Korea Bound

Hi everyone! For those of you in a hurry or who don't feel like reading the rest of my "long-winded" email... We made it and life is good! :) For everyone else, here is a recap of all that has happened in the last week.

On Thursday Nov 1st we loaded everything (and everyone) up and flew from Huntsville to Seattle, WA. We had to take my brothers pick-up truck to the airport to get all of our luggage there in one vehicle! The trip went well and both the baby and the dog were perfect! Charli's vet gave us some anxiety medicine for her but we didn't want to use it unless we needed it. She was fine in her little Sherpa bag until we started flying..so we gave her a pill (it said one to two pills every 8 hours)... well an hour later we thought she was dead she was so drugged up! She just chilled out the rest of the flight and then the next 5.5 hour flight from Dulles to Seattle. Once in Seattle we met up with John's sister Rachel and her husband Khasha. They had a perfect little baby boy just over a month ago so we were VERY excited to get to meet little Cyrus and to spend a day visiting with them one last time before heading overseas. It took both of their SUVs to get our luggage moved from the airport to their home! Cyrus and Caden don't look exactly alike, but you can see a common thread there. They were really cute together! Cyrus is so tiny! It's hard to believe Caden was ever that small!

On Saturday we loaded up the SUVs again and headed back to the airport for the final part of the journey. I promise you that we had more space in our seats (and leg room ) in the 5.5 hour out to Seattle than we had on the 11 hour flight to Tokyo. It was VERY tight. If any of you plan to visit us in Korea, we strongly recommend you pay the extra $109 and upgrade to the economy plus seats if they are available the day of your flight. Unfortunately for us, they were booked solid so we couldn't upgrade. But, we made it work. Caden traveled so well! The only little snag was that he didn't get to sleep for more than about an hour and a half at a time and his body was/is used to sleeping for about 5-8 hours straight at night.... so the fact that he only had small naps over the course of about 24 hours made him a little cranky toward the end, but even then he was still so EASY to travel with. We just took turns bouncing him and keeping him asleep. When he did wake up he was so tired he just cried and it broke our hearts.

Once we arrived in Tokyo we had about a 2 hour layover and then boarded the plane to Seoul. That flight was about 2 hours. We were all very tired at this point, especially Caden. Charli on the other hand was waking up because her meds were fading! We gave her another pill and out she went for the rest of the trip. Once in Seoul we had to go through customs and immigration and then take Charli to get her approved and then we loaded up on a bus and made about a two hour journey from the airport to Osan. Caden finally had a good nap. The bus was dark and had a nice steady noise to it. Everyone on it was asleep because it was 11pm local time. We took Charli out of her bag and held her on the bus while Caden slept like a baby!

Once we made it to Osan we had to load up John's car the best we could with all of our things (including Caden and Charli) while I took a taxi from the bus to the gate with the rest of our luggage. At the gate I met another taxi (whose driver spoke no English) that took me to the apt where we met John. I had a very good first impression of our apt! John had made a Welcome Home sign for Caden and I and had presents waiting for us! :)

The apartment is very high tech to me... we have to punch in a security code to get in the apt instead of using a key. And when you drive up there is a security guard and gate you have to go through, plus you have to have a security card to get in the building. There is a security camera/screen system in the apartment that lets you see and talk to the people at the door on the 1st floor and again at your apt door. The floors are heated through water pipes and our toilet has a built in bidet and a heated seat! There are LOTS of windows around the place and lots of little porches that are closed in so you can choose to open them up or not (kind of like sunrooms but smaller). I think we have 4 of those little porches in our house. In the kitchen our fridge is out on one of those porches. This is the only weird/annoying thing we've really encountered. The porch off the kitchen also houses the washer and dryer and another little stove top area where we think the Koreans cook the stinky food. The porches of all other 15 floors of the building have a shared drain in the floor and the smell from all of the fermented cabbage they cook drifts on to our porch. So when we open the door to go out and get something from the fridge we are hit with the stench of that smell. We hope we will get used to it in time. Fortunately it doesn't seem to get in to the house that much. We have to use tranformer boxes on all of the outlets to convert them to accomodate American plugs. That is a little bit of a headache, but we are making it work.

We all have adjusted pretty well so far. We had minimal jet lag, but that may have been because we didn't sleep much at all over the course of about 30 hours. Once we finally got to sleep for the night (at 3am) Caden only slept for 3 hours and then decided we should start our day! His sleeping schedule has been off now for a while. He was sleeping consistent 6 hour stretches at night and occasionally 8 hours (and a few times even 10)... and now he's up every 4 hours. It's been rough because I thought we'd moved past this stage. He likes to keep me on my toes I guess!

We live just off of the army base in an apt complex. There are probably 7 buildings, each 15 stories high full of apt/condos. There are TONS of high rise apts like this here in Korea and we don't even live near a huge city like Seoul. We live about 5-10 minutes from the Air Base. The BX and Commissary there have just about everything we need in terms of items for the house and food. The only food item they don't have that I am a little upset about is chicken. You can't get fresh chicken, only those bags of frozen chicken breasts. I'll adjust though. I suppose I COULD get fresh chicken if I wanted to buy it out on the economy (like in a Korean grocery store, but I prefer to stick with the stuff on post for now b/c I knwo it meets American safety standards). Also, they only sell milk by the 1/2 gallon and it's about $2.40 per half gallon!!! Kind of pricey! Pretty much everything seems more expensive here so far, even on the army/air force base. We do have a lot of options for eating out. On the military bases nearby we have: Chili's, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Charley's, Cpt D's, Burger King, Starbucks, Baskin Robins, Krisy Kreme, Subway, and then other places that aren't franchises like a little diner, another pizza place, and the officer's club, etc... There are places to eat off post too and some of them are "american" like McDonalds, Domino's, Outback, TGIFriday's, and Papa John's pizza!

As for contact info... that isn't quite available yet. We don't have our vonage up and running just yet, but we do have email and Internet!! To help with the time difference, we are about 15 hours ahead of CST (Huntsville, AL). My "trick" for calculating it is to take the local time in HSV, and add three hours to it...then change the time of day. So if it is 5pm in HSV, add three hours to get to 8pm, and then change the time of day from evening to morning and that is what time it is here (8am)! :)

I have been adjusting easliy to living here. Some of the things that I have observed so far are the steering wheels in the cars have a little knob on them so that you can turn them with one hand. Kind of like a door knob. They are apparetnly illegal in America! Also a lot of the Koreans where surgical masks just out and about... I don't know why, maybe they are afraid of germs. Koreans like hotdogs a lot, and they really do like dogs too, but as pets and not so much as food! There are a TON of dog shops around with fancy things for your pets. I know that they do eat certain kinds of dogs...but not the kinds that are pets. Kind of like we eat certain types of birds (dove, quail, turkey), but not the kinds that are pets (like parrots and finches). The roads and highways are pretty easy to navigate. They are set up VERY much like the ones in America. Everything here is metric (the speed limits, the temp on the stove, the temp for the house, etc...). That is an adjustment. The Koreans are used to the Americans being here. They are generally very friendly and try to communicate with you whether they can speak any English or not! The language barrier can be a bit of a problem at times so we purchased a little dictionary to keep with us and we are going to try to learn some of the language while we live here. By the time we leave Caden will probably be interpreting things for us!! Ha, ha!!

Well, I had better run! Caden is napping and I need to be getting ready! We are going to go try out a Korean/American church (Mission Baptist) this morning! I hope this email finds you all doing well! We will be in touch again soon! Please check out our website because I finally added pictures of our trip to Korea and our first few days here!!! I think the most interesting pictures are of the movers moving in the "rental" furniture we got from the Army. We live on the 10th floor and they use the elevator/crane things to send the furniture up the side of the building and in through the window!! At one point the man climbed our of our window on to the platform of the elevator/crane thing and it made us so nervous he would fall!!!