Saturday, April 14

Today was another change day.  We'll be moving now to Yesan City, which is an hournor so east of Seosan, the first city we visited.

After bidding our third set of host families a fond farewell, hoping to see them again at the District Conference, we drove to a ceremony honoring the famous ancestors from Yesan region.  The hour-long ceremony is a Korean tradition - one day each year they honor famous ancestors.  Local elders and officials wear traditional clothes, visit the spirits of ancestors, light candles, bow etc.

We ate lunch at the site with our new Rotary group, then drove around the reservoir that serves the Yesan area.  We visited Daeheung-myong, a city deemed to be the sixth slowest city in Korea, meaning that their way of live moves very slowly.  They are quite proud of the fact.

From Daeheung, we visited a traditional artist/craftsman who lived nearby.  We had tea with him, then engraved traditional wooden cups he gave us with our names in Korean.  Very cool!

We then drove to the condo complex where all of our home stay families live.  We moved in, relaxed a while, and drove to a restaurant for our traditional Korean dinner.  After dinner, we stopped by a night-time festival leading up to tomorrow's Cherry Blossom Marathon.  We were amused by the irony that one of our fellow team members - Kirk from Ohio, who supplements his professional photography work with bicycle mechanics work - one the big raffle prize...a bicycle!  We walked home to our homestays to retire.