Day 7 – Han River

Weird monster from a popular Korean horror film...

...about to eat Annaliese!

beautiful artwork behind a water feature

Touring the area around the Han river on bikes was so fun on our last morning. Although earlier in the week we experienced a heat wave not seen in the past 110 years, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were warm, but more comfortable and less humid.

Kakao friends in the Incheon airport

We had a quick lunch, packed up, said goodbye to our dear Ji Hae, and got on the subway to the airport. We left our room at Eastern at 2 pm to walk to the subway station, rode the subway to the airport arriving about 3:15 pm for our 6:15 pm flight, turned in our rented WiFi egg, checked our bags, found our flight was delayed until 6:45 pm, ate dinner, and waited. We got to see two other adoptive families who attended court with us in the airport, and one family was on our flight to Seattle which was fun! 10.5 hours later, we arrived in Seattle (Saturday afternoon - weird to land "before" you took off!) and went through US customs. Fortunately, we had been warned to go to the bathroom on the plane before starting this process. It was not customs that took a long time, it was going through the TSA security check before entering the rest of the airport. Our layover was over 4 hours, and then we had to wait in the plane on the tarmac for the coffee maker to be fixed...heaven forbid we fly without a working coffee maker ;) And finally made it safely to Albuquerque and drove home to Cedar Crest, arriving at 11 pm, about 24 hours after leaving the room at Eastern. Whew!

I have to say, the jet lag has rocked us. We did fine the first night, sleeping soundly until 7 am. But Sunday night was rough for us. Monday night was better, and I hope we're pretty much adjusted now!

Day 6 con’t – Palace & Seoul Tower

 After court we were pretty hungry, so we stuffed ourselves at a lunch buffet with a variety of traditional and modern Korean foods.

King Sejong

Next, we visited the statue of King Sejong, who created hangul, the written Korean phonetic alphabet, among many other achievements. Koreans are very proud of him and his gift to their people because it gave them separation from using the written Chinese language and literacy to many commoners.

Palace grounds

Then, we toured the beautiful palace grounds which were rebuilt in the 90’s after destruction during Japanese occupation.

A bunch of monkeys

In the Korean zodiac, there are 12 animals representing each of 12 years on a repeating cycle. Since Ji Hae is 12 years younger than Andy and me, we were all three born in the year of the monkey. Ji Hae also told us that people who are born in the year of the monkey are smart, skillful, and flexible ;) Little Stephen was also born in the year of the monkey.

Could be a cute little mouse, I guess :) 

Annaliese was born in the year of the rat, but she preferred to call it the year of the mouse J

Connected to the palace grounds was the Korean Folk Museum, so we visited the two parts of the interactive children’s portion of the museum. One part was about Korean mythology and how the animals of the zodiac interact with the gods to explain various aspects of life and history.

That's Annaliese with the red bear face after eating the wrong thing!

One funny exhibit was portraying the myth of the bear who wanted to become human so the gods told him he was supposed to eat garlic and mugwort for several days. So you stood in front of a screen that mirrored an image of yourself with a bear head and you would try to open your mouth to eat the garlic and mugwort only, since any other foods make your bear face turn red! The other part of the children’s museum was about Asian foods, including rice, noodles, vegetables, and spices.

Purple sweet potato ice flake - yum!!

We don't have a lot of pictures of native Koreans posted here, but a peace sign for pics is pretty common, so she's just doing what they do ;)

 We were still so full from our buffet lunch, that we just snacked on various desserts as we walked along the way that evening. Excellent parenting, right?!? Purple sweet potato ice flake not only tasted great, but was beautiful as well! It is a sweet milk base that is shaved into flakes, topped with sweetened purple sweet potato.

"Poo" emoji-shaped hateok, sorry to be gross!

Next dessert on the trail was a traditional Korean street food called hateok, but in the shape of the “poo” emoji. Strange, I know, but it was yummy! Hard to go wrong with a pancake stuffed with Nutella, no matter what form it takes!

long honey strings

chocolate peanut filling - probably not the original filling ;)

Our third and final dessert of the night *yikes* was the imperial honey dessert previously made for royalty, but now a street food that was apparently made popular recently by being on tv. We got to watch it being made as it was also explained to us (in English). It started out as a solid hunk of fermented honey that was then dipped in cornstarch. He then poked a hole in it and stretched into a large loop that he doubled repeatedly until it ended up as strings as fine hair. The strings were broken into chunks and then a peanut/chocolate mixture was placed inside before being wrapped up in the whitish honey strings. It was interesting and pretty tasty!

Annaliese got a very special souvenir, the traditional Korean formal dress called a hanbok and wore it the rest of the night

Nearing North Seoul Tower

People attach locks to certain areas of Seoul tower and throw away the key as a statement of "forever"

This city of 11 million dwarfs all other cities I've previously visited

It was dark by the time we made it to Seoul Tower. Whether because it was a Friday night, or whether it is always that busy at night, I don't know, but it took us about an hour to wait through 3 lines, ride up to the ticket area, purchase the tickets, and then ride the gondola up to Seoul Tower. There was another option to go all the way up into the donut-shaped part, but we didn’t do that part.

It was pretty late by the time we were done with the Tower, but again there was a line to get down of course, so we ended up walking down 1.6 km steps (that's 1 mile for us Americans) before riding the bus back, eating a skewer of street grilled chicken, and crashing in bed close to midnight. Again, excellent parenting ;) Annaliese handled it like a champ!

Day 6 - Family Court

We attended Korean Family Court this morning and all went well in the end. There was an *almost* critical mistake on my part that caused the social worker's eyes to nearly bug out of her head and me to nearly vomit... After taking an hour's bus ride to the court as we lined up in order of our appointments, they asked for our passports. Hours later, after it all worked out, I can write, "You should have seen the look on her face!" At the time, however I was about to lose control of all my bodily functions. How could I have screwed something up like this, when this is pretty much the last box to check before we come back to take our little boy home? Andy tried to reassure me it would work out and I held Annaliese's hand as I prayed aloud for God to provide for us. After a solid two minutes of panic-stricken bewilderment of wondering what we were going to do while the social worker ran around speaking urgent words in Korean, we offered our NM drivers licenses. The court official told her that would work fine as any picture ID was ok. WHEW! My stress level didn't fully return to normal however until hours later however. Anyway, we met our female judge who was friendly and asked us a few straightforward questions and we were done! That was the whole morning and the key part of this trip. Then we did some sightseeing for the rest of the day, but I'll have to post about that tomorrow while we wait in the airport for our flight home.

That social worker is definitely going to have a story to tell her friends about this family that gave her a heart attack ;P Yikes! Thank you, Lord, for providing for us!

Day 5 - Agency

Dr. Kim, the director of ESWS, gave an interesting talk about Korea and the agency's foundation and current work to us and 8 other adoptive families. They have done and are doing really amazing work here and in other countries. We enjoyed a buffet lunch at the agency while chatting with the other adoptive families. After lunch we got to meet our little guy again. It was a very precious and emotional time.
 
We also had a blast trying on traditional Korean dress called hanbok, saw a couple different areas of Seoul, including Gangnam (the area the old K-pop song Gangnam Style references), and once again had incredibly delicious dinner, grapefruit soju, and tiramisu ice flake dessert.

Meeting Stephen

A few random thoughts strike me after meeting Stephen. One is that we are not just the family swooping into to save this little boy. God is placing him in our family for the benefit of all the members of our family. God has specific and rich purposes in his giving Stephen to our family, not all of which may even be known this side of heaven. God will grow me and change me as a mother as I  love and learn to parent this little boy who is new to our family. The coming months will be hard, yet a joy to serve one of the least of these in the kingdom. Please pray for us all that we will seek to serve with hearts that are joyful and overflowing with God's love.

Also, I wonder how little Stephen will grieve the many losses he will be facing as he gains his forever family. He will recognize the loss of some of them right away, from his foster family, foster home, other beloved friends, his first language spoken everyday, his favorite play areas, comfortable foods, the smell of his home, being surrounded by people who look more like him, and the list goes on. We have learned about how each child processes their grief differently. I don't know if he'll be more vocal or internalized, more energetic or lethargic, deal with food, sleep, relational issues, etc. I know that God will give us grace to walk along side him as issues surface throughout his lifetime. Our good and gracious Father is always able to meet our needs. He gives us himself. He, himself, is enough. Please pray that we'll be able to point Stephen beyond our own ability to help him, to our heavenly and perfect Father.

There will also be an adjustment for our other kids that is different than expecting a new biological baby. Some of Stephen's needs will be surprising for our kids since they've been brought up in our household since birth, they have not only been taught about our expectations, they have come to expect them in each other. That will be new for our other kids to realize that although he's nearly two, he doesn't know certain things about life in our family that they knew when they were that age. Please pray for us all particularly in the first severals months of adjustment to just living together.

God also has incredible purpose in giving us beautiful connections to Stephen's home country. Both Stephen's foster mother and father, as well as Auntie Ji Hae, will be very special members of our extended family. We pray will be able to keep this connections strong for his own benefit, as well as for them and the rest of our family as well.

Stephen is a bundle of energy to say the least and I expect to be exhausted for much of the coming months. Please pray for my health and rest as well.

Thank you all for your prayers! Our Father hears and answers!

Day 4 - Fun walking around

A highlight today was conversation at the mall coffee shop

We had a wonderful day walking around Seoul today. We took the subway, ate sashimi for lunch, spent the hot afternoon in the mall, then walked around the university area near ESWS. God blessed us with some wonderful conversations and a special time today. Really, what a blessing it is to be here. Thank the LORD for all of you and thank you to all our family, friends, and church body who have prayed for us and supported us which has allowed us to be here on our journey to adopt our little one. Thank the Lord for Ji Hae our friend, guide, and translator.

Oh Korean BBQ, I love you! We especially enjoyed the kimchi stew.

Annaliese bravely tried a raw pepper - she had some water pretty quickly after that!!

An old-fashioned sweet treat made from melted sugar and baking powder, called "dolgona"

Delicious cream desserts at Cafe Oumt

15-layer crepe dessert