Tag Archives: dinner

26 Jul

sunday dinner at Browns Hill Bible Chapel

Who taught : Emily, Rachel and Liz

Cake for Leah and Zac's farewell dinner made by Mandie

When I knew that I am coming to the U.S., my father asked one of his friends who is a missionary from the U.S. to find out the church for me to go. He recommended Browns Hill Bible Chapel to my father and me. Since then, Jessy and I are going to the chapel and it has been such a blessing for us. If you are interested in coming, please tell me. We should go together.

A few weeks later from our first visit to the chapel, Debby asked Jessy and me after the church service, “Hey, do you guys want to have dinner together?” I responded, “OK! What time do you want to meet? Maybe around 5:30 pm?” She said, “No, it is now!” “But you said dinner,” I asked again. She then realized and explained to us, “Oh.. we use dinner for Sunday lunch.” I was quite surprised. I have always thought dinner is a meal we eat in the evening. Do you guys really use dinner, meaning lunch or something?

And, yesterday, we had a special Sunday dinner after the service at church to say good bye to our friends, Leah and Zac. They are moving to Spain because of Zac’s new job. They will be staying there for about 5 years and COME BACK to PGH. Right, Zac? They have to because we all miss them so much and I am pretty sure they will miss us too.

Right before the dinner, I was talking to some friends and Emily and Liz were talking to other friends. But we were pretty close. And for some reason, I felt that Emily and Liz were talking about me. When I looked at them, they were like, “Nothing! How did you know we are talking about you.” I said, “I do not know! I just felt it.”

Then, we sat down together to have dinner and Rachel was right next to me. So, I said to Rachel, “Hey, Rachel. You know what happened? Emily and Liz made fun of me.” And Emily said, “No, we did not! We were just teasing you.” At that time, I was kind of confused and thought about the previous post about “Popular VS Famous.” Again, make fun of someone and tease someone have the same meaning in English-Korean dictionary. Thus, it is hard to find out the proper usage of them in a proper context.

So, here is what I learned. Tease is pretty much same act as making fun of but it does not really involve a bad intention.

Am I right? I am still kind of confused. This kind of subtle difference in expressions is so hard to catch.

12 Apr

wine and dine

Who taught : Kelly

Wine and Dine….Sounds like really elegant and nice expression, isn’t it?

When I heard it for the first time from Kelly, I thought this would be an expression used for having real nice dinner. It is half correct because there is something else after dinner. You can use this one like, “I am going to wine and dine her tonight.” I mean you could use but you have to be careful. Why? this is an expression you can use, “when you want to take a lady out to real nice dinner and then have a sex with her.” Well, I think you should drink wine too along with dinner. I am not sure whether women can use this one. Is it possible? One more cultural lesson here! Be careful asking any woman for having dinner together! In America, if you ask any lady to go out for dinner together, then it implicitly means you might want to have a sex with her. Well, if you think more carefully, if you are a woman, if you say yes to this request, then you are implicitly saying I would like to have a sex with you. I mean, possibly. This is not the case at all in Korea as far as I know. (You know, I am very innocent and do not know a lot about this. I am not sure how I was able to marry Jessy. 🙂 )

There is a dirtier expression than this one, “wine dine 69.” Kelly actually taught me this one 🙂 Well, I will let you figure out the 69 part. One hint is … Think of 6 as a man and 9 as a woman. “Still not get it? My friends! I donno… You should research by yourself!”

Having said an expression related with sex, there is an expression you can use when you want to stop talking about sexual stuff with your friends if he/she keeps talking about those things. You can say, “Get you mind out of the gutter!” The gutter literally means a narrow channel that gets water from the roof of the building. Also, there is a street gutter for the same purpose. As you can see, the gutter has pretty dirty things. So, for American people, the gutter is related with some sort of dirty things especially thoughts related with sexual stuff. If any of your friends like to talk about sexual stuff, then you can say, “Dude, your mind is in the gutter!” This might be offensive to your friends so that you should be careful when you use it.

Interesting thing is, though, that people are really fast to learn these kind of expressions. Is it because people like to talk about this kind of stuff more than others or is it just because of human basic instinct?