Jellyfish Tentacle Salad

Jordan and Elder Harrison

Itaewon is great, but we don't do a whole lot of missionary work there. If someone wants to meet there, we can, but we usually work in other places. It's a portion of the mission that has been 'closed' for a few years.Of course we can use our Korean around town, but sometimes you say 'anyeounghasaeyo' and the guy looks at you like you're crazy and says, 'I'm from Boston.'

I'll give you the highlights for the week:  We met a guy who was Korean, but adopted to America when he was born. He's from California (I think), and said, 'Hey, you're Mormon, right?' and then proceeded to pull back his collar to show us a black, blue, purple, and green neck. He broke his collar bone the night before and was doped up until Monday morning, when he'll get surgery. He was really drugged up but he was coherent enough to talk.  Evidently he met missionaries in another area and was currently meeting with them, and one of the missionaries just moved in with us, so he'll start teaching him!

Jellyfish Salad

Our 85 year old investigator took us to his friend's son's wedding. Upon arrival the groom approached us and said, 'You guys aren't Mormons right?' and I smiled big and said, 'Why yes we are!' which actually sounded like 'nay kuh roocho!' He thought this old fogie brought us to his wedding to crash it and convert everyone there. But there was raw beef, sushi, and jellyfish tentacle salad, so we stayed around long enough to chow down before booking it out of there. Our guy is so old and he's the world champion of broken English. He's mastered broken English so well you can't teach him proper English. He thinks it's wrong. He'll just spit out a few words and expect you to understand. 

Namsan Tower

On the other hand, we met a 90 year old Chinese guy that speaks even less English. I thought we met the world champion, but he just got dethroned. This guy speaks Chinese and some Korean, but insists on saying the only 12 words he knows in English to us. He's an oriental medicine doctor, so he's pretty healthy and will be alive for a while. We brought a senior missionary who's 70, Elder Ulvestad, and they bonded so well. ...After he harped on Elder Ulvestad for not learning Korean. He's trying so hard, but he's only been here for a few months. This old guy started talking very loudly, 'You Korea, you learn Korea. you old man. I old man.' *Beams brightly* what a wonderful old man. He asked me what my name was and I said Franchina, and he goes, 'No, no, pust name.' Oh, it's Jordan.

He now calls me Jordan, and when he first said my name, he resembled my grandfather on my dad's side. Don't know why, but if my grandpa was Asian, it would probably be this guy. I like him a lot.

Namsan  Tower

We live right at the base of the Namsan tower, which is Korea's version of the space needle in Seattle.  It's really cool and right outside of our window - we can see it lit up at night. I like this area, we will be meeting a lot of cool people.

The important thing I am learning is just to be other people's friend. More than anything, just be a friend. So this week, reach out to someone and be a friend.

Elder Franchina

(Jellyfish Salad photo courtesy of http://maggie-edwards.blogspot.com/2011_02_01_archive.html)

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Over the weekend we received the following e-mail from someone who is vacationing in Korea and met Jordan.

We are visiting Seoul for spring break and spent our Sunday meetings with Elder Franchina. He was a great translator and he made sure we were well taken care of. He even made sure we found out where to fill our water bottles! He is doing great but what you really want to know is that he seems happy. Thanks for sharing your son with us.