Day 3 - Gotcha!!

Just another boring day.  Nothing really interesting happened.  Oh, except now we are parents!!

Today at 3pm we went to Holt to meet our son.  We took a taxi from our hotel and got there right at 3.  Sam and his foster family were already there waiting for us.  In we went and there's our son!  We spent about an hour getting to know Sam and his foster parents.  We were very impressed with his foster family.  They obviously cared a great deal for him and treated him as their own.  They also talked about how much of a gift he was for them.  He brought so much joy to them and made them better people.  The foster dad said that he even quit smoking.  Sam was cautious with us at first.  He was mostly interested in the toys in the room, but eventually started interacting with us.

We had a list of questions for the foster family and we also exchanged gifts.  We gave dad an OSU hat and also one for their college age son.  They also got some hazel nuts from a place close to Corvallis and a photo album with more pictures of us.  Foster dad was excited to see the pictures of us fishing with Chuck as he likes to fish and has already taken Sam out fishing.  We also gave them a photo book of Oregon.  I wrote a message in Hangul for them on the inside cover.  I told them how beautiful Oregon was and how Sam will get to see a lot of the places in the book.  We were incredibly blessed to receive a bunch of things from them as well.  We got three different photo albums from them including more baby pictures and pictures of him at his 1st birthday in his hanbok.  
They said that they had more that they would send us later too.  They also gave us the same hanbok he had on in his pictures.  They also gave us some of Sam's favorite toys including some that we sent him in previous care packages.

Things went so quick.  We took Sam downstairs for a quick medical checkup, got some pictures with the foster family and with DJ.  DJ is an incredible woman there at Holt.  She matches all the children to their adopting parents, handles all of the correspondences with Holt in Eugene, works with the foster families, and is there for all the gotcha days translating and setting adopting parents on their new course.  

Another incredible thing happened while we were there.  DJ asked Julie if she wanted to see her file.  Julie wasn't expecting or asking for any of this, but DJ got her on the phone with the orphanage she stayed at in Incheon.  She has arranged a visit there tomorrow!  No guarantees but this could open up a lot more information about Julie's past.  She is very excited. 

After this it was outside to the taxi.  We said our goodbyes to the foster family and were on our way to the hotel.  There was so much going on during the visit that there was no time for the moment to sink in.  In the taxi we had the first moments with Sam all to ourselves.  I thoroughly enjoyed watching Kristi holding Sam as he fell asleep in her arms.  We are parents now and feel incredibly blessed by the whole experience.  Enjoy the pictures.

Day 2.5 Dongdaemun, Bukchon

After touring Changdeokgung palace we explored more of Seoul.  We set out walking south to the Dongdaemun market place.  It turned out to be more walking than we thought, but it was fun to see all the little shops and sights and sounds along the way.  Along the way we strolled down the Cheong-gye -cheon which is a stream running through the city.  The weather couldn't be nicer for walking outside.  We had a little trouble finding Dongdaemun because we were expecting an outdoor market like Insadong.  Instead it was a huge multi floor building filled with shops.  The entire ground floor was nothing but fabric shops.  By this time our legs were about to fall off and we were a little overwhelmed by so many shops and so many people so we decided to catch the subway back to our hotel.

That evening we got a visit from our friend Dongkyun!  He is our friend Yoonsook's nephew who spent last school year studying at OSU and practicing his English.  He moved back to Korea this summer.  He took us out to dinner last night for traditional Korean food.  We had to remove our shoes at the front door and sat on the floor at our table.  The food was amazing,  I am not going to even explain what we ate.  I'll just let you look at the pictures.

After dinner we strolled through Bukchon which had a lot of neat traditional houses.

What a great way to celebrate our last evening and meal before getting Sam.  Thank you Dongkyun!

Day 2 - Changdeokgung Palace

Tuesday we went to the other famous Palace in Seoul - Changdeokgung Palace.  This was originally built in 1405 as a secondary palace to Gyeonbokgung, but later served as the main palace and residence for many kings.  There is actually more to see here, with the finale being a beautiful secluded garden behind the palace.

Day 1 - Gyeongbokgung Palace, Insadong

Today we took a guided tour along with several other adopting couples.  We toured Gyeongbokgung palace and the Korean National Folk Museum.  After these tours we went to Insadong for lunch and shopping.  All these places are walking distance from our hotel so we may go back later with Sam.

Our tour guides were Korean students in the area who volunteered their time for Holt.  They were very helpful with getting us around, figuring out the lunch menu, and finding shops for whatever we were looking for.  Our tour guide Chloe had previously lived in Washington and went to University of Washington.  So we made sure to give her an OSU beaver tshirt when we were finished.  I have decided that OSU needs to pay us for all the advertising we are doing for them.  We also gave a shirt to our bus driver from the airport.

The Korean rapper Psy who has been sweeping the US with his "Gangnam Style" was seen at Gyeongbokgung in this video.  It will give you a good view of where we were at today.

Below are pictures of the tour:

We made it to Korea!

Its Monday morning here in Korea and we'll be setting out on a tour of Seoul in a couple hours, but first I'll update you with some pictures of our flight to Korea and our hotel.  Everything went well on the trip.  We arrived at our hotel about 7:30pm local time and crashed for the night.  We woke up about 4am wide awake and ready to go!  Hopefully we'll adjust to the new time zone as the days go by so we can sleep in a little more.

Here's some pictures from our flight on Asiana Air.  Note the fantastic Bee Bim Bop meal.  Best airline food I've ever had!

Also below are pictures of our plush hotel - The Somerset Palace Seoul.
My apologies if these don't come out in order. Still figuring this blogger interface.

On our way!

I'm posting this from the Seattle airport and from my phone which is kind of amazing. No troubles so far. We got up at 3:30am headed to Portland and took the 8:30am Horizon shuttle to Seattle.

Here's some pictures from the Seattle airport prior to departure.