Seoul 5

Well, we are at the airport waiting for our flight home. We've really had a wonderful time on this trip.

Here are a couple of more things we learned before I get to a summary of today:

People's ages are measured differently here. When a child is born, he/she is already one year old. They count the age including the time of prenatal development, so when an American child is one, a Korean child with the same birth date is two.

Now for the story I promised. We learned it at the Korean Folk Village. There was a scene in the prison which represented the story of a young, beautiful 16 year old girl named Miss Sung who lived in a northern village. She was of the lower class, but the son of an upper class family, Mr. Lee, fell in love with her. The goal of this upper class son was to pass an exam so that he could become a civil official. In order to do that, he had to travel to a southern city to take an exam. The young man and woman were promised to each other, and he begged her to wait for him (girls were married in their teens at that time). So he left and was gone a long time. The roads were bad, and they didn't have means to communicate.

In the meantime, the mayor of the town fell in love with the girl and did everything in his power to win her over and get her to marry him instead of Mr. Lee. Miss Sung refused his advances and so the mayor had her thrown in jail and sentenced to death (rather a severe reaction, I think). Just before the sentence was to be carried out, Mr. Lee returned. He had successfully passed the exam. In fact, he had done so well that he gained a higher rank than the mayor. The mayor was punished, Miss Sung and Mr. Lee were married and lived happily ever after. Hoorah!

As for today, Dad and I went to an interesting shopping area. They have a number of night markets that are opened from 10:30 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. We didn't go to one of those because Park and our tour director, Sherrie Olson, recommended this one. We wandered around alittle and bought a few things. In thinking about it, I have concluded that the reason that the subway was so crowded on that night we came home from the temple was that one of those night markets was on that subway line.

Oh we learned why there was the discrepancy with our taxi bills. It turns out there are two classes of taxis - the black and the white. The white are the regular taxis and the black are special in some way. We asked the concierge about it, and she said that the black taxis have credit card machines, the drivers are supposed to speak English, and they are supposed to be somehow safer. They aren't supposed to cost more than twice as much, however, just 30%.

So, we need to go board our plane in a few minutes. It leaves here at 8:00p.m. on Friday and gets to JFK at 7:30 on Friday. That makes it a 13 1/2 hour flight. We'll call everyone when we land.