Ken Jennings Pays Sentimental Visit to His Childhood Home

We’re tearing up! Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings made a special visit to his childhood home in Seoul, South Korea.

“Hello from Seoul. I walked out of a museum this morning and realized I was just a short walk from the neighborhood where I grew up,” he wrote on Instagram on October 9. In the post, Jennings took a photo of himself in front of a hillside park.

Kennings was born just outside of Seattle, Washington, but grew up overseas, mostly in Asia, according to his website’s bio. Jennings spent 15 years in Korea and Singapore with his family, due to his father working as an attorney there. On the Armed Forces Network, which was one of the few channels he got while living there, Jennings spent most of his time after school watching Jeopardy!.

“This hillside park is basically the view from my high school bedroom. I put R.E.M. on my AirPods and pretended it was a Walkman,” the game show host continued.

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“It took me a few tries to find the actual house. I hadn’t been there in almost 35 years, but it looks exactly the same, except now there’s air conditioning.” Jennings then shared a photo of the outside of the house, which was a two-story building with Korean writing on the front.

“I am now a full decade older than my own father was when we lived there. Where does it go?” Jennings ended.

He also shared more photos from his trip to where he grew up. One photo was of a mall that is also a library. The library featured high walls filled with books. Jennings highlighted books on fishing in his post.

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Even though Jennings crossed an ocean and is far away from where Jeopardy! is filmed in California, he is still haunted by his losing response. “I cross an ocean, and still it tasks me,” he captioned a post on October 10. In the photo, Jennings made a frowning face while standing next to a sign for H&R Block.

The clue during his 75th game was in the “Business & Industry” category. It read, “Most of this firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year.” Jennings answered “What is FedEx?” but the correct response was H&R Block. The incorrect answer ended his winning streak.

In his other posts, Jennings said that Korea is “practically a different city,” but one thing that remained the same was the diamond pattern on the sidewalk. He went on to share other photos from his childhood home.