Anyeong Haseyo (안 녕 하 세 요)!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! We welcomed in the new year staying in our cozy apartment, watching a movie……while I nursed Will after some food poisoning. We had to miss the JVC service at 10:50pm New Years Eve, which was disappointing, but we have 2 more of those services to look forward to. I think Will was more disappointed in ruining his 14 year streak of NOT losing his lunch. Oh well. Can’t win them all.

Christmas Pageant
The JVC Christmas program was quite wonderful. I sang in the choir, and lead the children in singing “The Virgin Mary had a Baby Boy” and “Away in a Manger” with my guitar. There was a Christmas quiz for the kids, and a few skits by the youth. A particularly funny moment was when “Baby” Jesus was played by a 16 year old, the tallest one in the skit, laying on the floor swaddled in blankets. Another funny moment was when another youth played a “celebrity dancer” in the nativity story (huh??) and started dancing Travolta moves to a pop song in a leather jacket and shades (Note: This guy is normally VERY quiet and shy, so this was a spectacular surprise). A third funny fact was that Joseph was played by a girl and Mary played by a boy, who didn’t cover his face very well with his head covering.

From L to R: Ana singing in the church choir; Little kids singing; Ana singing with the kids

Christmas Day
This was our first Christmas away from our families, as a couple, so that was hard, but we enjoyed Christmas with our new family here in Korea. The day was pretty quiet and uneventful, but in the evening our cell group had a delicious Christmas potluck, with roasted chicken, kimchi, curry, fruit salad and Christmas cake. We sang Christmas songs and had a wonderful time of fellowship and prayer.

Swimming
I decided I had had a long enough break from swimming, and there are some great pools here in Chuncheon, so I started that up again. My first day swimming was an interesting experience. There were swimming classes going on, and the instructor was holding a long bamboo pole, and would hit swimmers on the head, to get their attention if they did something wrong! That’s different. Also, the bathroom in the changeroom always has water EVERYWHERE; On the toilets, on the toilet paper, on the walls and stall doors. How does that happen? There are no showers in there.

Cell Group Worship Service
Whenever there’s a 5th Sunday in a month, each cell group meets separately for Sunday worship. Our cell group met at the church, Will preached and I played a special song. After the service, we pulled out the ping pong table and played a few rounds with each other, while the children tried to sabotage our game by poking things in between the tables from underneath, or moving the net around, or stealing the ping pong ball and running away with it. We then went skating, pretty much all the children from our cell group, another couple and us. I realized just then that I’m not as good a skater as I used to be. A Chinese student, who has been attending our church recently, came along and had never skated before…so we just puttered around the ice, preventing falls every 5 minutes, while Will skated circles around us…the ol’ hockey player. Oh, and Will made new friends out of two little girls, who for some reason followed him everywhere on the ice.

From L to R: The ping ping saboteurs; Will and Ana skating

Hockey Game
Will likes to watch when our students play hockey, so we popped in to the arena for the hockey tournament which one of our students was playing in. In Korean hockey, NO physical contact is allowed, but the other team was playing dirty and checking our students’ team mates all over the place, and sadly that team won. There is an interesting Korean hockey custom, which involves each team bowing to the other teams’ coach at the end of the game.

Trip to 2nd tunnel, DMZ and Fish Festival
One family at JVC has been so kind to invite us out on a few occassions, and this trip was one of them. We first drove to the 2nd tunnel, which is one of the 5 known tunnels dug by North Koreans to spy on South Korea. There are likely more tunnels, that are perhaps still in use today. We first had to drive through a restricted military area, and were told to walk in a straight line towards the entrance of the tunnel. I’m not sure why. We were each given hard hats, and I thought that meant things would fall from the roof of the tunnel, but as soon as we went in, I saw why we needed hard hats; It is a very low tunnel. Even I had to duck most of the time. The sound of hard hats dinging against the rock ceiling could be heard at various points of the walk. It was quite humorous. There were circles spraypainted on the rock to show were mines had been, or holes made by North Koreans pointing in the direction of the south to prove that the tunnel was in fact made by the North Koreans. We went as far as we could until the barrier, which was at the border between the two countries.

From L to R: The entrance to the military area; Entrance to the tunnel

We then went to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which, despite the name, is actually quite highly militarized. The facilities had been recently redone. We were taken up a mountain in this slow moving train, and seated in a theater type place, that looked out a huge window. Outside the window was the South Korean side, the 2 km stretch of untouched land that is the border (the DMZ) and the North Korean side. We could look through telescopes and “spy” on the north. I saw a North Korean climbing a mountain to a building on top of the mountain, and a village in the distance. I had heard from friends about a fancy fake village in North Korea, set up to make South Koreans think the North Koreans are doing well financially. I thought the village I saw was also a fake, but I was assured it was a real village. We were not allowed to take pictures of the north, or the DMZ. There is a mountain in the North called “Red Mountain”, named so because so many men were killed on it, that when it rains, the mountain apparently looks red, as they say. We drove away through a flat, ugly area speckled with bombed buildings that had not been recovered, land that had seen many wars fought on it, land that was once part of North Korea.

From L to R: On train up the mountain; Ana pointing to where we went in the tunnel

The grand finale to our day trip was the Hwacheon Fish Festival, where thousands of people come to ice fish on a frozen river. There were hundreds of families huddling around holes in the ice, bobbing their plastic fishing rods, carrying their prizes away. On one side were these hugs snow carvings of a polar bear, penguins, and of course fish. There were sleds for rent, and little wooden platforms to push oneself around on with ice picks. Everywhere you looked on this lake were people of all ages pushing themselves around by one of these things. We all took turns riding and pushing a sled around, dodging people who weren’t looking, and almost falling over.

From L to R: Sign in Hwacheon for festival; People ice fishing; Kids pushing themselves around on little sleds; Will and Ana in front of ice sculptures; Will and Ana getting a ride

Random thoughts:
-Sometimes we feel invisible here; being budded in lines, people not moving out of the way on the sidewalk, etc. But the weirdest time was when we were at a restaurant, just about to sit in a booth, when a group of teens pushed their way past us and sat in the booth before we could. Is that a cultural thing or a youth thing? Hmmm…
-Like NA, traffic lights go yellow before turning red, but here, they also go yellow before turning green! So, you’re already stopped, and the light essentially says, “Wait…..ready? GO!”
-As I mentioned, seniors in this culture expect respect from anyone younger than them. We see examples of this all the time, aside from crossing traffic expecting cars to stop. Climbing down Anmasan the other day, we were following close behind an eldery couple, and we were waiting to pass them at any given moment. One of them even stopped, bent over to tie their shoe, and didn’t move out of our way. Will told me later that they likely just expected us to wait.