Hyunjoo's Concert

Yesterday was a half day at school, so Dionne, Scott (her husband), Jonah (her son) and I journeyed into Seoul in the afternoon to beat the rush hour traffic and outsmart the snow that we were supposed to get.  Here is Dionne and her family:

Scott, Dionne and Jonah Husted

We started our journey by driving to the next city with a subway stop.  It was about 20 minutes away.  We parked their car in a parking ramp that was free of charge.  Then, we took the subway two stops.  After a quick stop for coffee and tea, we caught an express bus into downtown Seoul.  What might have taken several hours by car, factoring in traffic and finding a parking spot, took about 25 minutes by bus.  We got off the bus and began walking around.  This is the same part of town as the lantern festival took place several weeks ago, so things looked quite familiar to me.  They're starting to decorate the area for the Winter Festival, which will be on until the Lunar New Year in early February.  We saw the U.S. Embassy, which is probably one of the ugliest buildings in Seoul.  It is under constant police protection because of bomb threats from other countries and it is surrounded by a stone wall, complete with barbed wire.  It is so weird to look around and see all of these gorgeous buildings and other embassies in relation to how unapproachable and prison-esque our embassy looks.  Bummer.

As we walked to the King's Palace, Scott and Dionne told me a lot about Korean history, especially all of the nasty things the Japanese did to the Koreans between WWI and WWII.  If you want to know more, google it or ask me about it.  The King's Palace was closed to tours by the time we reached it, but we were able to step inside the grounds for a little while.

The palace (and me :) )

The gate to enter the palace grounds and the modern buildings that surround the area

Seoul continues to amaze me.  It has all of this ancient architecture sandwiched in between cutting edge, new buildings.  The juxtaposition is soooo interesting to me.  At Thanksgiving, Kim was telling me that in 1987 (the year of my birth), Korea was still fairly undeveloped and still recovering from the devastation of the Korean War.  All that Korea represents and is in the world now has been accomplished in the last 23 years.  That blows my mind.  In the span of my life, Korea has gone from a developing country to the twelfth largest economy in the world.  Even in the last five years, things have become much more opened up to the rest of the world as far as the availability of foreign goods.  It is crazy to think that five years ago, you had to search high and low to find coffee and now there seems to be a cafe on every corner.

After we ate dinner, we still have about an hour and a half before we needed to arrive at the concert.  To kill some time, we continued to walk around the neighborhood some more.  We happened upon an underground shopping center where we purchased some flowers to present to Hyunjoo and we saw this restaurant:

That poor lady...

When we arrived at the concert, we were warmly greeted by several staff members from our school.  We spoke with the Founder of the school, who, we found out, is Hyunjoo's father.  He was a glowing parent last night, which was very fun to see.  We sat with Mr. Shin (the head of the English department), the Vice Principal and another teacher.  Mr. Shin gave me all sorts of travel suggestions for when Jill is here.  He is such a sweet man!

Hyunjoo's performance was AMAZING.  She sang six different sets of songs, all very difficult and impressive.  She and her husband sang a duet from La Traviata and later, as an encore, the sang All I Ask of You from The Phantom of the Opera.  She was all dolled up in these huge party gowns and looked like a princess.  It was so great to see a huge turnout from not only the EB High School but also the academic high school as well.  It was a fun event and it was so great to see everyone in a non-school setting.

Hyunjoo is in the blue dress, holding all of the flowers.  Her daughter Evelyn is standing next to her, wearing the blue plaid dress and the principal of the school is on her other side in the blue coat.  Some of the other people are teachers at the school and I have no idea who others of them are.

I'm glad we have the day off today because we got home at 12:30 last night.  Yowza.  Sleeping in felt quite nice this morning :)  Off to E-Mart now to buy some groceries and eat some duk boki.  It's been almost two weeks since I visited the shop.  They probably think I'm dead.