Katelyn and Gregory Haskins find their way through—and around—the world
Clearly, Greg and I have been playing catch-up on these blog posts so as promised, here is one on our recent trip to Seoraksan. Greg’s birthday was a few weekends ago and it happily coincided with another national holiday ( something like Memorial day, I think). We had been to Seoul and a few few places around Gyeonggi-do, but we decided to take our last few dollars and the opportunity of a long weekend and to venture a little further in to South Korea.
A couple weekends ago, we made a trip out to Seoraksan by bus. We’re going to post a more thorough account of that trip soon, but one side effect of traveling on a national holiday is the delays caused by the massive crowds of people everywhere. So, when we were ready to head home, the next available bus didn’t leave for 2 hours. Needless to say, we had a bit of time to kill.
As as follow-up to my previous post, I’ve compiled a list of various media sources on South Korea which I think express the nature of our situation here in a more concise way. First is a video about the education system. It describes the environment here well– pretty much everything you see in the video we have seen here ( aside from the sections on tongue surgery). Unfortunately, the video has no English subtitles, but the English narration is interesting.
This week marks a month and a half for us in Korea and we hope that our friends and family (those who still read this blog) can tell from our posts that we are happy, healthy and settling in nicely. We really feel like we have hit the lottery with our jobs and with the life we lead, but we would be remiss to say that there is not a whole lot about our lives here that we also find aggravating, perplexing, frustrating, exasperating and just plain backward. The following post is a bit long and no one should feel pressured to read it word for word. Mostly it has just helped me work out some of my confusion and frustration and understand that many of the problems I have come across in these two months are bigger than myself and thus beyond my control.
Like many other humans, my hair tends to get longer over time and needs cutting every once in a while; I knew this time would come sooner or later, though I put it off as long as I could. Yesterday I finally bit the bullet and headed down to Lotte Mart (our local mega-store that offers a wide, but somehow not wide enough array of products and services—groceries: yes, appliances: yes, hair salon: yes, chairs: no) to give it a whirl. My fear was that, like so many men I see on the street, I would leave looking like either Kim Jong-Il or Rain. (There’s one guy at work who’s sidestepping the issue and taking this opportunity to grow out his hair. I think most of you know that’s not a very good look for me…)
