Seoul Weekend

Erika was at a PWOC retreat this weekend, playing music that she didn't have to plan and enjoying speaker Victoria Robinson. Dan and I were on child duty. Dan went for a bike ride Saturday morning while Simeon and I did playground and board games. In the afternoon Dan led us on an adventure to a festival at a shopping mall.

The fun started in the train station.

The information about the festival was in Korean so Dan wasn't exactly sure what we were getting into. At first all we found was a shopping mall. Korea is very first world, and a shopping mall is a shopping mall even if the signs are in a different language. The signs we saw for C-Festival said W10,000 admission (about $10) and all we could see through the convention center doors were exhibition booths with more shopping. Not exactly something that would interest Simeon. But then we saw some colorful outer-space mascots coming down the escalator. When we followed them, we discovered a whole other area with much more kid-friendly activities--like this Legoland-type area where Simeon and his dad built towers with this magnetic construction set. And this stuff was free.

Outside we found a marching band, junior belly dancers in gauzy dresses that Simeon thought were beautiful (I found 8-year-olds with padded bras to be pretty weird), and this juggler/tightrope walker/unicycle rider. The masks in the audience are because of the air pollution, which is really bad at this time of year. I even got an emergency warning on my phone in the wee hours. It was all in Korean, but I'm pretty sure it was my weather app telling me not to go out.

Korea is looking forward to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics next February. (So am I!) There are lots of promotions around.

Sunday at home included a neighbor's birthday party. The base is like an American small town set down in the middle of a city of 10.25 million (25.6 million in the larger metropolitan area). This superhero-themed party included a bouncy house and junior high girls doing face painting.

Superman and a ninja turtle join Spiderman in the bouncy house.

Simeon gets a spider added to his Spiderman costume from his own birthday last year