It has been around 25 years since my last visit to Seoul, and, of course, this time around, I saw so many beautiful changes. First off, I didn’t realize it could get extremely cold in this South Korean capital because my previous visits were always during summer or autumn. This time, when I got off the airport terminal, I was met with the freezing minus-15-degree weather.
My Seoul visit this year was in connection with the 33-year-old International Education and Immigration Fair, which was held at the massive and specialized exhibition halls of COEX, Seoul’s major MICE (Meetings, Incentive, Convention, Exhibition) venue. This event provides a unique opportunity for South Koreans to compare and select excellent academic programs offered by top educational institutions all over the world.
This popular annual event showcases a wide range of educational opportunities, including “Study Abroad” programs, language training, internships, and employment. It also offers valuable information on immigration, investment, and employment opportunities for South Koreans looking to establish residence in other countries.
This is the reason why my team and I, from the Philippine Retirement Authority, joined this event. In our list of foreign retirees who have made our country their new home, South Koreans rank second in number because most of them avail of our Special Resident Retirees’ Visa (SRRV) so that they can enroll their children in our schools to learn English.
We put up a big booth in the exhibition venue and entertained a steady stream of visitors who wanted personalized consultations to gain practical and relevant information on our SRRV offering. It was very heartwarming to know what made them prefer to establish residence in the Philippines instead of in our other neighboring countries—they said that our people are very friendly, welcoming, and always smiling and pleasant.
I also had the opportunity to speak at a forum during the same event to promote the Philippines as a retirement haven, which is the mandate of our government agency. I made the attendees realize that availing of our retirement visa and sending their children to our schools also give them easy access to nature’s bounty, a lower cost of living, and many other social opportunities that the Filipino way of life offers.
Of course, no matter how busy my team and I were at the exhibition venue, we still found time to do a quick tour of some important landmarks in Seoul. Gyeongbokgung Palace is the largest of the five royal palaces in the city, left behind by the Chosun Dynasty, which was a very important part of Korean history. The nice thing about the 30-minute drive to the palace was the opportunity to pass by other famous landmarks in Seoul.
The Cheong Wa Dae, popularly known as the Blue House, is a public park that used to be the residence of the President of South Korea and prides itself on elegant diplomatic reception halls. It is located right behind Gyeongbokgung Palace. It is a complex of multiple buildings, bannering the traditional Korean architectural style and covering a total of 250,000 square meters. It was only three years ago when the government decided to move the President’s residence and office to the Ministry of National Defense Building in another part of town, which gave way for the Blue House and its grounds to be fully converted into a public park.
The new Seoul City Hall is an eco-friendly building with a very modern and unique exterior patterned after the eaves of a traditional Korean house. The most popular attraction in the building is the Green Wall, a vertical garden that climbs up its inner wall from the first to the seventh floor. Guinness World Records named it the largest vertical garden in the world. It has more than 70,000 plants of 14 different species. This garden was put up to eliminate contaminants and fine dust while also regulating the building’s temperature and humidity.
We would have wanted to visit the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and the Joint Security Area (JSA) up north because we heard how interesting it is to see the actual war site of the early ’50s, including a chance to speak with a North Korean defector and see how North Koreans live in this modern age. But it would take a whole day to do this tour, so we decided to put it off for another time, probably on our next visit.
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