Thursday, September 30, 2010

Let's Try This Again!


photo by Laura Hill

A wedding can sure take it out of you and then it's over before your even finished paying off the credit card bill from your dress! Was it worth it, absolutely! So now what, I'm married and we are deciding our future...together. (Apparently, that is what married people do!) BUT, I still have my own independence, and luckily my husband still supports that, in fact probably loves me because of it. So now that the grand event is behind me, I can focus on the task at hand which was to plan a trip to Seoul, South Korea.

I have gone to a couple different websites, one being homestay.com and looking at possible families I could live with that could help me reimmerse myself in the Korean culture. It is quite affordable to stay with a family and usually its because they want you to teach English to either themselves or their children for a couple hours/day, or its because they want to learn your culture as well. I think they might get a shock when they see me, expecting some American person and if I show up looking like them, they might think I have played a joke!

This is an odd dynamic that I am very curious about, how Koreans, people that I actually look like, will react to me. Maybe I'll be too "American" for them, do I wear too much eye make-up, am I too tall, too big? Is my skin color too tan? I feel more American than I do Korean, but there are times when I get awakened to the fact that no matter what, I will always look different, and my children are going to look different. Who knows if they will have double eyelids? Probably their hair will be black and straight like mine, as well as their eye color would be dark brown and not blue like my husband's whole side of his family.

I have sent a few emails out to various families to start the communicating process. For the next few months, I will be saving what I can to put towards the trip. I hope to stay for 2 weeks. I have also started researching my past history, gathering any documents on the orphanage I was in and my biological parents. It struck me that I don't even know the name of my biological mom. During this whole process I am documenting and writing down what I can, hoping to have a finished book by the end. Perhaps I can solicit the help of my talented brother-in-law, who is an amazing writer. :)

More to come soon!

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