Meeting the Parents

Jiran's mom turned up not long later. We sat down and had some fruit. Due to the high cost of fruit in Korea, it is seen as more of a treat than we would normally consider in Australia. Jiran's uncle on the island of ? had sent a plate of mandarins and kiwi fruit down to Busan for her family.


Communication with her parents has been interesting to say the least. Given my minimal Korean language skills, Jiran has been forced to translate all but the simplest of things, such as hello, goodbye, sleep well, see you soon, this looks delicious, this tastes delicious, etc. While listening to an abundance of Korean hasn't really helped my being able to speak it significantly, I do seem to have understand the flow of the language a bit better.


We sat down on the floor around the table, which is similar to what a coffee table would be in Australia and ate the fruit and had some onion drink, which is apparantly a health drink in Korea. In Korea, most buildings have heated flooring as the main heating for the residence. Jiran showed me up to my room and we deposited our bags.


Then Jiran, her dad and I went out to dinner. Her mom stayed behind, because Jiran's parents run a Love Motel, one of them is at the front desk at all hours of the day apart from the wee hours of the morning.


We went to a traditional Korean restaurant not too far from her parents place. We had a private room with a heated floor. We were seated around the low table on the floor, a waitress came in not long after and started depositing plates and stone bowls on the table.


Jiran's father had lots of questions about me and Australia in general. Jiran was busy translating amongst putting more food in my bowl. Jiran's father was most impressed at how adept I was at using chopsticks. I guess I got all of the family chopstick skill genes, as my brother, who was recently gifted some training chopsticks whilst he was in China as a joke by one of the restaurants. Chopsticks in Korea are slightly different from the standard variety, being a bit thinner in one dimension and made from stainless steel. This makes them good for sticking into foods like Kimchi and tearing it apart. It took me a while to get the hang of this skill but Jiran's dad patiently showed me the ropes.


I'll talk more about the Korean cuisine soon, but suffice to say that 'baebuleoyo' or 'I'm full' quickly became part of my Korean vocabulary