Seoul week

This week was fun. LOTS of traveling. Probably a total of 12ish hours spent on busses/trains/taxies. Bleh.

 

We started the week out by attempting to clean out one of our members' houses... He is 80 years old, not married and has no kids, so he lives alone in this little apartment. He's super awesome and smart... He studies at the library everyday from noon to 8 pm. It's crazy. He studies English and Confucionism and the Gospel. And he's pretty well versed on all of those things. Super cool. Anyway, he has lived in his apartment for over 30 years. And he's a hoarder. Real bad. I don't think he has ever cleaned his house before.

 

Awesome(ly dirty) house.

So we attempted to clean it on Tuesday. Super nasty. But super cool, because there was a bunch of super old and cool Korean things. We found a sweet, ancient Korean typewriter. It still worked! In the end, we couldn't really clean anything because he wouldn't let us throw anything out. But I managed to wash some dishes. I almost threw up, but I managed.

Cleaning.

 

We went to Seoul on Friday! Long time no see. It's been since the end of September since I've been there. We went and bought some warm stuff because Taebeck is filthy cold, and then went to the temple that night to sleep and for a session. That was really good.

Waiting for the train at 7:30 in the morning. COLD.

On Saturday, we had a huge dual-mission conference. Seoul mission combined with Seoul South mission, and we all got together at Yeoung den Po chapel for a cool conference. Two members of the quorum of the 70 spoke. One of them actually spoke in conference a few times ago (Elder Ellis.) The conference was really good, I got to see a bunch of missionaries that I thought I would never see because they're in the South mission.

 

My trainer and I.

After the conference, we headed over to Gangnam (anybody heard of Gangnam Style? Yeah. That Gangnam. That's right) to catch a bus back to our area. Gangnam is CRAZY. It's the most packed and busy city I've ever seen. It made me kind of glad nobody is in Taebeck. A lot more peaceful. Anyway, we caught a bus to our zone for a district (zone) conference of all the branches of Gangwondo. That was good. We slept over at the Ganleng Elders' apartment, watched some more district conference, and then came back to Taebeck. Finally home. It's been a long but fun week.

Tool time before the funeral.

On Wednesday we went to a Korean funeral. SUPER cool. One of our branch members' mom died, so we were expected to go to the funeral. In Korea, when someone dies, all of the relatives and friends get together and eat a lot of food and drink lots of alcohol. They also do something called 절 (Jurl), which is a cool bow to show respect for the dead. So we got to go do some sweet Korean obseiance bows.

 

Korea is awesome. I love it here.

 

Love,

Elder Edwards

A nice morning run. Really cold.