Osamuburugogi

A few days ago, I tried my hand at Korean cooking for the first time. Once a month, we (Rakuen Christ Church) offer a Korean cooking class as an outreach into the community. There's been a good turnout the two months that I've been here and this time, instead of just sitting around watching everyone, I decided to try it out. One of the best things about the cooking was that I got to wear an apron - they make me feel so domestic.


Well here it is. Osamaburugogi. Essentially, its pork and squid with Korean hot powder and paste and a variety of vegetables all fried up nicely. The squid in this dish was surprisingly tasty. I'm not usually a fan of squid due to its rubbery consistency; chewing something for 5 minutes before I can swallow it is asking a lot for something that I really like, much less something that is just so so. But for some reason, the squid in this dish had a firm tofu consistency...yummy.

This is my new friend Song. She is the daughter of one of the church members here at Rakuen. She just moved here from Korea. There are so few young people here that any new person around my age is always more than welcome. I'm so thankful for her already; she's kind and seems eager to get to know people here. In this shot, she's helping me with my Osamuburugogi because my chopsticks were getting too hot.

Say "No" to Strangers

Over the past month or so, the church members here at Rakuen Christ Church and I have been passing out flyers advertising my English classes to the surrounding neighborhoods. We have pretty much covered Tadaoka and even branched out to a few of the surrounding cities. Today, we tried a new tactic in order to get the word out. We decided, since our main target for the classes is children, that it would be a good idea to pass out flyers to kids as they were leaving their school and walking home. In order to make the classes a bit more appealing, we taped candy to the flyers. Yes, we handed out candy to innocent children just trying to make it home from school.

This was not my idea and when I was being told about it, I'm thinking, "Yeah right, kids are never gunna take candy from complete strangers, especially foreigners." I expressed my concern but was assured that it was perfectly fine. And sure enough, about 85% of the kids took the flyers and were quite grateful for the candy. There I was, smiling broadly as I hand the flyers to these adorable little kids, feeling like such a creep, and wondering why in the world they were so eager to rip the candy off the flyer and devour it. "Didn't your parents ever teach you not to take candy from strangers?" I'm thinking. Apparently not. Just another way that America and Japan are worlds apart.