Day 4

Happy Sabbath everyone! Just got back from one of the most fantastic vespers services ever. I haven't gotten such a blessing from a vespers program in a while. The program was a mix of teachers and students singing or doing musical pieces. There was a lot of talent for sure. One of my favorite groups was called the Pilgrim Quartet, which was actually a quintet for most of their songs, but still were called a quartet. It was one of the best a Capella groups I have heard in a long time, even though they also sang with accompaniment some of the time. Both ways were just fantastic. They had excellent tone and pitch. And their bassist was a tiny man who when he spoke was very high pitched and squeaky. Quite a shock when he went really low at the end of one of their songs.

That was pretty much the highlight of the day, for me at least.

Earlier today, after lunch we met up with the All Day club to go to town. We rode the Subway all the way to the other side of Seoul. Not sure the name at the moment. I need to start writing them down as I go to them, I am so bad at remembering all the names and places. Anyway we rode the subway, which was an adventure all on its own. It's hard to navigate a place you can't understand. the Subway is bad enough, but the Subway in another language is just...overwhelming. I think Overwhelming is my new favorite descriptive word right now. Sorry about its over use. We got to our destination, whatever it was, and began our walk through the streets. The streets here are very interesting. what I mean by that is, it is usually fairly hard to tell where the street begins and the sidewalk ends. You can be walking on what you think is the sidewalk and a scooter will fly by. Not that big of a deal, it's just a scooter, but then out of no nowhere will come a truck, or a car, or a van. Driving right up beside you on the sidewalk. When the traffic gets really bad on the streets people use the sidewalk as a short cut. And apparently it is legal. The other thing that is confusing is the street is also a sidewalk. People, bikes, cars, scooters and buses all fight each other for the right of way. Not so much on the highway but on the side streets it is a free for all. The scary thing is pedestrians do not have automatic right of way. You walk at your own risk and then move quickly out of the way when something bigger than you approaches.

So this is what we did all afternoon. Dodging traffic, trying not to get lost and checking out all the cool shops along the way. We somehow managed to all get very separated at some point and our group of 19 ended up being a group of about 5. Which was fine. We had a Korean with us and since everyone else made it back in one piece I will assume they all had a Korean with them.

I was starving so my new friend Boris, who is part of the All Day club, bought me some bread which he called strawberry bread. It was in fact, not strawberries. It was red bean curd/paste. It turned out to be fairly delicious though and I ate it all. Then we went to Burger King. A four story high Burger King. It was pretty fancy. And hectic. Ordering in another language is good times. A lot of useless hand motions and laughing are the only way to get through it. the food brought us back to life after our hot walk through town and we were able to make it back to the subway without much difficulty.

Now we get to relax again, and fall dead asleep, still trying to recover from that dang jet lag. I always thought jet lag was a myth, having never experienced it, but I have come to realize that it is an actually thing and more than that I would even venture to say it is a condition, one that should probably be added to the list along with the flu, or measles. And as such should be able to be controlled with some form of medication. That's just what I think...

Oh, I forgot to tell you that the other day Christina and I met with Pastor Mark who is in charge of the Kinderest program here. The Kinderest program is a kindergarten/preschool program that Christina and I will be helping to start/develop. It is a fairly new program so they are still ironing out the issues, but we were asked to help teach in a couple of the schools nearby. I think it will be an interesting time... to say the least. I will say this, little Korean kids are some of the cutest kids out there! Hopefully they are not also some of the most devilish. We shall see.

I think that is all for now, I am getting sleepy, It's 8:32 pm and that is a new record late for me.

goodnight and happy sabbath

Michelle