For the next two and a half weeks, the Cardinal Singers are touring Korea, and I’m thrilled to be documenting our trip on my blog again this summer! While I’ve had some long flights before, our traveling on this trip was the longest, most exhausting experience I’ve had. After arriving at the Louisville airport at 3:45am, we flew to Dallas, then had a fifteen hour flight from Dallas to Incheon (near Seoul), Korea. I didn’t sleep nearly as much as I had planned to, and towards the end of the flight, I felt that I was in a timeless, liminal space from exhaustion. Nevertheless, the joy of landing in Korea restored me enough to navigate customs. The Cardinal Singers’ traveling party totals about 40 members, and thankfully, our travels all went off without a hitch!
After exiting the airport, we boarded a charter bus to head to our hotel in Seoul. The beauty of the Seoul area cannot be overstated. The greater metropolitan area sits right on the western coast where the Han River empties into the Yellow Sea, and our bus ride views were incredibly scenic. As we entered Seoul proper, I was impressed by how intentionally green-space is incorporated into urban design here! Trees line most of the city streets, several buildings have plazas with grass and gardens, and for such a high-tech metropolis, Seoul feels much less polluted than I was anticipating. There are mountain ranges adorning the horizon in multiple directions, and you would be hard pressed to find any trash on the streets despite there being almost no public trash cans (which says something about collective societal responsibility in Korea in contrast with America).
Once we arrived at our hotel, we dropped our luggage off and headed to a nearby Korean BBQ restaurant for dinner. I’d never had Korean BBQ before, but it was delicious! Part of this might’ve been how hungry and exhausted I was from the travel, but I thought it was one of the best meals I’d had in a while. At each table, there were small circular grill spaces that employees put charcoal into. We ordered several different meat types then got to cook them ourselves on the table grills. Even beyond the language barrier, the biggest adjustment for me thus far has been chopsticks but I’m managing! With some coaching from one of our Korean graduate students named Jeena, I was able to advance to what I’d call a mediocre level of chopstick skills! Three of our graduate choral conducting students and one of our professors are from Korea, and seeing their excitement and joy in helping us experience their home country is one of my favorite parts of being here. After dinner, we called it a night, and I had one of my best nights of sleep in quite some time.
The sun rises and sets earlier than I expected in Korea, and thanks to some light filtering through the window, I woke up around 5:15 despite not planning to get up that early. I laid in bed a while longer before making instant coffee after getting ready, and then my roommate and I headed to breakfast around 7:00. The breakfast is complimentary with our hotel stay, and it was an impressive buffet with lots of options and gorgeous mountain views out the window! My roommate Jackson Scott is also an adept photographer, and I’ll be using some of his photos in the blog (I’ll try my best to include captions under his photos when I use them).
Following some free time in the morning today, we traveled by subway to the Presbyterian Theological University and Seminary (PUTS is a popular abbreviation) for an afternoon of a rehearsals and our first concert with their university choir! Before we began singing, we were treated to lunch in their cafeteria and a tour of the campus. The buildings at PUTS are laid out over a steep hillside, and a few of us joked about feeling like we were on the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers’ campus during our tour! Despite a complex history interrupted temporarily by both Japanese occupation and the Korean War, the seminary has endured as a leading center of religious scholarship in Seoul since its founding in 1907 by an American PCUSA missionary named Samuel Austin Moffett. As you can see in the photos below, their campus was gorgeous, and a particular highlight was seeing both their chapel and a nearby art installation of a cross made out of stained glass squares.
Our concert this evening was a joint concert in the PUTS library with their choir, and they were a lovely choir and wonderful hosts! The concert was split up into 4 segments, with us singing two ten minute sets split by a set by PUTS’ choir before a closing set of two combined pieces the choirs sang together. Several UofL choral alumni and families of current UofL graduate students were in attendance, and while it was far from our longest concert on the trip or our biggest venue, it was incredibly fulfilling. Many a cliché has been written about the transformative, uniting power of music, but after singing an arrangement of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” with them at the close of the concert, I couldn’t help but be moved to chills over the experience of singing a gospel hymn with a choir thousands of miles from America. Spiritual and gospel arrangements are always some of our most popular pieces in international tours, and I’d like to think that we represent not just the beauty of the music but also a broader mission of restorative justice in preserving the meaning and dignity of the music and sharing it across the world.
After the concert we headed back to our hotel and changed clothes before enjoying a wonderful dinner at a nearby chicken, veggies, and noodles place that two of our graduate students recommended. While we didn’t cook our own meat at this one, the food was served in one big pot in the center of the table for us to share from. At both Korean restaurants we’ve dined in so far, I’ve noticed and appreciated the communal nature of the food presentation, but I’ve also simply appreciated how delicious it is! Tomorrow, we have a free day to be tourists, so I’m looking forward to getting another early start and exploring more of the city. Thank you for reading, and keep checking in for updates on our trip!
Leave a Reply