Amanda Takes Off...

So Good Man and I almost never do anything for our anniversaries (measured the Korean way, in 100 day chunks, this is Day 500), but tonight we decided to order pizza.

I picked Good Man up from school and we picked up our pizza. Over dinner, Good Man said, "아만다나랑결혼해줄래?"

I nodded, "천천히 말 해 줘." Speak more slowly.

"아만다..." he said, switching to word-by-word mode.

I laughed, "'Amanda.'"

"나랑..."

I was reminded of a children's book I have. I thought and said, "'Me-with.'"

He nodded, "결혼 해 줄래?"

"Gyeolhon," I repeated. I froze. "결혼?"

Good Man nodded.

I switched to English, "Did you just ask me to marry you?"

Good Man smiled.

"Yes!"

"Oh," I said yesterday, "tomorrow is your 100 Day Anniversary in America!"

"How do you know that?" Good Man asked.

"Because you got here 2 days before our 400 days, and our 500 days is Wednesday, so tomorrow is your 100 days."

Good Man laughed, "You are more Korean than me."

So today is Day 100 for Good Man. I must say, he's doing better after 100 days in American than I was in Korea. After 100 days in Korea, I was working really hard to get another job.

His culture shock seems fairly minor so far. He doesn't like checks, carpeting, how infrequently the bus runs, and how you can't by soju at the Korean grocery store. He likes Americans' "silliness." He likes the crazy politics, too.

I think there are some big differences between our adjustments. One, my job was not going well, his classes are.

Two, he had to pass English tests—multiple tests—in Korea before the US gov't would give him a visa. I didn't have to even know the Korean alphabet before they let me in. The language difference is huge.

Three, I've lived alone before. So while I wasn't sure how to use a Korean washing machine, I at least knew how to wash clothes. Good Man has learned how to make coffee, use a dishwasher, launder clothes, what can and can't go down a garbage disposal, how to make and stick to a budget, and so on. (And oh thank kimchi, thank kimchi, he's learned it all quickly and without any nagging on my part.)

Four, I wasn't in Korea with a Korean lover, he's here with me. In many ways, this makes his adjustment easier because I can teach him how to deal with stuff. Like the aforementioned evil checks.

On the other hand, while he gets a buffer person to deal with the culture, he also has the "fun" of making his mistakes in front of someone else.

Once, in Korea, I ended up riding the same section of the subway 3 (4?) times and was 90 mins late in getting home. Nobody had to know about my mistake. A few weeks ago, late at night, Good Man ended up on the wrong bus and had to have me come and pick him up.

I once bought some sort of ice cream that I thought was chocolate filled and faced a red bean paste center. Ick. Somewhat similarly, Friday Good Man went to pick up dish detergent. He bought two bottles of dish soap. Thank goodness I was able to tell him that we couldn't use that, or we would've ended up de-bubbling the dishwasher this weekend...

Mother called us this morning. She called Good Man's handphone rather than his laptop, so when the phone was handed over to me, it was one-on-one. (When she calls the laptop, we have it in speaker mode, so Good Man can hear her and help me understand anything.)

I told her I wasn't feeling well and was getting a cold. She freaked out and told me to get a blanket (이불). I promised I would.

Then she told me my sweater was beautiful and I tried to explain the Sweater Curse to her. The Sweater Curse states that if you knit something for a man before you're married, you'll break up immediately before or after you finish it.

I made some really, really convoluted sentence to try and explain it. Mother, who is polite but totally willing to tell me she doesn't understand, responded with, "Huh?"

I took a deep breath and decided to simplify. But even my "simplifying" wasn't that great.

"여자친구가 남자친구를?" Girlfriend-subject marker boyfriend-object marker? "남자친구한테?" Boyfriend-to? "남자친구로?" Boyfriend-directional move?

I was tacking every damn marker on there that I could think of, trying to find "for." Good Man was sitting at his desk, two feet away from me, being of no help whatsoever.

Suddenly the lyrics from 가지마 가지마 popped into my head. I had been wondering was 위해 meant, and Good Man had told me "for."

"앗! 남자친구 위해?" Oh, boyfriend-for?

Mother said, "어, 어, 어." Yes, yes, yes.

With that hurdle out of the way, I could explain myself. And she understood me.

Whew.

Poor Mother. One thing she worried about me before meeting me was that she wouldn't be able to communicate with me. Sometimes, it's very true. And even when we do communicate, it's at my low level of Korean. She'd have a much easier time with a Korean daughter-in-law/living-in-sin-with-her-son-girlfriend.

Meanwhile, on the Sister front, I had some random Crises of Language today about how I should talk to Sister. I want to use banmal (intimate form) because I really like her, but I don't want her to feel uncomfortable because we don't know each other well.

Good Man told me to just ask her, so I did (asking her "favor" to speak banmal). But I did so knowing that she'd say yes to banmal because I'm older, which sort of defeats the whole point of asking.

She said yes.

Based on the exasperated look Good Man was giving me, I think he thought I was Crisis of Language-ing over nothing.

Speaking of language, Good Man came up with a good circumlocution today.

"My stomach feels sad."

When we first came to America, Good Man and I tried to institute a One Hour of Korean a Day rule.

It didn't work.

So we tried instituting a One Hour of Korean a Week rule.

It didn't work.

I would get frustrated because I didn't know a word, or we'd be tired, or want to discuss something serious, or... and then we'd slip into English and it'd be like, "Well, that didn't work."

Mark suggested taking an entirely different approach. He suggested speaking in Korean for one full day every week. They did this in German in his graduate program in Germany. He said since it was one full day, and the same day every week, you just knew, "Well, that's it, today's the day." He also said it became a sort of a game after a while, and that once you got over the difficult part at the start, it was fun.

Well, we decided to try it today.

As an extra incentive, I went out and bought a medium bag of M&Ms, figuring we'd remove one M&M every time we slipped into English. But I made a mistake in buying a medium bag (seriously, 9 servings of 1/4 C each is a "medium?") because we only had to remove 30 M&Ms. Thirty M&Ms, in the grand scheme of a medium M&M bag, isn't much.

And we did a good job, too. This wasn't English spoken as Konglish with a Korean accent. We were speaking Korean and only used Konglish when it was a phrase like "Florida Keys."

Our cut off time was 10 pm and frankly, I was shocked that we'd stuck with it all day. We mostly lost it while in the car.

The only bad thing...my jaw hurts. I think it's because all of that pronunciation in a different way takes more work. I am sure that sounds weird...

When we had Mark's family over for dinner, we picked up "Mi Sticks" for us. "Beautiful" Pepero Sticks have "air choco" on them as well as a "coffee+milk" layer. We were saving the Mi Sticks as a treat.

Well, one night during the week, I came home to find an empty box of Mi Sticks. I teased Good Man about it and the next weekend, we bought another box of Mi Sticks to share.

We broke out the Mi Sticks a few nights ago and I discovered that within one box there are two individually wrapped packs of Mi Sticks.

"You ate both packs of Mi Sticks? Both?"

Good Man grinned at me.

"왜 사랑하지 않아?" Why don't you love me? I asked.

"Noooooooooo."

Good Man was teasing me over something last night and I started to chase him. He ran into the closet and locked the door.

I stood in the bedroom doorway and stared at the closet door.

He opened the door a crack and looked at me.

"You're hiding in the closet? That's going on the blog."