Catch up time!

The photos: Mr. Sohn, our wonderful host for a fancy Korean feast, SK Kang, me, Ann, and Katie; Me on a September walk with Emily in Kaysville foothills; our family and friends picnic at Liberty Park, SLC, in September; family and Pate (Rebecca's AZ friend since age 10) on our back deck patio in Kaysville --Do we see a pattern here?--food-based photos!

Today is Columbus Day, October 8, 2007, a US holiday here in the American military community, while life goes on as usual outside our apartment windows. It's a time to catch up on a lot of undone things around the home, after weeks of activity ---a 10 day trip to the USA in September, and a week--long visit from fellow phone English teachers,Katie and Ann in Seoul. They both live in the US and had come last year also, but this year I had more time to spend with them, roaming around Korean sites, feasting with various people in traditional Korean restaurants, and catching up on our girl talk.

This Thursday is the 35th anniversary of our wedding. It seems like another lifetime when Norm and I went to the Salt Lake Temple to be eternally wed....so we will celebrate by a visit to the Seoul Temple, and maybe a Chinese dinner out. Then we will get to the Oktoberfest the next night to dine on Deutsch food with oompa music and fun times with our friends here.

The trip to San Antonio and Utah in September was to accompany Norm in his course (TDY) on military members' post-traumatic stress disorder, and then to just spend time with our children in Kaysville and Spanish Fork. We even had a "Happy Thanksmas" dinner gathering at Michael and Eleanor's home, just in case we are not together for one or both of the November/December holidays. We had a jolly gathering and scrumptious feast!

Life in Korea settles back to routine this week, for the next several weeks before we again head to San Antonio and Utah in early December. (More on that subject in a later posting.) Normal schedule around Seoul for me now includes some substitute teaching at Seoul Foreign School and at the American middle school, as well as my phone English teaching every weekday morning, and my private face-to-face ESL students in my apartment. I just added one more of those to my list today: the young assistant manager of the apartment complex. That came about because I had previously offered to help him with the English translations of his many informational signs for the tenants. (Out of the 310 apartments in our complex, 100 of them are filled with English speaking tenants that he has to speak with from time to time.) I have a great variety of students and I like the friendships that we are forming. Sundays find me teaching about the New Testament to a great group of adult students at church.

Norm is still waiting to hear if he is being extended in Korea or not. A few things depend on that news, but we are rather confident it will happen soon. We also continue to apply for positions in Europe; however, it seems to be an exercise in futility. Time will tell.

Mongolia continued--part 2

We met up with some very friendly people around the territory, and found that many Mongolians can speak a [tiny] bit of English. The LDS missionaries that come here are actually assigned as English teachers on a part-time basis, so they stay busy with teaching free classes to anyone interested. We saw some of the young elders out on the streets a few times during the week, and we also made our way to the main chapel building, which also houses the mission headquarters. We learned that there are currently between 7000 and 8000 Mongolian Mormons.

We knew that our Kaysville neighbor, Todd Altom, was winding up his 2-year mission this summer in Mongolia, and we had a care package from his devoted mother, our friend Debbie Altom. She had sent (via Rebecca's suitcase from Utah) a bag of peanut butter jars and pb-flavored goodies to him, and as soon as we gave it to him, his missionary friends quickly flocked around and became his instant best friends. They were a friendly and fun group, and we spent some time chatting after the church meeting.

That building is one of the only "true" air conditioned places in the country, and we enjoyed the friendly feeling from the natives there. Two young ladies sitting behind us just started right up translating the speakers' words for us, without us even asking for their help. One missionary helped us get taxi's back to our home base. It was getting hotter by the day, finally becoming 100 degrees F, so we started taking midday siestas.

Correction of a typo in my first Mongolia posting: It was the Chinggis Khan Cavalry, not the Calvary! I do know the difference. :-)

One of the common sights on the city streets is to see children and some adults begging for money. They meekly hold out their hands or show their deformed or amputated body parts, and just repeat "Money, money" over and over again. Generally they are pretty harmless, but on one occasion we had to ask the restaurant staff to get a young man away from our table. He was standing right by us at lunch, just staring, and would not leave without a struggle with the waitress (who had frequently sent him away, obviously.)

Another time, we walked past a man in a wheelchair who was apparently frustrated that no one was giving him money, and he started throwing rocks at us when we walked by him. We kept our cool, however. But, when we did start giving our small bills to the children, they seemed 100% ungrateful for the donation anyway. I learned at that point that there is no word for "thank you" in Mongolian. That is hard to believe, isn't it!?

Another of our day trips was to an old Buddhist monastery out in the forested wilderness area south of the city...or what is left of it. It was virtually destroyed by the Communists in the 1920's. Apparently there are two sides to every story, however. Rebecca told us that the Buddhist priests were not without their human frailties, and had been taking advantage of the people in various ways. Some things never change, eh?

Everywhere we went, on a bus, or in the van with our driver, we got bounced around on the roads, paved or gravel. With the wide variance in temperature between winter and summer, there is virtually no way to make or keep the roads smooth for any length of time. And, there is no superhighway anywhere in the country. We saw the best roads around; the visitors who go into the far distant wilds of the Gobi desert see almost nothing that could be called a road. I was sitting in the front seat of the van, looking at the rocky path up to the Buddhist temple in the national park one day, and could not believe my eyes. That driver was fearless. I just had to laugh...and tighten my seat belt. (The others in the group didn't have the luxury of seat belts in the back.)

Our driver was Bulga, a 22 year old single young man who comes from a family of nomad sheep and goat herders about 20 km out of the city. He drives tourists (in the guest house owner's van or SUV) on day trips, and also accompanies some adventurous folks on 4-day journeys into the Gobi and beyond. The guest house staff provides a variety of these tours, some for a few weeks of experiences. We met up with people staying at the guest house dorm (a very non-private existence that we were very grateful to have skipped, in favor of our apartment!) from several different countries in Europe, Korea, and the US. They are certainly a friendly lot, akin to a hippy community from the 60's. We chatted with backpackers, and a few volunteers from Peace Corps (English teachers) and the British counterpart to the Peace Corps.

If there is to be a part 3 to this narrative, it will be after a good night's sleep. Adios!

Meandering through Mongolia

Well, we didn't wander too far from the capital city, but we did get a fantastic introduction to the country of Mongolia. This was one of my long-awaited trips while living in Asia, and we finally made the adventure happen this month. We spent a week in a guest house apartment in the center of UlaanBaatar. Accompanying me on this journey were Norm, Rebecca, Daniel, and our family friend D'Arcy. The kids had arrived on July 18, and we took off on Mongolian Airlines (MIAT) the next morning. The flight was only about 3 hours, and I was relieved to see that we were on a Boeing 737 plane, American made! This is one trip for which we concluded we had to buy reserved seats, because the KAL flights for stand-by were all packed with other tourists and businessmen. Our flight was full too. Sometimes it pays to pay a little more for a lower stress level. Stand by flying is wonderful most of the time, but not to Mongolia in July!

I knew that Koreans were making their presence known in Mongolia, but I was amazed to see such an obvious, pervasive presence everywhere we looked--Seoul Street downtown, Korean restaurants everywhere, Korean cyberstores, Seoul Hotel, and even a Seoul Tennis Club. You may know that Mongols are responsible for the Korean race, so I went all week long not knowing by facial appearance if I was watching Koreans or Mongolians. However, their language and dress identifies them pretty well. Mongolian language is based on the Cyrillic alphabet. So, it was a strange mixture of Russia (Soviet) and Korea.

As I read the signs like "PECTOPAH" ["restaurant"] and remembered my rudimentary intro to Russian language during our past visits in Russian cities, I discovered that the Russians have left their mark there just as they did in the Communist years in Ruskieland. But Mongolians have taken their former Soviet government buildings, which abound, and turned them into lots of other things, such as snooker or pool parlors. We got a kick out of seeing a huge base relief Lenin head staring down from the wall inside the foyer of one such edifice, which is now a local billiard parlor, right next to a newly built movie theater building (one of only two theaters in the whole city of 1 million residents.)

We spent our week alternating between roaming around the city museums and performances, and venturing out on daytrips into the countryside. Highlights in the rural area were the visit to Terelj National Park (where we ate lunch with a nomad family in their ger home and rode horses for a while) and the Chinggis Khan Calvary March supershow out on the steppe, featuring 500 costumed characters and our main man, complete with music, blowing dust, and a lot of video and still pictures from the grandstands. That event started in summer 2006 as a big tribute to the 800th anniversary of the Mongolian nation, when Chinggis Khan united the many nomad tribes of Asia to form his mighty empire. He is truly the Hero of Mongolia!

One pleasant discovery is the restaurant [pectopah!] scene in the city. We were all sort of concerned about what we would do for a week if we had to eat a mutton-based simple nomad diet for the whole week. On our first night there, we did a little research in the neighborhood and found lots of modern, clean, ethnic restaurants that take VISA, contrary to what we had been told. So, one of our daily highlights became deciding where to eat each day, alternating among Mongolian and Italian, Russian, American, and Chinese cuisine. And the best part is the low price to dine in style there. On our last night we splurged at the only Mongolian BBQ restaurant in town. I am still trying to figure out how Americans connected Mongolia with this type of Asian grill menu, because we saw nothing like it anywhere authentic, anywhere we went, except B-D's on Seoul Street, an obvious tourist trap and ex-pat hangout.

I see that I have focused on Daniel the most in our 5 alloted photos for this posting, so I will add some more with the next section, and get back to it asap. We are off to the 63 Building in Seoul this evening with Rebecca, who leaves us tomorrow (July 31) to return to Utah after a great 2 week stay in Asia!.

Wedding Wrap-up!

The photos are: The newlyweds in the oak forest near Rossells' home, the Potters and Rossells with the bride and groom in La Verne, Norm and the kids cleaning up the yard for the Kaysville open house, and Sara's long hair being cut for donation to Locks of Love.

The past few weeks have been magical and marvelous! Michael and Eleanor were wed in the Los Angeles LDS Temple on Saturday, May 19, 2007. All our immediate family was able to gather from India, Korea, England-- where Daniel had been touring in May-- and Utah. Eleanor Rossell comes from a very large family, and they are wonderful people. We met many of them at Club Largo in LA, at a bluegrass concert and dinner hosted by Eleanor's parents, Craig and Theresa, on Thursday evening (May 17), and then the next night, Norm and I hosted a big family dinner at Grandad Turner's back yard and patio. Daniel and his sisters offered to make homemade ravioli (dripping in butter herb sauce!), and we added to the meal with COSTCO goods. It was all very delicious, and the family was in rare form.

Everyone enjoyed getting better acquainted. We had an impromptu testimonial session after dinner and before dessert, and most of the immediate family members on both sides stood up and spoke of memories and feelings about the newlyweds. It was touching, and entertaining too. We wiped away a few tears as we remembered Mom (Gram) who would have loved to be there---and probably was, now that I think about it!

Saturday was busy and beautiful. Eleanor's grandfather is an authorized temple "sealer" so he was able to marry the couple in a "sealing room" where about 65 people gathered, and half of them were standing behind the seated people, all around the perimeter of the room. Grandpa Norm Rossell spoke to Michael and Eleanor about the words of the ceremony, and how to apply the wisdom therein to their own lives to build a happy eternal marriage. It was very personal of course, considering he has known and loved the bride all her life!

That evening we all drove over to La Verne, near Claremont, for the big reception in the Rossells' home and back yard. They had worked very hard in recent weeks to decorate, repaint, and re-landscape, and it was very lovely. The evening was full of a couple hundred people, lots of desserts and fresh fruit, a little dancing, photos, and plenty of chatter. Good times for all!

The Utah event was on Saturday, May 26 at our Kaysville back yard. We turned it into a garden setting the best we could, with white lights, and we got some outdoor rugs to use on the deck and patio, and added some flowers and greens wherever we could. Neighbor friends added their own items to help with tables, chairs, decor, etc. and it was a big success with lots of good food, friends, family, and photos. We all worked reeeealllly hard for a few intense days, and deserved a break after it was all over Saturday night. So a few of the family were able to go to Park City for a few days relaxation at a condo, and then we visited the newlyweds at their first home in Spanish Fork on last Saturday, and made sushi for dinner.

Norm has returned to work in Korea, and I am on my way back home to Seoul next week. This month in USA has been a welcomed rest from the busy-ness of life in Korea, but we have some good times planned for the next several weeks, so it will be great to get back to a settled routine soon. Stand-by flying has come through again, with a few hiccups in our plans, but we cannot complain, considering that all 5 of us (everyone except Michael) used Delta flights to arrive in LA and/or Utah for wedding celebrations. Thank you, Rebecca!

PS: I have already told the three unmarried kids that I would really appreciate doing future weddings in just one city, not two!

In like a lion...

How do I turn the photos around the right direction, Emily? I am such a novice at this stuff!
This one is a shot of SK Kang in his little office down in the National Assembly district. He is my employer for the SK English Academy work that I do, teaching phone English to several Korean adults each morning.
A ROK Marine spoke to us at this memorial shrine area overlooking the waters that divide South Korea from North Korea. People with relatives in the North come here once or twice a year to honor their loved ones that they cannot see in person.


E

Well, it's snowing for the 3rd day in a row...in March. It's not uncommon, but still a surprise, after the warmer spring-like weather we started having recently in Korea. But after seeing the big snowstorms some people are getting in the USA, we feel pretty lucky to be here in the temperate zone.

Since my last posting, Norm and I went on another cultural day trip (Feb 24) with the Korean children and mothers, and other Americans, as part of the Good Neighbor Program here in the Yongsan post area. We have really enjoyed ourselves on these local adventures to places within an hour or two of our home. We go on public transportation sometimes, but the last couple trips have been on hired tour buses. The children are so cute, and fun to watch. They are a bit shy about practicing their English, with a few notable exceptions.

This last trip was to Kangwha Island, which is very historic in Korean culture, since the middle ages. The first "Korean War" against invaders from the north was fought there. Today it is best known for its proximity to North Korea (we went to another observation tower on a hill overlooking the water boundary, and some North Korean buildings beyond), and the ginseng market. Norm and I bought some ginseng honey to make warm drinks with it on cold mornings. We also visited a Buddhist temple that still had lots of evidence of their recent Lunar New Year celebration.

I finally visited the office of my employer for the phone English work I do here. We thought I would be getting a little job teaching English to the class of congressmen at the National Assembly, but something got [literally] lost in the translation! Apparently some other academy or institution got the contract for the new year, starting March 1st. It's OK with me, though. I really love working at home. Lately I have said goodbye to a few students (going to start graduate school in England) and hello to a few new ones. Three ladies were "passed off to me" by a friend who is soon moving to Heidelberg for his wife's job transfer there.

Speaking of job transfers, we are still trying to move, applying for whatever comes up that Norm feels qualified for and interested in pursuing. But we realize it may be the impossible dream so we are content to stay here until whatever time we would leave. There is still plenty to do in this region.

The best news lately is the upcoming flight route addition for Delta Airlines, starting June 4th. It will be non-stop from Atlanta to Seoul, so we will be able to come and go for free, space available [and schedule available too] as long as we can get to ATL each time. This opens up a whole new realm of travel possibilities for us and whomever Rebecca's buddy passes go to!

I have been teaching my little Primary class of 6 and 7 year olds for almost a month now. They are fun, and rather bright, too! We did a class presentation on very short notice for the younger children recently, where they each did a flannelboard story of a miracle of Jesus. It was darling, and I think everyone in the room had some tender feelings. There were some tears. We also had the token grandfather in our branch come visit us, dressed up as King Benjamin, giving some wise counsel to the children. [Girls, do you remember Mosiah 4:14 from your very young childhood?!

Because of technology I am able to stay in touch with all our children by phone for free, and I do appreciate that benefit of the Internet. We are planning out the big events of the year, and it should be a busy time for all.

Happy New Year, Korean style

This is the holiday weekend that all Koreans eagerly anticipate as soon as Chusok ends in the lovely autumn. That's because their holiday seasons are short and infrequent. In-between times, they are diehard workaholics, like I have never seen anywhere else on earth. After living here in Seoul for 2-1/2 years, I have learned some interesting things about human nature, and all I can say is, remember to balance my life!

Last November, I had sort of a new year-type fresh start in my own life, quite unexpectedly. I made a rather sudden decision within 3 weeks of deliberation, to quit my short-lived career as a special education teacher with DODDS (Department of Defense Dependent Schools), and take a break from the whole whacked-out scene at SAHS campus with a cold-hearted, micro-managing, control-freaky assistant principal. It was a traumatic time for me, but I can see now that this "parting of the ways" was the wise and wonderful choice I had to make to restore balance and sanity to my own life at the ripe ol' age of fifty-five fantastic years in mortality.

My new theme song is all about exercising control over my own destiny, like I have never been able to do for many years in the past. This explains my spontaneous trip to surprise my family members in LA area for Christmas season in December 2006! What a great time it was! Not only did I spend some quality time with my 91 year old Dad, big bro Bombie and Jen, and three of our four terrific children [Becky, Daniel and Milk], but I also met up with Michael's fiancee and her family in LaVerne....and I am so happy to welcome Eleanor Rossell to our fun little family in a few more months. They will be married in the Los Angeles Temple on May 19th.

That brings up one more area of my new-found control over my own life---I am now working hard at shedding 3 decades of "mommy and midlife" weight, so I can feel good about my appearance at our first family wedding, and every day after that for the rest of my life. I am tired of the trend to gain and never lose, and I am really weary of being trapped in a society of junk food junkies that insist on feeding me donuts, fried chicken, pizza, cookies, yukky cake, etc. for every little excuse of an occasion. My new style is cooking with only good ingredients, working out for as long as I have time and energy, as often as I can arrange it in the fitness center or apartment, and to get out with the Koreans in the Good Neighbor Program on Saturdays whenever we can.

This winter has been so much easier to survive because of a joyous January with Emily here in Seoul for the month, doing her vagabond thing between two India experiences. I watched her wander from teaching Korean children in a winter English camp with friend Lumina, to belly dancing at the Petra [Arabic] restaurant, to performing at a cafe on guitar, singing her own composed songs. And she has also added painting to her list of developed talents. She's my role model for continual self-improvement and self-determination.

Back to the Koreans---When I severed ties with DODDS for my daily walk on a career path, I immediately got recruited as a tutor to work with Korean folks in all walks of life, who are desperate to learn and improve their English language speaking skills. Little did I know, when I endured 18 months of after-school ESL-teaching courses in Davis County as a newly certified teacher at Davis High, that I would find myself instantly in demand, and filling my weekdays with private students who envy my native English speaking status. Talking with and tutoring them is so much more fun than dealing with witchy administrators and writing IEP's for a living.
[However, I do miss the great students I worked with, and rejoice every time I run into one of them in the Yongsan community, and have a chance to exchange a few words of love and support.]

Nevertheless, my daily contact with proud Koreans is what has made me feel the course of the year's seasons like they do, and feel the closeness with nature that they feel, the importance of being home with family at the special holiday times, the drive to improve themselves, the sacredness of education and ambition, the solid work ethic they practice, etc etc etc.....But I do wish they would think as highly of getting a full night's sleep! They are the "sleep deprivation champs" of the 21st century, in their zeal for getting to the top. My feeling is, all those great goals will look just as good in the morning, so let's all sleep on it!

Welcome to my world of blogging!

Hi everyone! I decided to start this blog when I was in my weekend class, where we got on the teacher's blog to do our follow up work. So now I am part of the high tech society, and will be learning all the advantages of this new fun adventure. Join me! ---Sara