False Alarms

Today we woke up to the fire alarm blasting in our hotel room.  What a great way to start the morning.  We grabbed the kids out of bed and hurried to the nearest stairwell -- which was completely black.  For some reasons the emergency lights in the stairwells weren't working.  We made our way down 6 flights of stairs, most of us still in pajamas, only to find out it was a false alarm.  Figures.  Oh well, at least we were getting up soon for church anyway.

Church.  We've been looking forward to attending church here in Seoul, knowing this would be a good chance to meet new people and make friends.  We spent the past couple of days researching where the building is and the best way to get there.  We decided the subway would be the easiest way, and since we haven't tried taking it yet, were excited about yet another new adventure.  I was blown away by Seoul's subway.  I've been on quite a few trains in my life -- many in major cities across the US and Europe.  I have never seen one as clean and hi-tech as this one.  It should be a tourist attraction in and of itself.  Here we are going down into the subway station.  I think we had to take three different escalators to get to the train platforms.  I'm not sure how far underground we were, but it felt very far.

Emma enjoyed reading the map and trying to figure out where we were going.  From this picture you can see how clean the subway station floors are.  I would NEVER let Emma do this in DCs metro.  

Here we are waiting for our train to come.  You can see how hi-tech the station is with its flat screen TVs in the background.  Everything here is digital.  They had these same TVs in the subway cars themselves.  It made finding your stop very simple.  

My favorite part of riding the subway, though, was the sweet grandmas on the train.  They loved our children.  We had to transfer a couple of times, and each train we got on, they would try to talk to us and offer us seats.  I sat next to two elderly ladies on one of the trains that tried to talk to me in Korean for at least 10 minutes.  Between our nods, smiles, and crazy sign language, I figured out they were asking us where we were from and how old the kids were, but beyond that, I have no idea what they were saying.  They didn't mind though.  They just kept talking, and I just kept smiling.  I loved them!  

We finally made it to the church.  It's a beautiful three story building with a parking garage beneath. 

Here's the church sign written in Hangul.  Luckily for us, there's an English speaking congregation.  

The interesting thing about the church is it is this beautiful building, but it's in a pretty run down part of town.  I'm sure the church increased a lot of the property value in this area.  

It took us a little over an hour to get to church, after subway transfers and walking, only to find out there wasn't church today.  Our second false alarm.  They were re-broadcasting General Conference.  The missionaries were there with maybe three people.  Oh well.  It was a fun outing and now we know how to get to the church next Sunday (which we double checked, and yes, there is church next week).