Party-crashing the G20 Summit

We were trying to get the president of Indonesia to come on our show, "Heart to Heart." Well, to be more exact, we were looking for ways to roll-over and bark and see if we could get 30 minutes of his time whenever we could, wherever we could. The embassy took forever to get back to us so meanwhile we applied for the press pass just in case we could show up with our cameras to the G20 Summit. Well, he ended up coming on the 2nd day of the summit and didn't have time to meet with us. This post would have been much more interesting and glamorous if I said I sat with the president of Indonesia, sipped tea and talked about the recent natural disaster he had to deal with and the state of Indonesia as a newly emerging market. But it was not to be.

But on the up side, we had the press pass so some of my co-workers and I went to the G20 Seoul Summit on the second day anyway (just to remind ourselves how important we are).



We first registered and got our badges...



...and went to the media center. Because there were thousands of reporters from all around the world, only a few were allowed in the actual room where the meetings were held. Most of them were placed in the media center and watched the meetings from the big screens.



I tried to get online to work on the post-production writing (subtitles, names, bio that goes into the program) of the episode of Dena Merriam, the founder of Global Peace Initiative of Women who came to Korea to attend the World Religious Leaders Forum that was being held in parallel to the G20 Summit. It was being aired that night so I was frantically trying to finish.




We walked around trying to look cool, calm and collected.





We posed for pictures...



...and had a fabulous buffet of lunch.



It was really great to feel the vibrancy of the reporters. I just wanted to sit there all day but we had to go back to work so we posed for one last time.



The head-spinning speed of Korea's economic growth is lauded as the "miracle of the century." When Korea was nothing but a waste land of war, its gross domestic product was less than $20. Sixty years later, its gross domestic product is approaching 1 trillion dollars making Korea the 15th largest economy in the world. It's really mind-boggling to think about it.