The Semi-obligatory Valentine's Day Post

We just celebrated our third month being in Korea, and I really can't believe that it's been three months already! I still feel like we've only just arrived, but at the same time, I feel like we're finally getting settled into a groove where our schedule is pretty well set.

We're definitely not wanting for things to do, as we do have a pretty busy schedule between work and school, and it almost makes me wonder where we're going to find time to do all of the adventuring that we want to do. All of the other foreigners that we've talked to are shocked that we've been here three months and haven't been to Seoul yet, but in the midst of everything else we're doing, we just haven't gotten around to it yet (but when we DO get a chance to go, you'll definitely hear about it!).

I won't bore you with our mushy-gushy Valentine's day plans of worship team practice, grocery shopping and house-cleaning; suffice it to say that our first V-day in another country probably won't be as romantic as you might expect, but if I have time today to plan anything outrageous, I'll try to post about it before YOUR Valentine's Day comes and goes.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPod touch]

Anyone Wanna Come To Korea?

So tonight we had another first for our adventure: we got to be interviewed over Skype about our experience in Korea. The audience was one of ABU's small groups whose topic of discussion is figuring out what you want to do with your life after university.

Because of the distinctive lag on the skype network (I suspect it has something more to do with the ABU network than with skype, but skype is always an easy target), we were provided with a list of questions in advance and had about 15 minutes to share a little about our experience while answering the questions, leaving time for additional q&a at the end. It was quite fun, and wouldn't you know it but an old friend was in the crowd, too!

We left the group with an open invitation to email us with any questions they might have about Korea, and hopefully we'll get some replies back because we'd love to see more people come over and take part in this wonderful experience with us.

Of course, if any of you have other questions that we might not have answered yet, please feel free to email us or simply post your question(s) in the comments section of this post (with your email address so we can reply directly to you). If a lot of questions come in, then we'll do a Q&A-style post, and put all the anawers in one place.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPod touch]

Aftermath

Well, we successfully made it to Hong Seong, and we're now on our way home, happy to have been able to visit somewhere new and to see Lorie for the first time since we first arrived in Korea.

An unexpected side effect of the bus ride was that Shan got a little motion sick on the way up, so we stopped by the pharmacy on our way back to the bus station to get her an anti-nauseant. We'll see how it works, and hopefully she'll have a more pleasant trip home.

Our day was really exciting, though, as Lorie showed us around her hometown, introduced us to some more new food (and I'm a horrible person for not remembering the name of it), and just generally showing us a great time. Hong Seong is much smaller than Daejeon (at a mere 35,000 or so, compared to Daejeon's 1.5 million), but there was still lots to fill up the afternoon. We went hiking around the mountain near Lorie's place and checked out the temple there, then she took us to the remains of the old Hong Seong fortress (we'll have pictures up on Facebook or Flickr once we're back at a computer and have time to sort through the hundreds that I took). It was really cool to see these buildings that are so old and then see how much of that heritage is in many modern buildings (like the pagoda-style roofs that you see modern iterations of in many places, to name just one example). Now I'm not much of a history buff (I leave such things to Shannon), but I can definitely appreciate being able to see (or more appropriately, 'take pictures of') things that have real historical significance.

All in all, I really enjoyed the day, and I can't wait to go on another adventure like this one where we get to see some of this rich history that exists throughout Asia.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPod touch]