Safety first!

This was literally right next to our apartment building. One day there was a pork restaurant and the next day... demolition. But over the weekend, when they were closing up shop, they left the machinery parked like this for the weekend. (Please notice the loose rocks it is resting atop tilted toward the street.) Let's just hope the parking break was on. Oh Korea...

Happy Hangul Day!

Did you see Google's homepage yet? Today is hangul day.... the day the Korean alphabet was invented 564 short years ago. To celebrate, I'm going to be studying these characters aaaallllllll day.

Chatting with the cuz

Today Mark and I met for the first time with my cousin, Su Bin. She is a college student, and it seems that her father and Birth Father are close since I see her the most often at family events.

To jog your memory, here we are in the car going to SangKwun and ChunPing's wedding.

We've decided to start meeting regularly so she can practice English and we can practice Korean. Plus, this way I can try to get to know her better. We've had other language partners, but this is so much cooler because this is someone I'm actually blood related to and by learning the language am able to communicate better with. Seriously, this is something most people probably take for granted, but being here and getting to know people that I have the same genes and blood as is so amazing. I can't even put it into words.

We had so much fun chatting for a couple hours yesterday and though Mark and I can get a little frustrated with our level and where we think we should be, days like this remind us that we really can communicate fairly well and we just need to keep practicing.

Oh yeah... China does censor

Living over here and seeing my family go back and forth between China and Korea so easily, it's easy to forget that China is still (at least technically) a communist country. But then Mark sent SangKwun and ChunPing the link to the wedding slideshow he made for them and posted on YouTube and they couldn't access it. YouTube is blocked in China! Weird...

Gak...

We had our listening, reading, and speaking midterms today. Speaking wasn't bad. But listening... ugh. They had a CD of some people speaking super-super fast, the sound quality sucked, and our teachers played and replayed it really fast, not giving us much time to read the questions in between. We also have our writing midterm tomorrow, then our speaking interview next week. Blechety blech blech.

I'm actually a bit worried since Birth Father bought us our tickets to attend the Chinese wedding and we're going to have to miss more class than we originally thought. Our initial plan was to leave on Thursday the 14th and return Sunday the 17th. But there were no flights returning to Seoul on the 17th... the earliest flight returns on TUESDAY the 19th. So as things are, we're going to miss 4 days of class, which is huge at the speed these classes move.

I'm really flip-flopping on this one. The reason I'm here is to spend time with my birth family, and this wedding will be really special. But missing 4 days of class (especially in light of the most recent listening midterm from hell) completely stresses me out and could hurt my goal of learning the language to get to know my family more in the long term.

So, whoever's out there reading... please weigh in. Should I go to China? Stay in Korea and study?!?!?

Korean Wedding Slideshow

I promise, a longer wedding post with descriptions will follow when I have time... this happens to be midterm week, so we're in the midst of cramming for our 2 exams on Wednesday and 1 exam on Thursday. Blargh.

However, SangKwun and Emily's wedding was perfect in every way and I am SO glad we had the opportunity to share in their special day.

For now, here's a slideshow Mark put together for them. He also took a majority of these pictures and I think he did an amazing job with both. Enjoy!

Seoul Design Fair

One of the cool things about living in such a big city are the many things to do and see. Last weekend we went with a couple friends to The Seoul Design Fair. Basically, it was a huge event with exhibitions showcasing all sorts of cool designs. From cell phones to offices to bikes, there was a lot to see.

There was an international area with different innovations from around the world.

Here's a future office (or school) idea....

And if your office looks like this maybe you'll experience...

But who are we kidding. No one experiences "joy in work." :)

This is super-Korean. It kind of shows how a lot of things are packaged and wrapped here. If you buy a big, expensive box of food in a department store, a lot of times they'll wrap it in material like this. But it's never quite this pretty.

Here's furniture that's about right for Mark...

A very Asian home idea...

And the whole stadium was filled with exhibits in the seats too. These were some of my favorites:

Overall, it was a cool thing to see, but really was just a lot of walking around and looking. There are more festivals coming up in the next month or so, a fireworks festival on the Han River, a lantern festival, and more. Looking forward to going to all of them!