MiKyung and Hyejin

These two wonderful ladies have become dear friends.



MiKyung lives north of Seoul, while Hyejin and I live South. Monday morning we met at the largest bookstore in Seoul and spent a wonderful day together. I had no idea that these wonderful ladies had planned to celebrate my birthday that day--much to my delight and surprise they had a wonderful day planned. We had a yummy lunch at an Italian restaurant that Hyejin and her husband use to go to for dates before they were married. After our lunch we took a short taxi ride to the "Blue House"--the President of Korea's home. The area near the Presidents home is beautfiul--mountains, the largest palace in Korea, manicured lawns--it's what you would think of a Presidents home.

When we arrived to our destination, we started to get out of our taxi and were suddenly swarmed by police officers and security agents. They ushered us back into the taxi and said we were to exit the vehicle at another location--which was about 25-30 feet away from where we were.



There are probably several reasons why they didn't allow us to exit the vehicle where we were--perhaps because we were in the middle of the road but Hyejin said that they don't allow vehicles to stop on this road because it looks suspicious. Perhaps we three middle aged woman do look suspicious. I told the ladies they were trying to get me arrested. Later as we were taking photos of the big Blue House--that sounds familiar to me--Oh, ya! Blues Clues . . . I digress . . . I decided to do another video but was told after a few seconds to turn it off. I did and couldn't stop laughing. Every time we tried to cross the street to get a closer view of the house, we were told that we were not allowed and must follow the path we were on. We obeyed and continued the beautiful walk along the walking path. There were a few locations along the perimeter of the Presidents area that I saw guards with machine guns posted high above the wall and agreed it was probably best that we stayed on the marked pathway.

We finished our day by having desert at a wonderful cafe. Throughout the day, I had been looking at wallets--I need something smaller and have been looking for several weeks to find something that I like but that was cheap. Well, the ladies had been scheming all day to find me a wallet or a pair of earrings--they know how much I like dangling earrings. I had no idea they were doing this--"Kimberly, do you like these earrings? Oh, how about this wallet?" We were in a quaint shop and MiKyung saw some cool wallets. I came in and said, "Yes, this is exactly the style I'm looking for but the cost is too much, we can keep looking." Ya, you know what happened, they bought the wallet. Their scheme was a success and they were quite proud that I finally saw something I liked. I'm glad I didn't settle for the Hello Kitty wallet or the wallet that had the pink polk-a-dot bow on it.