Weekends in Korea

September has proved to be a good month for us in Korea so far! The weather is changing, so it is a little brisk in the mornings and evenings, which is wonderful. We feel like we are getting more and more connected with people at church every week. We got our first paycheck, which was much needed! And, though we really do love teaching, we love the weekends when we have time to explore this amazing country.

Two weekends ago, Tim and I ventured into Seoul for a basketball game. It was no ordinary basketball game. Some retired NBA players came to Korea to play against the Korean National Team. Tim's friend, Matt got us the tickets, and we were really excited about it. Of course, the boys were more excited than I was because they knew more about the players and such. But I like basketball too, and was really looking forward to the game. Let's see, there was Tim Hardaway, Robert Horry, Dominique Wilkins... and Kareem Abdul Jabbar was one of the coaches! But it proved to be an eventful day, even before we got to the game. Here's how it went down. Ok, so since Matt had gotten us the tickets, we were planning to meet him at the subway station, so that we could go with him to the game. The problem was that the subway station was bigger than we expected. We waited for 20 minutes at the place that we thought we were supposed to meet, to no avail. Since we don't have cell phones, we had to try to guess what he would do. Finally, we decided that we should go to the basketball stadium to try to find him there. We knew that he wouldn't miss the game. We got there, and looked around outside for awhile to see if he was looking for us outside. He had our tickets, so we couldn't get inside the stadium to look for him. Just as we were contemplating what to do... buy tickets so that we could get inside?... keep waiting?... go home?... a guy walked by and handed us two tickets. We thought he was trying to sell them to us, so we said, no thank you. He said, "No, they're free. Enjoy the game." Crazy! So now we had a way of getting into the game at least, and we could try to find Matt from there. Once inside, Tim used his acute detective skills and the zoom lens on our camera to find Matt. And soon, all was right in the world again. It was crazy! I really thought that we would never find him, but we did! So we watched the game, which was kind of funny at times because the retired NBA players were pretty old and couldn't move as well as they could in the past. They lost to the Korean team, who literally only shot 3-pointers. There was a Korean boy band at half time that I liked! It was all so much fun. And the lesson that we learned that day... we need cell phones!!

This past weekend was also an eventful one. After church, we went with a group of people from our Sunday school class to an area of Seoul where there is free bike rental on Sundays. We ate lunch, and then went to the bike rental place, only to find out that all of the bikes were rented out. But, don't worry, we DID get to ride bikes. Kind of. So as we were walking around, we saw what looked like an infomercial being taped. There were video cameras and people riding these exercise bikes. We were standing there watching, and then they asked us if we wanted to ride the bikes for the taping. We were like, "Absolutely we do!" (a reference to The Office hehe). They chose Tim, my friend Jackie and I, and told us to ride fast and smile! In a few minutes, they said that they were going live. We could see ourselves on the monitor. Then, the camera guy came over to me, and did the most uncomfortably close close-ups ever. It was really funny! We were just laughing and smiling and waving! After the shoot, the director took us over to a convenience store and bought us juice to thank us for being in their commercial! It was so nice! We heard that they do a lot of TV shoots in that area, so we want to try to get in some more, so that we can be infomercial regulars! Hahaha! I LOVE KOREA.