Editor's Note: NPR opened a South Korea bureau in March. Correspondent Elise Hu takes a look at the wonder and the wackiness of life and journalism in East Asia.

"After a K-pop-themed sendoff and an unexpected flight delay, my family and I arrived on a freezing night in early March to open NPR's newest bureau, in Seoul, South Korea. News greeted me on my first day — the Internet was just getting set up at the bureau when an activist slashed the face of the U.S. ambassador to Korea, Mark Lippert. Before our bureau assistant and I had even seen one another, she was off to a press conference at the police station."

"Since then, we've covered a summer of MERS, North Korea's various provocations and South Korea's responses, the frenemy relationship between Japan and Korea, weird wedding culture, binge eating broadcasts, the dark side of PSY and I've made half a dozen trips to Japan and back to report from there, as Japan is this bureau's coverage area."