Saturday, after work, I took the subway into the Myeongdong neighborhood in Seoul. My former coworker Razel (a naturalized Korean of Philippine origin) had invited me to a Philippine-Korean community Christmas event. It was quite interesting, from a cultural perspective. A well-integrated immigrant community, with diverse admixtures of Koreans and other foreigners, too. And a kind of mirror image of a US-style immigrant community: in the US, the adults speak whatever language they brought from their country-of-origin, and all the kids speak English; here, all the adults were speaking English (the Philippine lingua franca, after all) and Tagalog, while the kids were all speaking Korean.
There were activities, games for kids, some karaoke and Christmas carol singing (I even participated – go figure). There was an interesting "secret Santa" gift exchange, which I didn't participate because I was too disorganized to have brought a gift for the pool.
Although I never studied it, I find Tagalog weirdly "on the edge of understandable" because of its substantial English and Spanish borrowings in terms of vocabulary.
[daily log: walking, 7km]