I had a crazy awesome couple of days in Korea, but now I am on a plane back to Thailand. Time to recap the adventures!
My Sunday in Korea was a good one! I’m the morning we got up and made our way by car to the Lutheran Church there. It is actually the only Lutheran Church in all of Korea. Everyone there was so nice when I first came in. They even had an shortened English service before the Korean one. After the English service I met Pat. Pat did the liturgy for the English service and was actually a US Army soldier stationed in Korea. Him, his wife, and two kids we’re actually from the West side of Michigan. It was really suprising and nice to see some people from back home.
Right before the Korean service James Lee walked in. James Lee is another high school friend. It completely caught me off guard because I had messaged him and he said he was going to be on military duty as a translator for the upcoming winter Olympics in Korea. Fortunately for me his departure dates for that got moved back! I was so happy to see him too. Everytime I see an old high school friend, like with Kisun, we always laugh about the good times in the dorms and I feel like things haven’t changed a bit!
After church there is a nice get together “youth” group. It was pretty much a group of the church’s young people who have graduated high school. Most of them have made studied either high school or college in the US so their English is very good. John Kim, another high school friend, showed up during this! More sentimental memories! After the youth group we had a meal as a church. Then the group of Maria, John, Kyle (nice guy I met at the youth group) went out to some markets.
After we wandered around the market, and I got my fill of hodduck they took me a Karaoke place. Karaoke here, like Thailand, is pretty serious. They have these places that are just filled with a bunch of dedicated mini karaoke rooms for you and your friends. The room is just big enough for a couch facing a pretty high tech Karaoke system and screen. There were two mics and the system allowed to configure everything like adjusting the key of the song to a better range for you. Even with these features I am still pretty horrible at singing, but it was a fun time!
After Karaoke we all went to a restaurant and had some typical snacks which was liver, intestines, rice cake, and dumplings. Good food! My chopstick skills are slowly but surely improving! After that we all split ways and Maria and I went home where her mom had actually made us dinner. Needless to say, I ate real well that night!
After a packed Sunday I had a more relaxing Monday morning. We woke up a little later and Maria and I went for a hike on a mountain near her house. After we went through the mountain I got some more hodduck of course! She bought some ingredients at a market for her mom. I think it was for kimchi. On a side note, the Ha family has their own fridge solely dedicated to the making and storage or kimchi. It’s a big deal..
After the hike and some lunch we had plans to rent the traditional Korean clothing and visit the palace. If you dress up, apparently admission is free. Plus it would be cool to pretend like I’m in the movie Mulan. So we got off the subway and got in our traditional clothing. Then we walked to the palace and got there at 4:15pm. It closed at 4pm… We had to improvise.
We went to go walk through some traditional village and we spent forever trying to find a park that was on this tourist map we had. But we couldn’t find it, and to make it worse it was around 15°. I’m used to Thailand’s 90° so this was a shocker. After wandering around for a bit and seeing some cool buildings we ended up taking pictures in front of the clothes rental shop!
After returning the clothes we wandered around downtown. They have a cool stream running through the middle of the city and the whole place was decked out with Christmas decorations! Warmed my heart. That’s the stuff I don’t get to see in Thailand. It’s good to be with friends during the holidays!
Next post I’ll talk about my last day in Korea and my Hong Kong flight mishaps and downtown Hong Kong explorations.