Interesting weekend, especially Saturday night. At Vivian's invitation and encouragement, I went out with a group of people she gathered, and met, among others, a rather young woman (22) from Hong Kong, her seemingly charming but actually annoying and obnoxious Canadian boyfriend (28), and two Korean adoptees from Denmark. (In my diary entry that night, I wrote, "I met two Korean Danishes. Er, Korean Danes?")

The evening wended its way from a restaurant in Insadong, the old quarter of Seoul, to college mecca Shinchon, where we first went to a basement expat bar where the walls were covered with writing and a fight broke out between patrons, at which point we moved over to an Enchanted Forest of a bar called the Water Bar because of the clear pipes with water running through them. At first hesitant, I edged my way toward asking the Danes about growing up in Denmark as a Korean. They both said they had great families, and didn't feel or experience racism, but that they had friends who had less empathetic families, or families who considered themselves as having done their Christian duty by adopting.

According to David (age 30), there are about 8,000 Korean adoptees in Denmark, where adoption of Korean orphans goes back to about the 1970s and continues to the present day. Unmarried women who get pregnant are still hustled off to private houses, where they have the baby and give it up.

David and Yoon (just about to enter college in Denmark) both are interested in finding their birth parents. Yoon said she was particularly interested in seeing if she had any siblings. Family medical history is also useful to know. David, who's been here for nearly a year and doesn't have any plans to leave soon (though he thinks he'll eventually go back to Denmark), hasn't started looking for his parents yet, but plans to.

Fascinating stuff. But you know, I'm a big dork, and as such, I got a huge kick out of watching two ethnic Koreans jabber at each other in Danish. Cool.