The weekend!

We had a great first weekend here. It was sunny and warm (for spring). Saturday we walked down Teheran Street to the COEX Mall. But instead of going into the mall we walked around behind it to an old Bhuddist temple complex called Bongeunsa. It dates from the 8th century AD (according to the guidebook), but the oldest building there now was built 150 years ago. Here are photos of some of the things we saw there: a huge drum and bell; a really tall statue of Bhudda, hundreds of paper lanterns and amazing ornate old buildings set in the middle of a very modern city.

Outdoor (fake ice) skating rink at COEX, with odd IPark Building in the background. There are many stunningly designed buildings here.

We finished the afternoon off with ice cream from Baskin and Robbins. For real! Lili had cherry and Jin had chocolate box. It was expensive ($3.80 for a small cup) but good.

Sunday we went to the Zoo at Seoul Grand Park. What an experience! We haven't seen many kids around during the week, but a trip to the park and zoo is definitely a family event in Seoul, especially on such a nice spring day. There seemed to be thousands of people streaming out of the subway up the long broad walkway to the park entrance. There were food vendors along the way selling BBQ'd tteok sticks (cylindrical rice dough cakes), gimbap (Korean for california roll sushi), stir-fried larvae(!), some sort of small shell thingy (sold by the cup), BBQ'd squid and donut twists (just like Tim Hortons, but much better). I'd like to say we tried it all, but we passed on the larvae, shelly things and squid...this time. For about $3.50 we bought a couple of tteok sticks, a package of 20 small gimbaps and 4 donuts. A pretty affordable and tasty lunch! Here are photos of the vendors and the girls chowing down on some tteok (pronounced tdawk). Oh ya, if the street food was't to your liking, there is always the Colonel....

The Zoo is spread out in a valley on the south side of Seoul with generally large enclosures for most of the animals. We saw elephants, lions (Alex has a family), monkeys of all types, white rhinoceras, zebras (Marty and his friends), hippos (Gloria just laid around), cranes, penguins, flamingoes and lots more. We thought the coolest thing there were the giraffes. (who knew Melman could be so cool?!) They were feeding a baby one when we walked by. Here are a few of the critters we saw. (the references are to the movie Madagascar which is a current favourite of the girls)

Deb's favourite thing was an orchid festival that was being held in the botanical garden there. Very spectacular. Check out the photos...

The first place winner.

The girls put up with the orchids with a promise to visit the zoo playground. Here's Jin sliding out of an elephant's trunk!

We ended the day with a Domino's pizza back at the guesthouse. We ordered half pepperoni and half bulgoki (traditional Korean beef dish). The pepperoni was passable and the bulgoki was...well... let's just say we would have rather eaten the traditional bulgoki any day. And it cost $20!

Before bed people we know from Ottawa arrived at the guesthouse. They are here to receive their second son (their first son is with them). Small world, eh! We are looking forward to seeing their new arrival in the days to come!

Well that's it for now. All the best and thanks for the comments.

Love,

Jin, Lili, Deb and Derek

First Days in Seoul

Hi again!


Our first couple of days in Seoul have been busy, exciting, tiring and rewarding. We shopped for the basics (groceries and Hello Kitty stuff), did a little touristing and looked for an apartment. The over-riding factor though has been dealing with jetlag. It was good that we arrived in the evening last Wednesday, so we could head straight to bed. The trouble is Jin and Lili woke up at 2:30am and would not/could not get back to sleep. We didn't sleep much better. That of course meant we were all very tired the next afternoon. Fun times shopping with the cranky family! Everyone has been adapting, slowly but surely. The kids actually stayed awake for dinner tonight (Sunday) and slept in till 4:30am. Anyway, let's tell you about what we've been up to the past few days.


We planned a low key first day. Our first order of business was shopping for some groceries. We brought coffee and cheerios, so after a quick trip to the corner store for milk and juice we had breakfast covered. After that we set off for the E-Mart (a sort of upscale Walmart) about 1km away to do some serious shopping for supplies. It was an alright spring day when we left for the store, about plus 7 and a slight drizzle. Half way there though the rain got heavier, then the temperature dropped, then it started to sleet! Yuck! By the time we got to the Emart we were a little damp and chilly (did I mention tired and cranky too?). The highlight of shopping was the moving sidewalk ramps, or as Lili likes to call them, the excalators. You can even take your shopping cart on them! Here is a photo to prove it. And then one of Deb and the girls walking back from the store in better weather.


After shopping Deb treated us to our first "home-cooked" meal in Korea, a dumpling lunch. Mmmmm! And for dessert, very juicy strawberries.





As a further reward for putting up with grocery shopping, and in an effort to keep people moving and awake so we could try to force our internal clocks to Korea time, we treated the kids to shopping at the Hello Kitty store at the COEX mall, just a short subway ride away. This underground mall is huge, so a simple trip to hit one store turned into a marthon walk through throngs of Korean shoppers. (did I mention we were tired and cranky?) Anyway, the expedition was succesful and both Lili and Jin came home with a couple new stuffed HK toys. After this busy day everyone flamed out early.





Day 2: Everyone was awake early for day 2. Not because we wanted to be, it's just our bodies still thought it was the middle of the day. This day we went looking for a place to stay for the rest of our time in Korea. We had arranged ahead of time by email an apartment hunting tour set up with a real estate company (they handle sales and rentals) that was recommended to us by friends in Korea. We took the subway to the Hannam District (an area in central Seoul where many foreigners live) where they showed us 3 places. We loved the first place! Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, furnished (even a dishwasher and an oven - ovens don't appear to be common in Korea), new, clean, four storey "villa". In some respects it's even better than our house in Sudbury! It costs more than we were hoping to spend, but the more we thought about it the better it sounded. Nice neighbourhood. The landlady's son goes to kindergarten, so maybe Jin and Lili could to school with him. We are now in the middle of making arrangements to sign the contract and arrange payments, etc. We could be moving in in a day or so. We'll send pictures of it once we move in.

That afternoon we visited our friends Justine and Soomee at INKAS, an organization that helps international Korean adoptees. We met them back in 2007 when we came here for a Motherland Tour. It was great to see them again! They arranged for a volunteer translator to help us out. Her name is Na Young. She is a university student majoring in English literature. They also lined up another real estate agent to show us apartments in another area of town, Gangnam District (upscale and modern, think Bloor and Young times 100). So Derek and her went out to check out a couple places late Friday afternoon while Deb took the girls "home" to bed. The apartments ranged from smaller, nice expensive places to not-so nice, older cheaper places. The neighouhood is not too kid friendly though - few visible playgrounds, narrow backstreets with BMW's speeding around. That helped confirm our decision to go with the first apartment we saw.

After all this, Derek came home with some take out food (not so good chicken kalbi and a weird spicy veggy and cold noodle dish with chunks of some kind of meat) and a bottle of wine (the kids were already in bed). Then it was early to bed.

This post has gotten a bit too long, so let's save the storey of our fun weekend tourist trips (zoo and Bhuddist Temple) for the next post.

Bye for now.

Derek, Deb, Jin and Lili

We're Here!

Hello! Annyeong-haseyo!

We've arrived at last! What a looooong day we had traveling to Korea. Mom and Dad got us up in the middle of the night! We were so excited, so jumped out bed right away. The airport shuttle showed up a little early (4am!) so there was a mad dash to get the last of our stuff put away and load up the van. Luckily Mom and Dad (mostly Mom) had already packed most of our stuff already.

The first leg of our journey was in a small plane from Sudbury from Toronto. Here is a picture of Mom and us getting on the plane "in the midde of the night" (actually at about 6am).

In Toronto we switched to a real big plane (Dad said it was a Boeing 777). Everyone had their own TV! We watched Madagascar 2 and High School Musical 3. And Mom prepared a luscious breakfast and lunch for the flight.

We stopped in Vancouver to switch to another plane (a 767 this time) for the last leg of our trip. In Vancouver Airport there this awesome aquarium. It is huge! Here is a photo of it. Can you see Jin and Lili in the aquarium? We looked for Nemo in the anemones but couldn't find him.

Aside from the aquarium the best part of all the airports (except Sudbury) were the moving sidewalks (Lili calls them "excalators"). After a couple of hours in Vancouver we got on the plane to Korea. Here is a photo of Lili and Dad in front of our plane.

This flight lasted a long long long time. Eleven hours! They fed us lots of food - not as good as Mom's but still not bad. Some of it was kind of spicy. Mommy and Daddy liked the free wine! There were TV's on the back of each seat and the same movies as the last flight. So Lili got to watch Madagascar 2 a bizillion times. Mom and Dad did get to see Slumdog Millionaire. We did manage to sleep a bit, some more than others. Here is a picture of Lili doing some colouring in front of her own TV.

The TVs could also show us maps of where we were. Here is a picture of a map showing the location of our plane approaching the international dateline (we were approaching tomorrow). The interesting thing is that it never got dark during our flight.



Finally we started our descent to Korea. Here is one of our first glimspes of Korea through the clouds. Still a bit brown, but spring is just around the corner.

After a not too smooth landing we were happy to have finally arrived in Korea (at about 5pm Korean local time on Wednesday March 25). Here are two different reactions to our arrival.

And here were are coming through the arrivals gate at Incheon Airport (Seoul's international airport).

We still had an hour's drive on a shuttle bus into Seoul to where we are staying. Then there was a small glitch at the Guesthouse where the doorman had no record of our reservation. Yikes! He found a room for us (it was the same room we stayed in when we were here to get Jin 6 years ago - how cool!), so despite the uncertainty about if we could stay here for more than one night we all fell into a deep sleep.....at last. The next day the great folks at SWS (who run the Guesthouse) sorted everything out. So now we have some time to look for an apartment to live in for the rest of our stay here.

Good bye and good night for now!

Love,

Jin, Lili, Deb and Derek