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December 8: 2002

Sunday, December 8, 2002

We just had some nice green bean soup, Dutch cookies and herring on toast and while we were eating a strange guy was walking around, a big hat, with some yellow cross, wearing a read dress and assisted by two very dark employees.

Yes, the Dutch version of Santa Claus, so called “Sinterklaas” arrived in Seoul, he came all the way from Holland were the whole country always celebrate his “birthday” on December 5. This was a special day for the children in the Dutch community in Seoul. Normally he is riding a white horse, but the horse could not come so he brought a picture of his horse and the children had a lot of fun. We remembed last year, he also came to Almaty and it was a big adventure over there as well. But at that time Yde was still too small to enjoy it. Today it was different, he ate dutch candy while we, all the parents, had our fun with warm wine and the green bean soup. And we certainly needed warm things, the weather is not good, wet snow and the forecast for this week doesn’t look good. It is getting colder. Anyhow, Yde got a nice box with duplo so he has something to do.

Furthermore everything is fine, we are trying to find our X-mass lights, it should be somewhere so we opened the last boxes which were in the cellar. If we don’t find it we will buy the Korean version of “some” lights. They use incredible amounts of small lights as decoration for trees, houses and even churches. Normally a church here already looks funny with the red neon cross on top but now they cover everything with lights. Probably those playing a melody like Ho Ho HOOOO merry X-mass. Yesterday I saw the lights at the Hyatt hotel, very beautifull because all the trees were decorated in a sofisticated way.
If we have some time we will make a picture and publish it on this site.

Today we also published the travel story of our first visitors, Erik and Jellie. So far only in Dutch but we will try to translate it. Don’t expect too much, even our weekstories are more like month stories so it can take some time before it is finished. To compensate for all these delays we also published the first story of our friends who live in North-Korea, PjongJang. They wrote a story in English as well so enjoy it, Kees and Silke, thanks, we are looking forward to read more from you. The first impression after reading it, cold if you go to a restaurant but also an adventure.

See you next week,

Jitze, Christina and Yde