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Lying face down in the grass, hidden in the shadow of the tree in front of me, black mask and clothes leaving only my eyes and hands exposed, I thought, “Yeah, this is my spy dream.”

I was guarding my team’s flag in an EV-wide game of capture the flag. In plain sight but camouflaged by the trees around it, my flag had yet to be discovered despite several of my friends-turned-opponents coming very near in pursuit. Somewhere in the shadows, Adam and Shawn silently lurked, also on my team. Then Larry from the other team trotted by on the walkway, and he spotted our flag.  He called out to his teammates, and we were shortly chasing off a blitzkrieg of other team members.  I turned and saw another, Derek, flat in the grass behind me.  I ran for him and he flew up and grabbed the flag.  Adam nabbed Derek on the walkway and Shawn  tagged Larry, leaving our flag in the wide open walkway.  As Shawn escorted our POWs to the jail, Eric sprang from a shadow, and I dove for him.  I tagged Eric on my way down to the brick sidewalk.  A bruised hip and skinned hands later were a small price to pay.

We regrouped and realized that our opponents’ number in jail left their flag very lightly guarded.  Adam and Shawn remained to guard our flag, and I went into a kamikaze mission with Benny and Brian.  Our concern was lightning-quick Nate, who was guarding the other team’s flag.  If he tagged one of us, he’d have to escort us to jail, leaving the flag unguarded for a minute or two.  I ran in and had a clear path all the way to the flag.  Nate was waiting, and after a dance around the trees, he tagged me.

“Okay, now walk me to jail.”

“Wait a second,” he asked the refs if they could walk me.  Nope.  “Can I just let her go then?”  Okay.

So I just went for the flag again.  Nate tagged me again.  “Are you going to walk me?”

He realized he was stuck.  Nate walked me warily away from the flag.  Unfortunately for him, the jail was on the far side of his team’s territory.  As we turned a corner of the nearest building, I saw a flash behind me.  Nate took off back toward the flag.  I had cleared the path for Benny and Brian, and they had taken it.  A moment later, the cheer went up, and we had won the game!

-Jessica

To celebrate Buddha’s birthday, Seoul puts on an incredible, annual, international, weekend-long Lotus Lantern Festival. I have never seen so many people. I have never seen so many lanterns.

Yesterday, Adam spent all day in Seoul, and I joined him after work. As I stepped off of my bus onto Jongno, the main urban road in Seoul, I realized it would be no simple task to make my way to Adam’s and my meeting spot. Throngs of people were already flocking onto street-side bleachers to stake their claim on the best view of the coming parade. I swam upstream into Insadong, one of the centers of the Lantern festivities. Annie and Sung Sook were already there with Adam, when I reached the book shop. We wandered through the Buddhist worshipers, tourists, and revelers congregating at Jogyesa Temple.

As dusk fell, the temple began to glow with a canopy of lanterns. Red, pink, blue, yellow, green, white. The ancient tree looked as though its boughs were glowing lanterns. The first monks and drummers began to pour into Jogyesa’s courtyard, the final destination of the parade. We knew the parade had begun. We ran past the stirring sound of drums, songs, and TV announcers, and pushed through crowds.

Annie, the petite child that she is, was able to squeeze through to the curb for a clear view of the parade, but we weren’t so lucky. She came back to us, and we continued down the sidewalk to an entrance to the subway. There were people sitting all along the edge of the roof, and Annie and I climbed up on the sloping end. It was the perfect seat for viewing the parade. Adam wandered, seeking out the perfect photograph (and I think he found many). Sung Sook milled back and forth in her lovely, helpful way and brought us kimbop and dok boki in plastic bags. Annie and I managed to pick our dinner out of the bags with our chopsticks without sliding off the slanted roof.

After almost two hours of luminous lanterns and colorful costumes, we jumped down from our perch and made our way back to Insadong. The thousands of lanterns that had glowed their path down Jongno were now deposited in radiant piles on the sidewalk near the temple. Annie and I went on a frenzy, filling our arms with lanterns. When our arms were full, we would drop the most ordinary lantern and pick up a prettier one. People started looking at us, and one woman stopped to hand us one of her lovely pink lotus lanterns. “Obviously these girls want these lanterns more than I,” she must have thought.

On the far end of Insadong, Annie’s dad picked us all up in the van, and we opened the trunk to pile our lanterns inside. Annie and Sung Sook had collected seven lanterns, and Adam and I had nine. Our friends dropped us off at the bus stop, and Adam and I climbed onto the bus, laden with glowing orbs. The bus driver laughed and gave us the thumbs-up sign. We slept the whole way home.

Now we need to figure out a place to hang all of them.

-Jessica

Yesterday, we went on a field trip with Adam’s photography class to Dobongsan Mountain. It’s just south of Uijongbu (not that that means anything to you– I just like saying Uijongbu), about 55 km/36 miles southeast of where we are in Paju. Dobongsan is an interesting and beautiful place. It’s the Korean Aspen or Boulder, Colorado.

We rode our motorcycle through neighboring towns, soggy rice paddies, and blooming mountains out to Uijongbu, enjoying the wind in our hair and the fresh smells of spring. As we pulled up to the Dobongsan subway station to meet our group, we swam upstream in a river of middle-aged Koreans wearing clone NorthFace outfits: windproof pants and shirts, hiking vests, hiking boots, hiking poles, hiking backpacks, sun visors. The current of clone Korean hikers swept our group through the foot of the mountain that was occupied by shops and stands selling what we needed to be clone Korean hikers too and restaurants providing sustenance for the hike and drinks for the post-climb buzz.

We picnicked in a creek bed, finding an unoccupied boulder to eat our sandwiches and take photographs of the masses of families eating their kimbap and playing in the creek. I enjoyed getting to know Adam’s photography teacher and her husband, an upbeat and funny couple from Italy named Georgia and Luca. We continued back up the mountain, among the stream of other hikers, stopping a few times for photographs. Then, our group split, and we continued the rocky hike up with Georgia, Luca, and Jenine from South Africa.

The masses of hikers thinned a little as we got higher until we reached a tiny Buddhist monastery at the first peak. We took a rest at the monastery, listening to the chanting, drumming and swaying in the strong wind, like the lanterns that were strung along the perimeter. We looked out across the city below and up at the steep peak above us. Even that peak was crawling with hikers and their climbing ropes. We drank cider and ate tortilla chips then began our descent.

At the bottom, we found a Korean restaurant with a patio overlooking the creek. The five of us happily ate our dinner as the table of men beside us celebrated their day of hiking by getting totally blasted on beer and soju, laughing and singing loudly with the sappy ballads playing through the speaker. Something about the moment reminded me of exploring San Jose del Cabo, Mexico with Adam on our honeymoon.

We jumped back on the bike and braved the evening chill for the much quicker ride home. I felt like a bear coming out of hibernation.

-Jessica

We went camping last night.  We planned it last minute with our friend Nolan, and we didn’t feel like going far, so we did the equivalent of camping in our backyard.  The hill above English Village was the perfect place to pitch our tents.

All night, we sat around the campfire singing songs, eating hot dogs and s’mores, and spending quality time with a bunch of good friends.  After a couple of rough weeks, it was so refreshing to be outside all night around the fire.  I forgot how good campfire nights are for the soul– we had so many good times around the fire pit in our backyard in Nashville.

Last night was the first time Adam and I used our tent, and we had a great sleep.  It was such a great way to initiate the Spring.  I’m looking forward to a lot more nights like it in the coming months.

-Jessica

Last night, Adam and I watched a really nice film, “Pieces of April” while I cut apart the Seoul Art Guide and made a Spring collage for our bedroom door.

This afternoon, we met Annie and Sung Sook in Insadong. We enjoyed a lunch of bibimbap and pajan pancakes, then we walked to a gallery where we saw several of the art pieces I cut up from the art guide last night. Adam’s hips were hurting, so he parked himself at an art book store, and us girls walked around the Ssamzie shopping area and painted mugs at one of those pottery places. I painted a mug with a cat and dog on it for Annie, and Annie painted one with strawberries and grapes for me. We didn’t get to take the mugs home with us since they glaze them somewhere off-site.

For dinner, Sung Sook brought us to a delicious cold noodle restaurant. Cold noodles are a summer specialty in Korea. It’s not summer yet, but it was still a nice treat. Then we went to an arcade. Adam played a racing game while Sung Sook, Annie and I hit gophers on the head, and then Annie and I did Dance Dance Revolution.

On the way back to Jongno subway stop, I bought a beachy summery outfit for our trip to Thailand in two weeks!

Adam and I hadn’t made it to Seoul to hang out for a few weeks, so it was especially nice to enjoy the spring day in Insadong with our friends. We had a good day.

-Jessica

I recently came across this incredible video on one of my favorite blogs, “Shlog” written by Nashville musician Shaun Groves, and I got involved in a mini debate in his comments section.

I have experienced this shift firsthand: Online, I found Adam, we found and later sold our cars, we found our house, our travel companions, many of our friends, and my job here in Korea. We keep in touch with family and friends all over the world though email, this blog, and internet phone. Adam is completing his degree online. We get all of our news online. We conduct business online (selling my CDs and Adam’s voice and photography work). We book travel online, we buy our music online, we buy almost everything but groceries online. Technology is such a gift.

However, Adam and I have been feeling the weight of technology lately. With the conveniences available to gain more information and complete tasks quickly and with a greater scope, the information, expectations, and “noise” are becoming exponentially greater. We feel guilty for not being able to keep up with emails and phone calls (no, you’re not the only person we’re ignoring).

Our generation has the gift of meeting and maintaining more friends because of the conveniences of CouchSurfing, MySpace, high school and university alumni pages, Skype, Gmail chat, email, blogs, the ease of international travel, etc. It’s just getting overwhelming, and this video reminds us that it’s not going to slow down.

Adam and I actually talked this morning about the ramifications of a year without any long-distance correspondence other than hand-written letters. We’re not going to do that, but imagine…

-Jessica

Adam and I had a nice evening.  We went for a walk in a new direction, to the driving range up the road.  It’s a double-decker range enclosed by green net 650 feet long and 200 feet high.  We stood and watched as white dots soared past like snow, and the repetitive “thwap, thwap” sounded like the rain from this afternoon.

After we cooked our dinner of mandu and black rice, our friend Bill came over to play chess with Adam and give him some tips to improve his game.  I went up to the gym field to play Ultimate Frisbee.  It was a really fun time.  I used to play Ultimate on Sunday afternoons in high  school with friends from youth group, and it felt great to finally play again.  There were 10 other teachers from the village that played, and they play every week, so I’ll be back.  I always thought I was pretty good at Ultimate, considering I’m not very athletic.  I was definitely rusty, but I made some good catches and throws to balance out the mistakes.  I also ran really hard.  I don’t push myself that hard on the treadmill.  It was a great workout, and I’ll be sore tomorrow.  :).  Maybe I can lure Adam away from his chess game to play next week.

We have just finished watching the Korean film, “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring”, directed by a famous Korean director Kim Ki-Duk who happens to live across the street at Heyri Art Village.  He is a neighbor and friend of Mr. Han, and he came to our little concert on Sunday.  He heard that Sunday was Adam’s birthday, so he ran home and brought back his DVD anthology to give to Adam as a gift.  Very cool.  His is the first Korean film we have seen in our 7+ months living in Korea!

Have a good night (or day, depending on your hemisphere).  See you later.

-Jessica

Guitars, violin
and song fill the air. Smiling,
Jin-ju dances free.

-Adam

She knows she’s cute…

She’s also very smart.  A few days ago, Annie and her parents Sung Hyeon and Sung Sook took us to the nearby city of Ilsan for the evening.  On the ride there, Annie and I were talking about GPS systems, and I taught her the word “satellites” (I actually found a word she didn’t know).

Hours later, she brought it up again, reviewing the words she had picked up from our conversations that evening “so I learned satellite, charcoal, cherry blossom and ticklish…”  I forget new words as soon as I learn them unless I use them a lot immediately, but Annie absorbs words after just one use.  What a special kid.

-Jessica

We have a knack for killing plants, but Mr. Chia Head is alive and well.