I look just like Julia Roberts

On Thursday I went with Jen to a temple near our school to help her teach some of the nuns and some refugees from North Korea English. We had been connected with the temple through this amazing woman, Judy, who owns a great restaurant above our work. She lives with the nuns at the temple which is also a place that some North Koreans come to when they first get into the country. It is a pretty amazing opportunity for us to work with people that we would have no other way of having a relationship with.
The temple is beautiful and so quiet compared with the rest of the city. I didn't have the chance to really look around but there was a huge garden on one side where they grow all of their vegetables and which also serves as a community garden for people in the area. There is the main temple where people can come and pray whenever and then the houses where the nuns live and study.
The class was with two nuns and two North Korean women who were about 25. Both of the North Koreans are unique in that they made it out of North Korea without being forced into a marriage. Typically single women end up in a marriage in China (they can't go directly to South Korea) because they cannot support themselves alone. I am not sure how long the two of them had been in South Korea but it seems that it has probably been a while because they both seemed very happy and open, there was lots of laughing at their efforts to speak English. At this point all of their English levels are very low and we will mostly just be trying to teach them vocabulary and some simple grammar but they have been learning very quickly so hopefully we will be able to communicate with them more.
Jen is pretty good at Korean (after 5 years here) which seems to be a big help in teaching them, I think it will be a struggle if I go alone to communicate with them and the other nuns.
The class is only an hour and then we are given lunch with some of the nuns. They are all so nice and welcoming. My favorite was this very old nun (I guess she is the oldest at the temple) who seems to be done with silly pleasantries and small talk. She just kind of sat around at lunch looking bored. When one of the other nuns took a picture of her with Jen, Jen was smiling and posing and the other woman just looked bored and not at the camera. Somehow she all of this while still seeming to be a wonderfully kind person. It was just as if she had lived a very full life and understood how inconsequential all of our behavior and conversations were. The one thing that did get her excited was this app on one of the woman's smartphones of a animated cat that would repeat things you said in a cute cat voice or you could punch it on different parts of its body for different reactions. This game kept her entertained for way too long.
I am definitely excited for the opportunity to get to know both the nuns and the North Koreans better and hopefully help them with their English but I am a little nervous about going on my own with my total lack of Korean. Though I think I will like spending time with the nuns as they are very complimentary, one of them told me I looked like Julia Roberts which mostly just indicates that she has never seen a picture of Julia Roberts.

This was the only photo I took on a recent weekend in Daegu. I love how eggs look and I don't know how they can have this huge stack of them on the street without people breaking them.