Pohang sunrise and back to Seoul

This morning we woke up at 5:30am and Nathan’s uncle drove us to the sea to view the sunrise. It was a chilly morning, and so we huddled in our jackets as we saw the sun pierce the sky through some low clouds on the horizon. There were a lot of fishermen coming back from night fishing, so we saw some of them unloading their catches. They had some huge fish, and Nathan even saw a ray. We had to stand back a little so we didn’t get splashed while they where transferring the fish from the boat to their buckets.

We had some Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast before heading back to the Lee’s apartment to get ready and pack up. At 10:30 we left for church, which was fun but a little difficult to understand since it was all in Korean. Thankfully we had an English translation of the hymns so we sang along quietly in English. Their church was really nice and had a good choir, and very friendly parishioners. There were some not-so-subtle teenage girls staring at us when we got there, which was a contrast from the middle school English teacher who was cowering away from us, since he is probably self-conscious about his English!

We went to lunch at a nice Chinese restaurant called Silk Road with Nathan’s Uncle’s brother and his wife. The lunch was a set menu featuring 6 different courses and gave Susan a chance to try menu new foods including shark's fin soup and sea cucumber! Then it was time to catch our flight back to Seoul.

After we settled in at the Intercontinental, we had dinner with Nathan’s dad’s high school alumni and their wives. One of the men brought his daughter, whose name is Jae Hee. She spoke perfect English and we learned that she’d spent high school in Chicago and has recently graduated from the University of Chicago. She’s now living in Seoul and working for Booz Allen Hamilton as a consultant. Nathan’s dad brought us back to hotel, and we went up to the club lounge to have a drink with another high school alumnus. He was very nice and has high hopes that his son will learn English. His son is eight, and has already been to Vancouver to learn English and it seems as though his mom helps him learn while he’s in Korea. He’s a little shy and didn’t want to talk to us very much, but he was a good sport and answered our questions very well, with good grammar and pronunciation.

We wandered around Coex Mall which is in our hotel’s basement, had some ice cream cones at Baskin Robbins, and went back upstairs to bed.