A little story on how Sungsoo and I first started as e-pals...

When friends, colleagues, relatives ask me about how Sungsoo and I started, they will usually end up with an exclamation of disbelief after hearing our story. 

Well, Sungsoo and I started as e-pals (electronic version of penpal) in 2009. During that time, Friendster and Facebook have already started popularizing. However, we chose to use a social platform less conventional called Interpals. 2009 was the year when my dad turned 60. My sis and I decided to treat him for a trip to Korea. Prior signing up for a travel package, I did consider to go free-and-easy. That was Q3 2009 when I started to use Interpals and write to a couple of Korean e-pals for their recommendation for places to visit. Despite writing to a few, it was Sungsoo who was able to communicate well back to me in English. What caught my eyes was a pict of Sungsoo at Makansutra Gluttons Bay near Esplanade, with a table full of Singaporean dishes . 

Sungsoo looked so satisfied with good food laid in front of him.

My first thought was "This Korean has been in Singapore. And he loves Singaporean food. lol" There were a lot of topics which we talked about and Sungsoo was quite humorous. Always never fail to make me smile or laugh when I read his messages. For about a 9 months, I looked forward to every single messages he wrote and I loved it when he promptly replied. The communications grew longer (~1-3 pages) and there was endless topics which we could talk about, including typical topics penpals write about. From everyday life and observations, personal strengths and weaknesses, work, interests, etc... We didn't want to use any form of visual communication. At that time, maybe we felt e-pals are e-pals and there weren't a compelling need to go beyond writing. But eventually, we tried using the Singtel online sms service to send msges. That provided instantaneous replies but the system restricted us to maximum 20 msges a day and we carefully drafted each message so as to fully exploit the free service. Once, Sungsoo decided to call and when I picked up the phone, I was naturally nervous and I giggled a lot. Amazingly we spoke till almost 4am. We started to grow closely and we succumbed to adding each other on Facebook. Finally, on 28 March Singapore time midnight (equivalent to 29 March Korea time early morning), Sungsoo arrived in Singapore Changi Airport. 

Sungsoo was in Korea, Kat was in Singapore