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훌연 (Hul-yeon) 훈련 (Hun-ryeon)

It’s rare that I title a post with a word I’m not necessarily sure is right, but appropriate in this case.

A couple of Fridays ago, as I was preparing to leave for a conference in Seoul, I noticed that there was a lot of strange activity going on all around me. More fighter jets than usual soaring around; traffic all over the city blocked for some incomprehensible reason. When I asked one security guard what was happening, the incomprehensibly mumbled string of words ended with a couple of repeated statements of what sounded like 훌여 or 훌연… (Update: which turns out to be 훈련 — Gord.)

Then the air raid sirens went off. Now, I know I’ve lived in Korea a long time, but I’ve never seen this before, never heard the sirens go off, so this freaked me out a little. A coworker and I were in a taxi crossing town and when I asked the cab driver what 훌연 훈련 meant, he replied with more explanation I couldn’t for the life of me understand. Moments later, we heard the same word again on the radio, and finally I called Lime.

Turns out 훌연 훈련 means military training exercises or something to that effect. Which was a big relief, because for a few minutes there I was suspecting that the Second Korean War had broken out and nobody’d called me to let me know.

Whew. Must start reading news (and perhaps getting out) more.

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