Japan & Korea – May 28, 2016

Started the day with a western-style brunch with HaeJung and her high school sophomore daughter MinJu.  I first met MinJu in 2008 when the family had just returned from a year living in the U.S., and this 7 year old child spoke fluent English with an American accent.  She and her mom have worked on her retaining her English; her vocabulary and accent are both amazing.

We then went to the Coex Mall, a huge, and relatively new, shopping mall.  While I don’t especially enjoy shopping, it seemed a good way to spend time together while having an opportunity to talk.  We arrived to find that there was a festival going on outside the mall (a not infrequent occurrence on weekends in Seoul).  Sponsored in part by International Rotary, there were booths and entertainment from several nations.  We watched some musicians, supposedly from Ecuador, although their headdresses looked more like American Plains Indians to me, were amused by “game show” entertainment using traditional Korean games for the competitions, and enjoyed a little (too little for my taste) pungmal drumming from a Korean drum group.

Then we entered to hallowed halls of the mall.

MinJu, who is a teenager after all, had an idea and led us to a photo store – with many picture-taking booths of a complexity far beyond the “4 pictures for a quarter” machines of my youth.  She took charge, and we took a good many photos which she then played with, adding accessories and otherwise changing things around – and having a good time.

Since I’d originally thought about a trip to the zoo to see the pandas but decided against it (a long way with concomitant time commitment and I had seen pandas in Tokyo), going to the Aquarium housed in the mall seemed like a good compromise.  It is a very well-done aquarium, and we had a good time looking at fish and other sea animals.  They creatively displayed fish as art with the tanks surrounded by frames and were doing some improvement work as this underwater worker tried to hammer underwater.  The penguins were cute, and the manatee exhibit was extraordinary.  We were there as clumps of lettuce were thrown into the tank, and the manatees, with as much speed and enthusiasm as manatees can muster, eagerly grabbed and ate.

It was after 5 by the time we finished our aquarium and Coex visit, and MinJu had to get home, grab something to eat, and get to her “Academy” by 7.  This non-school education class is English Speech and Debate.  I read the preliminary paper she had written to deliver as a speech and was quite impressed.  It is my opinion that Korean students work far too hard, giving us almost all free time and fun to attend extra educational Institutes.  I just hope MinJu, who is bright and creative, doesn’t get worn out before graduation.  At least she had a fair amount of enjoyment in elementary and middle school since she didn’t do the extra Institutes then that many Korean students do.

She had to go to school.  I was able to relax and read at home. . . .