Meeting Day Number 2

  I am including some photos in this post from yesterday’s dinner with Justin and Elizabeth.  Also I forgot to mention that Justin works in the corporate offices of Samsung, so after dinner we visited their “d’lite store” where you can check out their latest products.  It’s Samsung’s version of the Apple store.  Samsung is very huge here.  Most everyone we have seen has a Samsung phone, which they are constantly using.  Wireless speeds on cell phones are a lot faster here, so many of the Samsung phones have built in antenna that you can use to watch tv on your phone.  Pretty awesome.  The biggest attraction was the smart TV, which you can operate with your hands- no remote needed.  Andy, being the technology fan that he is, really enjoyed browsing the store.

 This is our dinner of noodles and a beef broth.  It was really good.

 Justin treated us to a Korea dessert of red beans over shaved milk ice.  It was a lot better than I expected it to be.  It was delicious!

Now, for today, we headed back to Insa-dong to grab a couple mementos to remember our time here. We didn’t have much time because we were meeting Anderson again at 1pm. 

We have been very lucky with the weather on the last two days.  It has not rained for almost 48 hours, which is saying a lot considering it is the monsoon season.  But we were looking through the channels on TV last night and saw the local weather station with the screen showing a large hurricane-shaped storm heading our way.  It was momentarily terrifying because while we could see the diagram and radar, we had no idea what the weatherman was saying.  It felt like an eternity before we could get the computer turned on and pull up The Weather Channel’s website.    Luckily, it is just a tropical storm and Seoul is not forecasted to get a direct hit, so we don’t think our Friday morning flight will be affected.  But it might mean that we are spending the majority of the time after we get Anderson in our room because they are expecting lots of rain.  Honestly, we are really okay with this because we get enough stares while we are out on the streets and that is before we have a Korean baby on our hip (quite possibly a crying Korean baby).

For this visit we got to spend some time with Anderson alone in the playroom of the SWS house.  We were pleasantly surprised by how well he did.  He is very attached to his foster mother, so we were worried that he would cry immediately.  We were able to play with him alone for about 15 minutes before he started really crying.  He is drawn to Andy, who is constantly making silly faces at him.  He even allowed Andy to pick him up to be comforted when he began to sob a little.  We spent the entire 15 minutes trying to keep him distracted from the fact that he was alone with us.  I think it is a taste of things to come as he transitions from foster mom to us.   

Tonight we are going to see a baseball game here in Seoul.  But I’ll have to tell you more about that in another post. 

Tomorrow is the big day.  Please pray for us that this will be a smooth transition and that we will be able to find ways to comfort him when he is crying.