Day Something

I have no idea what day it is, or was, or whatever. I've been home 24 hours now. But then again, I left Seoul on Saturday Oct 17 at 2pm and arrived in Eugene on Saturday Oct 17 at 1pm. I'm so confused!

The flight home was fine, relatively uneventful. Lots of turbulence over the Pacific, but we got into San Francisco an hour early, which was nice since it took a long time to get through all of the security. Late leaving San Fran, of course, as it seems they over-booked the flights and didn't have enough gates to accommodate. They had planes stacked up 3 deep waiting to board passengers.

The view from my hotel room.

There is so much still running around in my head about the trip. It was so incredible it's hard to put into words. The city is huge, and has over 10 million inhabitants, and yet it didn't fee over-crowded. It was nice to walk along the street, bump into people and not worry about offending someone. No one takes notice. Even though very few Koreans speak English, they all seemed quite nice and willing to help however they could.

Street vendors attracting crowds.

I really thought I would feel uncomfortable being in the minority. There were more Caucasians in public places than I thought there would be, but I was still obviously the minority. When I went to lunch with the Holt PAS department I was the only white in the restaurant. No one felt the need to speak English, or seemed to care that I couldn't understand or take part in the conversation. At first I felt awkward, but by the end of lunch I could tell when they were teasing someone else, or talking about work, and I didn't feel awkward anymore. More than anything I wished I could understand what they were saying making me more determined to learn Korean.

I learned so much about the Korean culture in general, and regarding adoption in Korean in particular. I realized how much we need to do to teach our parents about the culture their children came from, and how much we need to learn to help our adult adoptees understand the culture that placed them into a home in America.

I really believe, now more than ever, that it's important that we understand every culture our children come from. Immersing our children in their birth culture isn't as important as our understanding of that culture. Kids want to know about the current styles at school, the newest iPod, the popular movies. But when they ask us why their birth parents placed them for adoption, we need to be able to explain the culture that motivated their birth parents' decision. We need to be able to explain to our parents why the birth country is asking for certain requirements, why country A will allow 5 kids in the home but country B only allows 2, why their child is afraid of something as simple as a stuffed animal, why he won't eat hamburgers or will only eat noodles with sesame oil morning, noon, and night.

I look forward to learning about the cultures of all the countries we work with. We should all learn about other cultures - learn to honor them, not ridicule them for being strange to us.