Back to South Korea to visit the Horton/Kang family!

After spending two fun nights in Macau (the Las Vegas of Asia!) and taking a ferry over to explore Hong Kong for a few days - which you can read about in my two previous posts – we flew onto Seoul in South Korea.

This is our fifth visit to South Korea where our son, James, lives with our daughter in law, Sujeong, and our grandson, Aaron.

Our sweet grandson, Aaron Horton

Being based in Asia over the past couple of years (Malaysia and Thailand mostly) has been great for us as it has been strategically conducive to not missing out too much on our young grandson growing from a baby into a toddler.

During the past few trips, we have also managed not to get lost taking the high-speed KTX train from Seoul to Daegu. We have actually mastered the subway around the city - and we have even managed to do some unchaperoned shopping at the mall or the market too – utilising a few handy Korean phrases!

During this visit, we would get to meet the new addition to our family – Zoey the Beagle – who is an adorable puppy and new best friend for our grandson.

In early to mid-September, the weather is still warm (South Korea has very hot summers and incredibly cold winters) so we were able to take our grandson out to the play park and for lots of walks and even for a day out to Daegu Theme Park - which was great fun - so please excuse proud Jamma and Papa overload! (Aaron's names for us.)

Also, during this visit, we were able to discuss the BIG WEDDING PLANS for April 2018. Our son and his wife have been legally married for a few years but they have never actually had a traditional Korean wedding party for family and friends to attend. So, in April 2018, they will be getting married again with friends and family. The style of the wedding will be traditional, with Korean wedding clothes for the bridal party (white traditional gown and groom in a suit) and also a change into Korean traditional 'hanbok' for the reception and dinner.

It’s also a tradition in South Korea to have the formal wedding photos done in a photographic studio well ahead of the wedding date - and so these few I’m showing you have been recently taken – and don’t they look romantic!

While we were in Korea this time, I went with Sujeong and her mum and her sister to get measured for my traditional Korean ‘mother of the groom hanbok’ – handmade and in colours I have chosen for myself – complete with shoes and handbag to match. The photo on the bottom left shows the fabric I've chosen - and top right are my shoes! The middle photo shows Sujeong trying on a hanbok in the shop.

I’ll feel so privileged to be wearing this traditional outfit at our son’s wedding ceremony alongside Sujeong’s mother, who will be wearing her ‘mother of the bride hanbok’ for the ceremony when we next visit in April 2018.

My daughter-in-law's family - the Kang family - are so lovely and generous and hospitable and we enjoy going out for some meals together - Korean Barbeque food is amazing! On every visit, they have always managed to find somewhere interesting and cultural to take us. On this occasion, to appreciate the leaves starting to turn colour, we went on the Palgongsan Mountain Cable Car. The views over the forest were spectacular. There are two different cable car venues in Daegu – the other is the Aspen Cable Car – which we did on a previous visit and for the high panoramic views of Daegu it is an absolute must see.

We stopped off for lunch at a countryside restaurant. The Kang family had pre-booked this (we had no idea) and we had a private room for us all to enjoy a fabulous and huge traditional meal (with lots of kimchi of course!) with us all sitting on cushions at a low table.

Heading back into Daegu, on the outskirts of the city, we stopped off to walk through a beautiful flower field in the warm sunshine. It made for a fabulous and colourful photo opportunity!

We had a wonderful visit and we are now looking forward to April 2018!

Next on the blog – an unexpected twist to our travel adventures!

After applying online for a housesitting assignment for the winter months in South West France - from October 2017 to March 2018 - we got it! This meant flying from Seoul via Kuala Lumpur and via London to Bordeaux France to be the guardians of a 500-year-old French country chateau close to the city of Perigueux in exchange for looking after the house and the resident pussy-cat while the homeowners were back in the UK. 

What a fantastic opportunity and a wonderful place to live!

Our beautiful new home for the winter in SW France

The housesitting assignment is perfect in many ways because we really needed somewhere to settle down for a while as I had just signed a publishing contract with Harper Impulse – the romance imprint of Harper Collins publishers UK - for a book I had yet to write scheduled to be published Summer of 2018.

I needed to be somewhere to focus on my writing so that I could meet my tight end of January 2018 deadline. The new novel is to be called The Backpacking Housewife – a novel based on my own travel experiences.

You can read my author acquisition announcement on the Harper Impulse website HERE.

My husband, Trav, was also very happy about living in France for a while too because he knew he would be kept busy while I was writing. He would be responsible for maintaining the beautiful gardens and the swimming pool and any issues with the rented gites in the grounds of our château home over the wintertime.

So please join me here on the blog next time – when I’ll be in France!

Love, Janice

Reconnecting with family and friends in the UK

Sadly, in the last week of April 2017, after Trav and I had been living and working in Bucharest Romania for a month, we heard news from family in the UK that Trav’s dad had become gravely ill. It had been less than three months since the death of his mum.

Trav immediately returned to the UK to be with his dad during his last days.

Just a few days later, after his dad had passed away peacefully, Trav returned to Bucharest and together we packed our bags to leave Bucharest and travel back to the UK to be with family and to prepare for the funeral.

First, we flew into Scotland to meet with our son Iain who lives in Glasgow and our son Ben who lives in Edinburgh.

The silver lining in the dark cloud of our bereavement was that for the second time this year, and in a short space of just three months, we would get to spend more time with our sons, with my own mum, and our much-missed family in the UK.

Blue skies over Glasgow

Our son Iain and his lovely girlfriend Alice

During our few days in Scotland, I also took the opportunity to attend a Romantic Novelist’s Association lunch in Edinburgh. It had been several years since I’d met up with my friends in the RNA Scottish Chapter. When I saw on our group Facebook page that a lunch meeting was being arranged for the morning I arrived back, I jumped at the chance to go along. I took the train from Glasgow and it was wonderful to see blues skies over Edinburgh and all my Scottish writer friends again face to face.

Edinburgh Castle in the sunshine

Blue skies over Princes Street Edinburgh

With Rosemary Gemmell in Edinburgh

With Eileen Ramsay - chair of the Romantic Novelist's Association 

It was wonderful to catch up with my Scottish writer friends in Edinburgh

Also, while we were in Edinburgh, we got together with our son Ben and his lovely girlfriend Hayley and all her family.

Trav and I with Hayley and Ben at the bowling club

Hayley is a ladies champion bowls player and there was a match being played that day at the local bowling club. It was a fun day and a welcome chance to spend quality time with Ben and Hayley especially when in just a few day’s time – the day after his grandad’s funeral – they were looking forward to their three-week holiday in Orlando Florida.

Hayley in action

Hayley's mum Andrea and Graham

Fun at the bowling club with Ben and Hayley and her family

Trav and I travelled down to England by train and were once again so grateful to our best friend Dina, who had generously offered to share her home with us again while we were in the UK.

Hanging out with my best friend Dina

In the days before the funeral, we managed to have some fun times with Dina in our old home town of Widnes and we also got to spend a great day out in Liverpool - exploring all the tourist sites like the Albert Dock and the Caven Club.

The day of the funeral was an emotional one for all the Horton family. For Trav and his brothers, Rob and Stuart, to lose both parent’s in such a short time was heart-breaking. As it was for all eight grandchildren to lose their grandparents. Their legacy of course will live on in them all and also in their one great-grandchild, Aaron, who lives in South Korea and whom they sadly had never met.

A short time after the funeral, on a solemn grey and rainy day in May, Jimmy and Dot’s ashes were buried together in the same Runcorn cemetery where their parent’s had been laid to rest. A small and intimate service was held with just their three son’s and wives present. Trav, being the eldest of the brothers, said a few words over his parent’s grave while we all held hands and said our last goodbyes.

For mid-May, initially from Bucharest, I had booked flights to London in order to attend the Romantic Novelist’s Association Summer Party. This writer’s networking event is a great opportunity for writers to get together with publishers and agents and other writing professionals. As I had been out of the country off and on for almost four years, I also saw this event as a great opportunity, not only for me to meet up with my writer friends, but to put my finger back on the pulse of the writing industry and to see what had changed over the past few years.

I had hastily re-organised my travel arrangements and I was very excited to be accompanied to the event and staying with my lovely writer friend Linn B Halton, who lives outside London. Linn and I hadn’t seen each other face to face (if you don’t count Skype) since the Festival of Romance several years before so you can imagine how much we had to talk about!

Ready for the RNA Summer Party -with my lovely friend Linn B Halton

Linn and I travelled to London together by train, had a fabulous lunch in an Italian restaurant in Piccadilly, and then caught up with other Romantic Novelist’s for pre-party drinks. It was so great to see everyone again. Below are a few photos with my lovely writer chums!

With Linn having lunch in London

Pre-party cocktails with lovely writer friends

With Mandy Baggot

With Talli Roland who also writes as Leah Mercer

With lovely Liz Harris

Soon, Trav and I felt ready to move on again. As we don’t have a home of our own in the UK anymore and, as we still have wanderlust to travel, we were keen to take up our nomadic adventures again and there is nothing like losing people to remind us of the fragility of life and how quickly time passes.

Our flight from London to KL via Singapore

Trav and I want to travel the world together while we can, while we still have our health, and before we get too old to do so. Of course, we love and miss our family and friends, but we appreciate they have busy lives too and being close geographically to them is no guarantee we would see them often as we'd like anyway. So I'm so grateful to the times in which we live; when we can keep in touch with our loved ones whenever we like on the internet and, thanks to affordable air travel, no place and no one in the world is much more than 12 hours away from us.

A farewell meal with my family before leaving for SE Asia

So we left the UK to fly back to Asia. We took a flight back to Kuala Lumpur and, while in a taxi to our hotel in KL, we had some wonderful news from Orlando Florida, where our son Ben was on holiday with his girlfriend Hayley. He had proposed and Hayley had became his fiancée.

The newly engaged Ben and Hayley in Orlando Florida

We were thrilled and so excited to see their proposal on video and to see how happy they are together. Our driver must have wondered what was going on when he heard me squealing and tearful on the back seat of his taxi!

After a good night’s sleep in KL, the next morning, we headed straight for the Perhentian Islands off the east coast of peninsula Malaysia. We flew with Air Asia from KLIA2 to Kuta Bharu - a 45 min flight and then took a bus and a boat over the Perhentian Besar (the larger of these islands). It’s a place that has been on our radar for a couple of years now but we have never been in Malaysia during these island’s short season - between May and September – after which all boats stop going there and all accommodations close down.

What is special about the Perhentian Islands you may ask?

Well, for one they are incredibly beautiful - the beaches are white sand beaches and said to be some of the best in the world - and the diving and snorkelling too is said to be amazing. But there is one other very special reason that we headed out to the Perhentians at this time and that is to do with my current Work In Progress. I needed to go to these islands for research purposes.

In my next book, I have a heroine who is establishing a turtle conservation sanctuary on an island– and so for a week I was going to be staying at a turtle conservation center to learn all about sea turtles and turtle hatcheries and baby turtles while Trav went diving.

If I was really lucky, I hoped that on Perhentian Island I would get to see baby turtles hatching and then help to release them to the sea. If I was really really lucky I would get to see a nesting turtle returning to the beach that she had been born on at least thirty years before, to lay her eggs under the light on the moon, before making her way back into the sea.

Please do join me here on the blog next time to find out more about the beautiful Perhentian Islands and to find out exactly how very lucky I was!

Love, Janice xx

Horton-Kang family time in South Korea!

We are back in South Korea and it’s been a little over a year since we were last here visiting our son James, our daughter-in-law Sujeong, our grandson Aaron who is now two years old, and the rest of our Korean family.

Sitting in the springtime sunshine with Aaron outside Daegu library in South Korea

We originally booked this much anticipated trip as a visa run from Thailand - taking advantage of an Air Asia sale earlier in the year - but since then we’d had a big change of plan and now, after our week in South Korea, we were heading back to Europe instead of Thailand.

(You can read about this big change of plan by clicking HERE).

Our son James teaches English in South Korea and he and his family live in a big city called Daegu. Since our last visit they have moved into a new and bigger apartment, so instead of us having to stay in a hotel, this time we could stay in their home. It was wonderful to be able to help with Aaron, who is now two years old, especially at bath time before bed and in the mornings when he was full of energy and wanted to play. His favourite toys are his musical instruments and his play kitchen. He also has a great fondness for his small toy buses in the same way that James used to love his Thomas the Tank Engine toys many years ago.

Our grandson Aaron is now two years old

The weather was mostly dry and sunny for our visit and we had lots of opportunities to take walks out and about in the city and in the park – especially lovely at this time of year when it is cherry blossom season.

We also took several trips to Daegu traditional market – one of my favourite things to do - as the market is very close to the apartment and it is so interesting and colourful and has so many types of fruit and vegetables, fish and meat and yummy spicy kimchi and my very favourite dumplings.

Another highlight of the week was spending time with and having meals out to celebrate being with our Korean family again. Sujeong’s parents and her brother and sister - the Kang family - are so lovely and welcoming and hospitable and it was so great to see them all again.

The week went by so quickly and soon it was time for Trav and I to say an emotional farewell and take the KTX fast train back to the airport. The distance between Daegu and Seoul is about the same distance between Manchester and London in the UK and the train journey takes around two and a half hours.

Our flight back to Malaysia on the 5th April (our son Iain's birthday - who we were thinking of all day too) would take seven-hours. Arriving late in Kuala Lumpur, we would stay overnight in KL before taking a direct fourteen-hour flight to London early the next morning. Then after a night at London Heathrow, we had a three-hour flight to our destination of Bucharest Romania.

A total in the air/flying time of twenty-four hours with two quick stops!

Next time I’ll be chatting about our fabulous time in Bucharest Romania!

Until next time, please do consider signing up for my book news updates. I only ever send out a newsletter when I have writerly news to share, a new book coming out, or special offers and competitions with themed prizes to tell you about. Every new subscriber receives a free copy of my bestselling ebook 'How To Party Online' just for signing up using the form at the top right hand side of this page.

Love, Janice xx