Mission President Seminar and Mother's Day

This was a quiet week planning for the weeks ahead.  Terri and I attended a mission president seminar.  We attended by video conferencing with the three other Korea mission presidents and their spouses.  It was a rich experience.  We consider it something like the zone conferences in our mission. At zone conference we train the missionaries how to better understand their role and how to have greater impact in the work they do.  Same thing in the mission president seminar.  We are always trying to do better.
We stayed at the JW Marriott hotel in Seoul.  Here's a panoramic view from our hotel of the area in front of the hotel.  On the far left is what is called Dongtaemun which means Great East Gate.  It was one of the four main gates around the original city.  If you click on the picture you should be able to grow it and look at it in more detail.  This is a huge whole shopping area as well.  It was busy all night.  Thankfully, they had good sound proofing. Terri's favorite part of the room was the automatic curtains.  We could lie in bed with all the lights off and watch the world go by below us.  It is one very busy place.  Many stores open until 4:30 in the morning.

 

At the hotel was a nice buffet of Korean, Japanese, and western foods.  They had a spicy baby octopus salad that was a very tasty and included a baby indeed.

For dessert they had what every little girl would love to see, Hello Kitty!



 

They theme of the restaurant for the evening was the same:

 

In the morning I went for a run along the water runoff canal.  I found a ladies' Zumba class.

 



We did some shopping at Namdaemun, which is the great south gate, another huge shopping complex.  One of the mission presidents and his wife from Busan will return to the US this summer and they don't have access to this market or anything like it.  It was good for them to find a few things.  If you want to check it out, look here: Namdaemun Market

Here's a picture from our venture:

 

As for interesting finds this week, we found a little boy shopping with his dad at Costco that looked like he'd been working with our missionaries all week.  He was in the midst of chaos in great peace:

For Mother's Day, we wandered into a huge market for plants of all kinds.  Terri found what is called a clock flower.  You can see the one we purchased. It has three hands, one for hours, minutes, and seconds.  It's pretty stunning.  It is a climbing plant.

We finally have some clear air. This morning during my run I was able to get this shot of the Lotte Tower some four miles off in the distance.  Normally, it's pretty hazy.



 

 Finally, we had a nice visitor.  We always like it when some of our missionaries come by. We had a wonderful visit catching up on the good things in her life.  We feel bad because we had a sister come back a few weeks ago and didn't take a picture.  We really wish we'd have captured her and her fiancé for the blog.  We won't make that mistake again!

We start interviews again this next week and expect to have some photo-moments to share. 

We are learning so much.....





Birds, Mission Tour and being with the missionaries!

What a fun week.  However, we really have to start off with this funny story from a few of our missionaries.  We think you'll enjoy it.  It happened a few weeks ago, but this is a good time to share:

"Okay so that's pretty much us, except before district meeting one of the windows got left open on Sunday after church, so last district meeting we chased a magpie out of the church which was hilarious. My sides still hurt. Except we had to clean up some poop, because it was in the church for a few days we think.... but yeah just thought I'd spice the email with that, it was hilarious. When the magpie escaped he flew away to the building next door and glared at us the whole meeting. Maybe he wanted to stay... But we're not looking for avian investigators right now. :( "

 

We had special visitors this week.  Elder and Sister Yamashita of the Asia North Area Presidency came to teach and train us.  We had a delightful time with them.  We started with a special mission leadership council meeting where he taught our zone leaders and sister training leaders and helped them better understand their responsibilities.  They are a fun bunch.  If you haven't ever seen the South Korean 'love' symbol with the finger and thumb, here it is! (Sister Turner is doing her best to continue with strategically posing the missionaries.)

On Thursday and Friday we had conferences with one half of the mission each day.  During the day, Elder and Sister Yamashita as well as Sister Turner and I did some training.  We hope you hear in your weekly emails this week things they may have experienced or felt.  It was pretty amazing.  Here are the group pictures from the two days.  We hope you can find your loved one!

They are all so amazing.  We had some powerful lessons, but we still had time to laugh and enjoy some of Sister Turner's Tasty Treats.  They love the Sour Cream Banana bars.  They want the recipe, but this is a special treat right now.  We'll let them have it if they ask as they leave the mission.

 

There is always the occasional one-off selfie that has to be included.

 Sister Turner and this Sister dressed similar, but opposite.  They really matched well today.

On Tuesday, South Korea will elect a new president.  One of the ways they campaign is for each candidate to send out a host of small trucks made up special to allow people to stand in the truck bed and wave and speak to the people.  We wanted to capture one for your view.  This is the first time we had stopped long enough to get a picture.  If you can't get them on TV, you can get them on the street.

For the children, we captured two good pictures.  The first, of course, is the movie all the kids love,

The second is the young man wanting to shop with his mother.  He crossed the street at the light and was in no hurry. Even when mom wanted to hurry him along, he had his determination and his pace.

Food continues to be of great interest to us.  We had an evening of Samgyupsal 삼겹살.  It is very thick pieces of bacon (see the large chunk to left of the grill) which is cut into smaller pieces and grilled at the table.  You add it to a leaf of lettuce with various things like kimchi, garlic, onions, etc. and then eat like a sandwich.  It's probably one of the least healthy foods, but very tasty.

 Then, there always has to be a taste of home.  We had to make our family favorite Macho Nachos for dinner tonight.  We had to use the oven since we don't yet have a grill, but it was almost comfort food.  It would be more colorful if there were some tomatoes on it.

 

Finally, a lovely sister returned home last month. She happens to live close enough to our sweetheart daughter, so that Rachel could meet her.  Everyone of these young men and young women are like our own children.  We get so close to them.  With those already returned home and those who are still here, we have roughly 200 new sons and daughters right now.

Well, it's been another rich week.  We never know what the next week will bring. This week we also had a missionary that has only been here a week have to return to his home in Busan to recover from a bought of pneumonia.  We will hope to have him back soon.   That's it for this week.  Know of our love and appreciation for all your support.

 



More sad farewells and happy welcomes and a great day of playing!

We started this week with a day of play.  On the missionaries' preparation day we had half the mission come together at a park in the morning and the other half came together at a different park in the afternoon.  They have worked so hard and the results have been wonderful so we thought we'd allow them some time to play on their preparation day.
We started with a 5K fun run or walk in the morning.  We had rented a soccer complex for a few hours.  We could run around the area seven times to be over 5K.  I originally estimated eight laps and the fast ones ran the entire thing which came out closer to 5.7K.  I was the official distance tracker on my GPS and at lap six realized we would only need to run six laps.   Some played football or tossed a Frisbee instead of running/walking, but that's okay.
I had to take this picture before we took off running.  I turned and ran so for a few moments I would be in first place.  That didn't last long....

We then got lunch for everyone and relaxed before starting the real fun, kickball!

We divided into four teams and off they went to play

Rather than add commentary, we are adding pictures of the many athletes in our mission. We're sure we don't have everyone represented here, but we tried to capture as many as possible in the limited space we have.

 

Of course, there was showing off at times as well.  We were glad they had a great time!

Terri and I left half way through the event and headed to the other venue.  We had originally scheduled this event for the week before, but we were rained out.  We did the same basic thing, but played kickball first.

It was fun to see those who had never played the game pick up quickly and have a great time.  The weather was terrific and we had a great time.  You can tell each team had a bandana to help them identify their team.  they really were great!

We ran another 2.5K because everyone was hot and tired after the games.  There were a few that literally flew through it.  The smallest guy was the fastest.  I was pretty tired, but I committed to run with them and they were good to me.  The season is young.

Tuesday was meant to be the day to pick up the new missionaries, but the flight was delayed so we met them at 6 AM the next morning.  We had a great time with them, tired though they were.  This time we had a sister from Hong Kong, a sister from Hawaii and an elder from Idaho.

We had a nice lunch with them.  You can tell one of these is spicy and one isn't.  If it's red, it's caution you must consider! The dear sister from Hawaii wanted the sea food, but was cautious of the spice so Roger had the red one.

   



 

After we went them off we prepared for the departing missionaries.  It was an evening of many tears, hugs, laughter, good food and company.  We are sad to lose these folks.  Three are from Korea and we're likely to see them soon. The other three are from California, Idaho and Texas.  We know their families are more anxious to have them than we are to keep them.

 

 

After this week, Terri and I knew it would be a while before we got a break so we took a preparation day and visited the city of Icheon for their semi-annual ceramic festival.  They have 1,000 years of ceramic history with beautiful vases, pots, drums, dishes, etc. from true masters.  It was fun to just wander and see the many things.  We realized later we hadn't taken many pictures of actual ceramic pottery.  However, everything you see here is made from clay.

 

 

On the way out we saw signs for two Buddhist temples. With Buddha's birthday on May 3, we wanted to stop by.  We knew we'd be too busy to visit a temple this week, so we went while there were few people around.  The beautiful color, artistry, architecture, landscaping made it a wonderful experience.  We are still trying to learn the meaning of all the art on the walls around the outside of the two temples.

 

 

 

Of course we saw interesting items this week as well.  How many motorcycles do you know with phones and GPS settled on the dash?

 

We close with the setting of the sun in Seoul. (Sorry for the spotty window!) We're still having fun. We love our experiences, but more importantly we truly adore our missionaries.  Thanks to all the good parents!