We Have A Rock Star Among Us!

Hello, again, from Seoul-
It didn't take us long to figure out that Seoul is truly a beautiful, safe and clean city with wonderful, friendly people! Having spent quite a bit of time in China and Hong Kong, I was expecting Seoul to be similar, but it's not at all. It's SOOOO much cleaner, the driving is so much more civilized (we never feared for our life and they don't honk at each other), and the people go out of their way to greet you and help you. We've spent the last couple of days sight seeing (and shopping) and wherever we go, people (especially school aged children) say in broken English, "Hello. Nice to meet you!" We were forewarned before we left that Ben would get quite a bit of attention here, but, holy cow, we feel like we're with a rock star! Everywhere we go, Koreans come up to him and talk to him (usually in Korean) or they'll yell from down the street to him. One morning we were waiting for a coffee shop to open and a group of school aged girls were gathered on the corner looking at us and, obviously, admiring Ben and then one of them yelled to us..."Hello, You baby is bootiful!" and they all giggled as they crossed the street. It's so endearing, but it pretty much freaks Ben out. He's been riding on Dave's shoulders when we're out. Dave's going to need one really long massage when we get home.

We were at a Korean Folk Village with 2 other couples from the US and I heard some commotion behind me and a very large group of kids had surrounded the other 2 couples and were talking to them in broken English and wanting their picture taken with them. It was so funny!

We had a situation in the subway this afternoon where a Korean gentleman went out of his way to help us. We didn't realize that the route we took was a slightly higher fare (literally 10 cents each) than what we were used to paying (it was a longer ride), but we didn't realize our mistake until we tried to exit at our stop. The machine kept spitting back our tickets and the turn styles wouldn't move so we could exit. We realized we needed to pay more, but couldn't figure out how to do that...the ticket offices were on the other side of the turnstyles. This gentleman was wearing a St. John's sweatshirt, so we asked him if he spoke English, and he did a little. We were able to communicate the problem to him and he didn't know how we could pay the difference, so he told us to stay there and he ran to find someone to help us. We were finally freed after paying our 40 cents. I've heard of similar stories from other families....the Koreans and just good, friendly people.


We've seen some really cool things...we visited a royal palace yesterday that was built in the 1300's. It's weird...here is this ancient palace right in the middle of a bustling city and is surrounded by modern sky scrapers. We watched a changing of the guard ceremony, which Ben really enjoyed. We also visited the world's largest book store and found some cool books that we can give to Claire that are in Korean and English. Ben was excited to get a Spiderman coloring book where all the writing was in Korean. Today, we visited the Korean Folk Village which a huge complex that really gave us a sense of all facets of Korean culture...how they live, what they eat, how they make a living, how they are entertained, etc...it was really cool to see so much in one place. We watched a group of folk dancers and musicians perform, we watched them perform some acrobatics and we watched a traditional Korean wedding ceremony. It turned out to be a full day adventure, but it was worth it.


We still have a few more places that we're going to try to see on our last couple of days here. The other 3 families that are staying at our hotel (who we now call our friends) are leaving for home really early Monday morning, so they get to pick up their babies tomorrow night and bring them to the hotel. I volunteered to go with them to the agency for their pickup to video tape it for them. That should give me a sense for what our pickup will be like. I'm planning to have lots of tissue on hand.


That's all for now....both Dave and Ben are crashed and I'm ready to join them.


Christa, Dave and Ben