It's A Small World After All!

Whew... It has been a crazy week. This week is Chuseok (추석) in Korea. Chuseok is basically like Korean Thanksgiving. From what I understand (which is very little at this point) it is a harvest festival and people also go to their ancestral towns to be with family. It seems like there is also an element of remembering dead ancestors, but I haven't figured out all of the ins and outs of that yet. Things have been crazy at school leading up to Chuseok. We have the next three days off, then classes again on Friday. There are lots of things that I'll hopefully be able to catch up on in the next few days, but I'll start with two stories, both of which happened in the last 24 hours, that prove how incredibly small the world is. 


When I went to the Chicago consulate to interview for my Korean visa, I met a girl named Renee. She was going to be living and working in the same area of Seoul as I was. She and I talked for a bit, but in the midst of the nerves and busyness of getting the visa paperwork done, we never got around to exchanging contact information. A few days later, when I went back to Chicago to pick up my visa, Renee was also there and she gave me her contact information. I stuck the card in my purse, but somewhere along the way I thought I had lost it. I found it buried in my purse lining when I got to Korea though. We emailed back and forth a bit, and yesterday we got together to eat pizza and watch a movie.


When I met Renee at the subway station, she told me that she had a co-worker who had moved out of an apartment that was somewhere near my subway station. Her co-worker had a bunch of furniture that she was trying to get rid of. Renee thought she could recognize the building if she saw it, and she had the key code to go into the apartment. Her co-worker said she could take whatever she wanted. Renee lives a few subway stops away, so she told me that if there was anything useful, I was welcome to have it.


We ordered our pizza and walked back to my apartment building. Which, incidentally, turned out to be the same building Renee's co-worker used to live in. I now have a couch, bookshelf, footstool and table that we carried down the elevator. I was pretty excited!


The second thing is almost as crazy. My first Sunday here, I went to a church I had found online. The pastor asked me where I was from, and then introduced me to a couple who were from Indiana. Lance and Sarah and I got along well, and we have been making plans to start a small group Bible study. They live really close to me too. A few weeks ago, my sister Beka asked for my contact info. She said that her boyfriend was good friends with some people who had just moved to Seoul to teach. I sent her my contact info.


Tonight, I got an email from Lance. He informed me that I had a younger sister named Beka who was dating a boy named Aaron who was his good friend from his home church in Indiana. It was a little freaky ;-)


All in all, the world is incredibly tiny. This is a really comforting thing for this small-town girl living in a city with a metro-area population of 22.5 million people. I just might survive Seoul!