Wednesday

Wednesday was one of the busiest days I have had in a good long time. I'm still sore from all the walking and standing I did. The benefit is that I am learning the Seoul subway system pretty good. If you want, you can follow along on the subway map I included. My hostel is located about 400 yards away from the Chungmoro station, near the middle of the map, so I use Chungmoro as the base. I went down to Seoul National University of Education stop to transfer lines to the Gangnam station and walked a few hundred yards from there to Jubilee Church. Jubilee is a great church, so alive and so dedicated with zeal and fervor. It's made up mostly of ex-pats (Koreans who were born in Korea but lived in America most their lives and are now coming back) or long term visiting Korean-Americans, so the service is in English. Plus, their coffee shop, Ecclesia, makes a great BLT. I had a meeting with a deacon there who said the church would more than like to help me out. He told me to come back to their 8pm church service and I said I would, but I needed to be across town to pick up my physical report and try to make it to the travel agency on time before it closed to get the paperwork started today. So I transferred subway lines at Gangnam again and basically took the orange line all the way up to Jongno(3) sam-ga and then transferred and took the purple line to the hospital near Hoegi. Don't ask me what the names mean, because when it comes to Korean, I am more like a parrot that can recite words taught to it, but has no idea what it is saying.
By the time, I got to Hoegi it was around 430, and the beginning of rush hour, so after cutting across 8 lanes of traffic and a million side streets and alleys, I make it back to the hospital to pick up the report.
I am there maybe 30 seconds.
It took about an hour and a half to get there.
No matter. I was just glad to have the forms with no problems and quickly headed over to the travel agency, deep in the heart of the city. Everything went well there and the agent said that I may actually have the visa as early as Tuesday! Let's hope so! After this bit of good news, I walked back to my hostel only to find the place had been invaded by Japanese schoolchildren on holiday. Hundreds of them. Cute, staring, shy, giggling school children. On my way up to my room, I must have heard hello a hundred times and one little girl quietly asked her friend "how do you say 御元気ですか in English?" her friend whispered something and she squeaked "how are you?"
I answered and since the kids saw I wasn't evil or anything, they asked a million more so I spent the next several minutes answering the same questions over and over.

Japanese kid: How are you?
Me: Fine. Thank you. How are you?
Every Japanese Kid: *giggling*
Japanese Kid: Where is your home?
Me: I come from America.
Every Japanese Kid: Ooooooh and Ahhhh
Japanese kid: How are you?
Me: *Sigh*

So after resting for a bit, I went back down to Gangnam and went to the midweek Jubilee service. It was pretty good and I got introduced all around afterwards. One of the deacons asked how much money I had, and since I had just paid for my visa, I was running a little low but still had enough to get around, I thought. The people around me kinda chuckled when I told them and one of them left for a minute and brought back the financial deacon (apparently there is such a thing, she handles the church finances) who asked the same thing and did the same chuckle when i told her. So Jubilee is not only paying for the rest of my hostel stay, but they also gave me a nice bit of cash to last until I leave for food. Not bad for a foreign visitor who only went to their church twice so far. :-) So Praise God for these bits of good news!

Click on the image to see the map.