Way back in 1999, before we were dating or even very good friends N and I went on a study abroad trip to Korea with our professor Mark Peterson...and a Korean film crew followed us around and made a documentary!
I have a VHS tape of it somewhere, but our professor just uploaded the whole thing to Youtube so N and I just watched it again for the first time in over a decade.
I'm not in the documentary that much, the narrative focuses on my friend Carol who was on the trip with her fiancé Doug (romance!) and on an adopted Korean-American girl, Mischa, who got appendicitis and had to have emergency surgery (drama!) Ironically, the crew actually missed the whole appendicitis incident so they later took Mischa back to the hospital and had her reenact lying listlessly in bed wearing a gown so they could get some footage (!)
The scenes I'm in include
19:15 - I am separated from the group and get lost at a Buddhist temple on Buddha's birthday and stumble over "rocks and stuff"
21:15 - Me praying at a Buddhist temple
27:30 - We take a traditional music class (this was one of my favorite parts of the trip)
37:15 - I summarize my feelings about the trip and then N talks for a bit. We're sitting next to each other so that must have been filmed during the few weeks of the trip when I started to get an hunch that this N guy might be kind of awesome :)
I'm so thankful that this documentary exists. I am fascinated to see how very young we all were--I was only 18 at the time and in the process of figuring out who I wanted to be and what I wanted out of life. Our trip changed my life: it helped me figure those things out and connect more with my Korean heritage.
And it also introduced me to the charms of a certain wonderful guy. :)