HELLO!!!
Quick updates!
Guess what! I and the other YAVs are going on our seventh month here in Korea! Oh yeah! SEVEN MONTHS! Oh yeah!!! “DANCING” SeVen MoNthS “DANCING” Okay, time to stop playing around and get down to the point of this blog post. We all went to Seoul…again…for five days and it enjoyable for the most part. This time around we were able to explore all by ourselves. I felt like big kid in a candy store. I am proud to say, Bennett and I were able to survive our Seoul adventure unscaved.
I went to the worlds largest Church and heres what I have to say….
Yoido Full Gospel Church, a mega-churches and the largest of them all. I want to give you scale, this church alone has a million person membership. There are seven serves each sunday and service can have in upwards of 26,000 people. I swear to you, almost very set was filled. They had on the spot translators for a number of different languages ranging from English to Russian. It was pretty cool. On the other hand, the governing body of Yoido Full Gospel Church is going through some major scandal yet the church as a whole is standing behind their senior pastor. This is to say I in no way agree with the idea of a mega-churches but I have to admit, it was truly moving to see that large number of people coming together to have a faith experience and I will leave it at that.
North Korea is not what you think it is
We went to the DMZ and it was not that bad. Yeah so I am going to write another post about the DMZ a little later just bare with me.
I went to a protest in Seoul and ended up in the News paper…..
On our last day in Seoul we had the honor to partake in the the wednesday protest outside of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, Korea. I have written before about the comfort women issue that is an ongoing problem here in Korea and in other once Japanese occupied lands. On that Wednesday it turns out was also another very important day for the protestors. On this very day a Korean ambassador to the UN spoke on the behave of the Korean government urging Japan to reconsider their plan to re-evaluate their 1993 apology. Some of you might be asking why Koreans would urge Japan not to re-evaluate their apology. Well it turns out the current government in Japan has an extremely conservative leaning and they felt the apology given in 1993 was too good. I will let that sink in for a little bit. It would seem that the Japanese government is totally oblivious to the needs,wants, concerns, and feeling of the Korean general public. I want it to be known that the Japanese government has backed away form their plan to change the wording of the 1993 apology but the damage has been done.
As for the title of this section let me tell you it has been a while since I have had that many cameras in my face so there can be any number of photos of me floating around the interwebs.
Be good Always!
“I sometimes wonder how Mary felt; when he took his last breath, to know that her only son was gone.”
If you know more about Yoido Full Gospel Church here some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoido_Full_Gospel_Church
More on the ‘Comfort Women’
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/14/us-japan-korea-idUSBREA2D04R20140314
Japan’s Lawmakers Launch Campaign Against ‘Comfort Women’ Memorials
It starts with you and me 