Korea Trip

I had the opportunity to go to Korea for a week to work on a compensation project. LaMont (my boss from SLC) flew in from the states and we met up in Seoul. It was very hot, humid and crowded. When I landed I took a bus to the hotel for 14,000 won. (trivia..how much did I spend for my ticket?). On Saturday I walked around (not far from the hotel) just to see what I could see. LaMont landed early Sunday morning and we were able to make it to the Korean sacrament meeting. When we got there we were given little translation headsets. A translator sat in the back of the room and translated the meeting for us. Sunday afternoon we strolled through a park not far from the hotel. Monday morning we went to work in the Korean office. We had meetings with consultants and worked on the Korean pay line. On Tuesday LaMont and I were asked to speak in the devotional. Either they all understood English or they didn't want to hear what we had to say. Each day the HR Manager took us out for a great Korean lunch. I actually got pretty good with my chopsticks. However I was never able to "catch a fly". On Tuesday evening we were invited to play volleyball. After a nice basketball warm up they put up the net. But something was a little strange...the net was up as high as a tennis net. We were playing a Korean game called foot volleyball. You can only use your head or your feet. The ball can bounce once between each hit. These guys are so good at this that they can actually set up a spiker and these guys can spike the ball over the net! We looked pretty silly trying to do it but eventually were able to hit the ball and we had a pretty good time. I was a little nervous about by past foot injury but everything went ok. It has healed nicely and it only hurt a little when I landed on another guy. We ended the evening with real volleyball and take out noodles. After finishing our project we got a little tour of the city from our good friend and visited the Korean palace and museum. They are celebrating their 60th anniversary of independence from Japan. We flew to Japan for a day of work then home to New Zealand by way of Brisbane Australia.