South Korea Temple

Guess what?  I went to South Korea last year!  I know, I almost forgot too.

One of the things that I really wanted to do while we were in Korea was to go to the Seoul LDS temple.  I packed clothes for church and to go to the temple, but Will forgot.  His wardrobe was basically all Army issue and I don't think he was thinking past that.  

Fortunately, there are more "American" type stores on the Post he was working at and he found a white shirt, a tie and some slacks...do I say slacks because I'm old, or am I really just old so I say old things?  Pants, then.

Will got back to the hotel a little early and we were ready to go and walking out the door, address to the temple written in Korean and everything, when we remembered that we had put our temple recommends along with our passports and stuff in the hotel room safe.  So, thinking that we had dodged a bullet, we got them out of the safe and I scanned over mine and noticed that I had brought.l..14 thousand miles away...my old expired temple recommend.

Back into the hotel room...the Temple wasn't going to happen.  Leave it to me to complicate something so entirely!  I emailed our Bishop and he called the temple, probably at like 3am his time, to tell them it was ok for me to go in.  

If any of this sounds weird and foreign...recommends, Bishops, etc...I apologize...I forget sometimes that not everyone has the same vocabulary as me.

Our taxi driver couldn't understand the name of the church as we had it written down...the Church recently changed it's name in Korean, the way it is translated anway, and when the taxi driver repeated the name of the church to Will, he was thinking it was some sort of dooms-day church.

Nope. Not that one.

Until we turned into the temple grounds, I was sure the taxi driver still had it wrong.  If you were driving up this street, would you think there was a beautiful, large temple on it anywhere?

But there was...perched on the top of a hill and completely unseen from the street...and we made it with an hour and a half to spare...things aren't quite as busy as they are in the Provo Utah temple.  So Will and I roamed the temple grounds and took pictures. 

It was one of my favorite days!

---I am 40 years old and I need a personal shopper...someday I will realize that the best place to shop for travel clothes is NOT Sam's Club or Costco!  I'm anti-trying things on...you know, the fear of having to go up a size...so I always buy the big size and about 95% of the time I regret it...this was one of those days.

It really was a wonderful evening.  I had to laugh because while we were in the temple we used little translator sets with earphones because obviously, everything being said was in Korean, but there were times when I felt like I was watching one of those old kung-fu movies where what's being said doesn't match the moving mouth. 

And I could also hear what I was listening to being translated in to Russian for the lady sitting next to me.  Not a language I would expect to hear in Korea, for sure!

I got homesick for my sister Holly when I saw this coffee shop...a lot of the restaurants have western names, and/or themes...Korean's like USA and France, apparently!