U.S. Embassy

We were scheduled to interview the ambassador Thursday morning, but due to a language barrier with our driver, we were dropped off in a different part of town near an army base instead of the Embassy. Our professor tried to talk to the guards at the front gate, but they did not understand English very well. After all the guards at the front gate gathered around, trying to translate to one another what we were saying, they told us that we were not near the Embassy. Our group stood in the middle of the street, looking lost and foreign. This was definitely one of those moments we knew we would later look back on and laugh, but, at the time, it was too cold to really laugh about it. For all we knew was we were dropped off somewhere in the middle of Seoul.

Luckily, we found a store with heat and waited there as our professor went on a search for an Embassy or someone who spoke English. It turns out that the embassy was on the other side (more specifically, the WAY other side) of this army base. My professor came back, told our team to bundle up and led us to the correct building.

Fifteen minutes later, we made it! However, because we were lost, we did not get to spend a lot of time interviewing. Our time at the embassy still went well, though. Instead, we met with one of the Embassy's spokesmen and another higher-up deputy. The spokesman opened up the discussion with an uneasy intro.

"How are you guys liking Seoul, Korea? Did you know that more than 6,000 artillery weapons can fire any minute . . . We are in distance."

Comforting, right? He went on to share the history between N. Korea, S.Korea and the United States, and  explained how the Embassy was supporting ex-patriots and working to keep everyone calm. While N. Korea has typically created some type of attack near or on U.S. holidays, the attack on  Nov. 23 was different, according to the Embassy. They said the recent attack on S. Korean soil led to a change in S. Korean attitudes - a hardening in attitudes. 

The deputy, in my opinion, gave a great description of Korea, focusing on the idea of propaganda.

". . . Like a neighbor who shows up with hand guns and bazuccas. You're not going to ask [your neighbor] who their son is and how he is doing. You're going to ask them, 'what are you doing with those?"

We followed up with some questions about reunification in the future. According to the embassy, most Koreans want to see peace and reunification, but not while they're still alive. It would take a lot of work to not only repair a broken and corrupt society but to restructure many old buildings in Korea. They have predicted that reunification would set the S. Korean economy 20 years back.

I appreciated that we learned a lot of other interesting Korean facts in this meeting, from education to foreign services. It was a great reminder to be grateful for freedom and a neat experience to see the U.S. at work in a country other than our own.