Media on Amazing Race Event

During the conference I participated in an event they named "Amazing Race- Adoptees Loose in Seoul", only adoptees that had never visited Seoul before was allowed to participate. There were eight groups of four people. They split us up by birthday months and then arranged us until it worked out to have four on a team. The team I was on had a lady from Seattle, a lady from Minnesota, and a young Danish boy about 18 years old. Since I live in California that's typically where I said I was "from". It got too tiring to always say "I'm from Seattle but now I live in California", then you have to explain why and I usually was talking to someone that English was not their first language.  Because the Amazing Race event was brand new for IKAA there were local news crews and journalists that wanted to shadow groups while they ran around Seoul. One group had the news crews and my group had a journalist. The journalists article was on the IKAA conference and the events we participated in like the Amazing Race. If you're interested here is a link to her article:

http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/Features/2010/08/06/13/0801000000AEN20100806000100315F.HTML

My team had very nice people in it, but that was about as much as I could say. We were very diverse but did not have the tools or experience to do well in our missions. None of us knew any Korean, the only words were knew at the time was "hello" and "thank you", so it certainly did not help when we were asking for directions. The rules during the game included we could not talk to the news crew for help, we could not use cell phones, and we had to stick together and return together at the hotel at 3pm. The goal was to complete as many missions as possible and accumulate as many points as possible.

We completed three missions. It seemed like everything that could have gone wrong did. The eldest lady in our group had a physical disability so she couldn't walk very effeciently and definitely could not run, so with her and having a journalist interviewing us the whole time it was very hard to communicate and be quick with our missions. Our first mission was to go to a specific subway stop, find an E-mart (grocery store in Korea) buy 'Kim", come back out to the volunteers who would witness two people eating it then they would give us our next mission.

We were on our 2nd mission when we practically all gave up. The weather made it so hard to function, the sun beat down on us, it felt like it was 100 degrees out. On top of that we all started to run out of steam, they didn't allow us time to eat lunch (and I hadn't had breakfast), so we all were dragging an hour into the race. Our goal was to find the oldest palace in the Chosan dynasty at the Palace Museum and take a picture with the palace guards at the entrance. We ended up spending 1.5 hours at the wrong museum even though we had asked two different types of people (one being a tourist information desk). Literally as we were walking/jogging up to the palace steps, the guards walked away to take a 15 minute break! You'll notice in the picture there are no guards. We had to wait until they came back for us to complete the mission. It was very trying on our patience. We wanted to get out of the sun and start our next mission b/c we were running out of time.

Our third mission, luckily was on our way back to the hotel. We took the subway to Anguk station, next to Insa-dong, known for its art and crafts. We had to walk along the street to find the volunteers who would then tell us our mission. Finding them in along popular shopping street wasn't as easy as you might think. Once we did, we were told to walk to a street vendor, buy this round flat, amber colored object, which we were told was a "Korean candy". We had to eat around the edges until the heart shape was free. The candy tasted like burnt marshmallows. It did not taste good.

After that we ran out of time. We had half an hour to walk back to the hotel, it took two of us that long and about 45 minutes for our other team mates, which is unfortunate b/c we weren't considered done until all of us arrived. I think all four of us were just glad to be done with the race. We had fun getting to know each other and learning how to get around Seoul.

So check!, amazing race experience is off my list. Thanks IKAA.