This past couple of weeks have not been very eventful on the front of Korean language learning with my partner due to midterm week and the extended break. However, I would like to write about some of my personal excursions to participate in some local Korean-American culture. I have a few Korean-American friends on campus who go to the Richmond Korean Presbyterian Church each Sunday for a youth service. They invited me to come to a service, so I decided to venture out and I went for two weeks. There’s a bus that comes by THC to pick us up around 10:30am with the service starting at 11. I really enjoyed getting to know more people in the Korean-American community on campus. They were all very nice and were happy that I decided to partake in something they do every week. Once we got to the church, there is the main hall where the senior service takes place, and we went to a trailer beside it for the youth service. I believe that some renovations are being done, but I thought it was interesting how the services were separate. Little did I know that, by chance, I would get to experience both types of services in those two weeks. The first week was the youth service performed in English, half of which was spent singing songs with the youth band. It was very fun because even though I didn’t know any of the songs, I was able to quickly learn the melodies and the lyrics were portrayed on a screen for us to follow. Afterwards, we went to a section of the main church where a group of older women had prepared food for all of us to enjoy. It was very delicious, and I was excited to have homemade kimchi. Even though the service was not in Korean, most of the people there were bilingual, so I got to practice listening to and speaking some phrases.
The second week was actually a joint service that only happens three or four times a year between the youth and parents/seniors. It was held in the main chapel and was delivered in both Korean and English. There was a guest priest who only spoke English, but there were translations of his sermon in Korean on screens to the side of the room. With this, I was able to practice my reading and identify words I understood from the speech. The main focus and reason for the joint service was the South Korean holiday on March 1st, National Independence Movement Day, or 삼일 운동. This public holiday commemorates the earliest social movement for independence against the Japanese colonial rule in the year 1919. A part of the service was used to take a moment to acknowledge the suffering endured by South Koreans during the Japanese occupation and to pray for the country and China who at the time were some of the worst affected areas by the COVID-19. We then sang songs that had the sheet music and Korean lyrics on a screen for us to follow along with the choir and youth band. Overall, it was a lot of fun and I’m very glad that I was able to go and share some experiences with my Korean-American friends.
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