bi Bim Bop

and it was so good!

Charlie preferred the oranges.

Reuben slurped three bowls of tofu soup.

Peter enjoyed the main dish.

Oops, too close.

The woman in the brown shirt back there...
She has been waiting to be matched with a Korean child for three years.
She and her husband started the process the same time we did for Charlie.
We feel so blessed to have Charlie home with us.

After lunch we began our instruction on how to properly bow to our ancestors.

Here's Reuben practicing his bowing.

I didn't do any bowing, but it felt awkward and

kind of wrong to be bowing down to anything other than God.

When we were in Korea to adopt Reuben we happened to be there for the Lunar New Year and we saw WooSeok's parents create a shrine/alter to their ancestors and bow to it/them.

It's a piece of their culture that I don't fully understand.

On to a Korean hacky sack competition.

These Koreans are very enthusiastic game-players,

including kids and adults in their sports.

I only hackied the sack two times.

Holder of the hacky sack.

Hold on.

I'm going to look up the Korean name for it...

Jaegi.

But, you should have seen Paul!

He pulled out his secret jaegi skills.

A Korean man said to me, "I bet he's a really good soccer player."

Ha.

Ha, ha, ha.

He might be.  He probably is.

Of course, he would actually have to play soccer in order to find out.

Paul was clearly the best nonKorean jaegi player.

And he was very handsome.

Fun day.

As for the Gung Hay Fat Choy title... when I taught first grade I was handed some curricula and asked to teach about Lunar New Year, also known as Chinese New Year.  It said you're supposed to shout, "gung hay fat choy!" and it means "happy new year!"  Fast forward to that one time when we lived in China... when Lunar New Year came around I confidently called out a hearty gung hay fat choy to my Chinese friends and they had no idea what I was talking about.  Sorry to all those first graders I totally misguided.  I hope that was one of those lessons that nobody remembered.