Collin Condray’s Blog

Yesterday, Kathleen and I got to meet Sophia’s foster family, Mrs. Lee and Mr. Choi. We had a wonderful time catching up in spite of the language barrier. They took us to one of their big shopping centers to buy gifts for Sophia. We founds lots of dolls for Sophia but no dolls that looked like a little Korean girl. They bought Sophia many Korean books, stickers, and magnetic Korean characters (which Mommy and Daddy will probably use as well).

After our morning meeting with Sophia’s foster parents, we met the Drs. Kim who run the adoption agency. They gave us a short history of modern Korea and updated us about all the work their agency was doing. Afterwards, we had lunch with some of the other families who are adopting children and had a good time finding out who they were adoptiong, where they were from, and what they did.

Later they took us back to their home and they shared a snack with us. We looked a pictures of Sophia and told them about how Sophia had grown as much as our poor Korean allowed. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get this video of Sophia up in time for them to see it:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/1276973[/vimeo]

Afterward, we headed to dinner at a very nice hotel and what a dinner it was! There were at least 8 courses and each one of them was delicious. We of course took pictures and I joked to Kathleen that Peter will have probably figured out how to cook each of the courses by the time we get back.

Tomorrow, we see Liam again and meet one of our old Korean teachers.

I’ve finally uploaded all the photos that we took in Korea and of Sophia after returning home. There are in the Seoul 2006 directory in the gallery.

While uploading the files, I accidentally deleted the comments that I included on some of the images. Instead of trying to recreate them, let me summarize our itinerary while in Korea:

• July 12-Leave for Korea
• July 13-Arrive in Korea
• July 14-Meet Sophia, the foster family, and the Drs. Kim
• July 15-Go to the market and visit the Chongdong Theater
• July 16-DMZ visit including a visit to the 3rd tunnel that North Korean infiltrators dug.
• July 17-Shopping for a hanbok for Sophia.
• July 18-More sightseeing and an evening with Sophia’s foster family
• July 19-Visit Deoksugung palace in the morning and the farewell prayer.
• July 20-Sophia comes home!

I’ve added a bunch of comments to the DMZ photos. I’ll try to add comments to the other photos that I’ve got when I have time. Enjoy!

We got to meet Sophia this morning! She was completely adorable in her cute little pink bow. I didn’t get any pictures of Kathleen with her but I did take about 20 minutes of video. I had some technical difficulties with getting the still photos up. Hopefully, I can also figure out how to get the video up as well soon.

The people with her are her foster parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lee. They’re a great couple who’ve spoiled Sophia rotten, for which I am thankful. Sophia was pretty well behaved. She only cried out once or twice but stopped pretty quickly once you gave her her rattle. She does like to kick and drool. Rigth now its more of the former and less of the latter but something tells me that’s not going to stay that way for long.

Then we met with Dr. Kim and Dr. Kim, a father and son team that founded the adoption society where we’re adopting Sophia from. They’ve placed 46,000 kids in the 40-odd years they’ve been in operation.

We haven’t done much else yet. The flight over was very long and we were exhausted when we got in. We tried to stay up but after we got into the hotel and got cleaned up and all of our stuff squared away, we went to sleep. We’re going to do some poking around and maybe visit the tourist attractions at the DMZ (yeah, that still sounds weird to me). Its supposed to rain a lot so we’ll see what we get done this week.

Ken (here and here) and Pete are pretty much of the same opinion as me on the Orlando trip, it was a great time! I can’t add too much to what they said. I put the pictures that I took in the gallery.

Our itenerary went pretty much like this:

Day 1

Universal Studios

Islands Of Adventure

Eat

Day 2

Islands Of Adventure

Eat

Day 3

Magic Kingdom

MGM

Eat

Watch Lost (also owned by Disney)

Day 4

Sleep

Shop

Eat

Shop

Eat

Day 5

Animal Kingdom

Epcot

Eat

Watch fireworks

Day 6

Massage Feet

Ken and I are pretty much of the same opinion of the rides. Here are my favorite rides from the various parks in the order which I enjoyed them most:

Universal Studios

1. Revenge of the Mummy
2. Shrek 4D
3. Men In Black: Alien Attack
4. Back to the Future
5. Terminator 2 3D
6. Earthquake: The Big One
7. E.T. Adventure
8. Twister: Ride it Out

Islands of Adventure

1. Dueling Dragons: Fire and Ice
2. Amazing Spider-Man Ride
3. Incredible Hulk Coaster
4. The Cat in the Hat
5. Jurassic Park River Adventure
6. 8th Voyage of Sinbad
7. Storm Force Accelatron
8. Doctor Doom’s Fearfall
9. Poseidon’s Fury

Disney’s Magic Kingdom

1. Space Mountain
2. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
3. Splash Mountain
4. The Hall Of Presidents
5. The Haunted Mansion
6. Peter Pan’s Flight
7. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
8. “it’s a small world”
9. Pirates of the Caribbean
10. The Enchanted Tiki Room

Disney-MGM

1. The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror
2. Muppet Vision 3-D
3. Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith

Animal Encounters

1. Kilimanjaro Safaris
2. Festival of the Lion King
3. The Tree of Life

Epcot

1. Mission: SPACE
2. Soarin’ New
3. Spaceship Earth
4. Morocco Pavilion
5. Japan Pavilion
6. United Kingdom Pavilion
7. U.S.A. Pavilion
8. Germany Pavilion
9. Norway Pavilion
10. Italy Pavilion
11. Mexico Pavilion
12. China Pavilion
13. Canada Pavilion
14. France Pavilion

Several of us went to the Old Spanish Treasure Cave and I took a few pictures. In a nutshell, not intentionally scary.

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the Tulsa Zoo. The zoo was kind of lame but I think we had a good time and the day ended well with dinner at PF Chang’s. Here are some pictures. If you don’t have time to look at them all, the keeper is this one.