A copy of our Christmas Newsletter from December 2007
Hello Family and Friends!
We hope this letter finds you all doing well as we count down the final days of 2007! Things at the Nichols household are going really well and we are adjusting beautifully to life as a family here in Korea . This time of year I typically write a “year in review” letter to send out. Well, most of you have been on my mailing list for the last year as I’ve made all of our major announcements, but here is a quick recap:
In January of 2007 we packed up and moved from Virginia to Alabama. I moved in with my parents and John left for Korea in Feb when I was 17 weeks pregnant. John worked for the 25th Transportation Battalion in Yongson (Seoul area), Korea for several months before the Battalion was moved down south to Daegu, Korea. In May John made the move to Daegu as well. In July he flew back in to the states and on July 5th we welcomed our precious son, Caden David, in to the world. John returned to Korea at the end of July and I continued to live with my parents in Huntsville. John was offered a command position in the Osan area of Korea. Caden, Charli, and I packed up and shipped our goods to Korea and John flew in to the states to get us in October of 2007…. That pretty much sums up our year!
Since my last email many of you have requested that I keep the stories of life in Korea coming. So, over the past several weeks I’ve been making a little list of observations and events to share with you! This is going to be a long one because I have waited son long to write! I will try to keep the updates shorter, and more frequent in the future! Also, I write a little family blog for us that I will share a link to at the end of the email!
In my last email I told you all about our high-tech apartment and some of my initial observations about Korea . A lot has happened since then. I can’t believe we’ve almost been here 2 months! Shortly after our arrival here, I got my Korean driver’s license. I was a little apprehensive about driving here at first, but now I feel pretty confident about it. Driving here you pretty much can’t do anything wrong and so you don’t ever have to worry about looking stupid! Who cares if you stop for the red light in the middle of the intersection… the important thing is that you actually stopped! As a general rule, you always approach an intersection with caution because a red light doesn’t always stop traffic like it should! In the particular part of town we live in there is a good bit of traffic on the main road to and from post. It is a four lane road (two lanes going each direction) with lots of pedestrians and people on bicycles and scooters. The street is lined with shops and buildings all several stories high, kind of like a busy, city street. This is not always the case, but it is sort of an unspoken rule that you only really drive in the inside (left) lane and the right lane is left open for those people who wish to turn right at the next light because there are no right turn lanes. If you happen to stop in the right lane at a light you will have a bunch of angry Koreans honking their horns behind you, some even jumping the curb and driving over the sidewalk to bypass you and make the turn. I have even been stopped at a red light waiting to turn left (waiting for the left turn arrow/signal) when a man behind me saw that I was going to follow the law and wait for the light, so he pulled up next to me (in the lane to my left which was fortunately fee of opposing traffic at the time) and made the turn. I decided that if he did it, I could too so I followed him through the red light and made the turn! Anything goes here when it comes to driving (as long as it’s not an intersection with a video camera)!!
On November 28th John took command of the 138th Movement Control Team (MCT) at Osan Air Base (about 45 miles south of the DMZ). The MCT is a detachment of the 25th Transportation Battalion that is located in Daegu, S. Korea (3 hours south of Osan). Often John will have to make trips down to the Battalion Headquarters in Daegu. Sometimes it’s just for the day, and other times for the night or even a few days depending on what he has to do there. Caden, Charli and I joined him for a trip to Daegu for the Battalion Christmas party earlier in the month. The funniest part of this trip had to be that our dog, Charli, could not stay in the hotel with us, so we had to put her in a self-serve kennel that was next door to (and part of) the hotel. The hotel was on the Army installation so it was a normal, American hotel…just no pets allowed. Well, the kennel was out of dog rooms/cages so Charli had to stay in the room with the cats! For those of you who know Charli, this was a PEFECT fit for her! She really doesn’t like dogs! The funniest thing was when John would go get her to let her outside to potty, she had to walk through the dog room and she would get up against the wall as far from the cages as possible when she’d walk through there! The cats were right up her alley and she was perfectly content to hang out with them!
Caden is such an easy baby to travel with (I never thought I’d hear myself say those words). Once we got to Daegu we had to leave Caden with a babysitter because the party was not for children. One of the families that live in Daegu has a trusted Ajumma (the respectful term for an older Korean woman) that watches their kids on a regular basis. So we left Caden with her. It was his first babysitter outside of our family. It was hard to give instructions because she spoke VERY little English, but she nodded like she understood what I was saying. Unfortunately, the long road trip had taken its toll on Caden and he was tired! He started crying when we got there and according to the Ajumma he cried for most of the 4 hours we were gone. It broke our hearts! Not the best “first babysitter” experience for any of us! Ajumma said (or signed) that she used a blanket to strap Caden to her back and carry him around the house. It is very common over here to see babies carried like that. It’s kind of like the Korean version of swaddling a baby, but also serves a purpose in keeping the baby warm if you’re outdoors and also frees your arms to move about and do things (or take care of older children). It’s funny to think of our little man being carried around like that!
I’m learning a lot about the Korean culture and babies! They have a lot of baby stores here and it is fun to go inside and see what they have! They use a lot of the same things (brands and all) that we do in the states. In the area we live in I see most women with the babies strapped to their backs rather than in strollers. It’s more practical I suppose. They don’t have any kind of regulation (that I know of) about child safety restraints in vehicles over here. I’ve seen kids standing in taxi cabs, and babies in mother’s laps or strapped to the mother in a Snuggli type carrier. Don’t let that fool you though. The Koreans adore babies here and they won’t let the language barrier get in the way of telling you what they think about your baby either! Oh… so many stories about this particular aspect of the culture! The Koreans think “white babies” are cute, but I’ve heard they think they are generally badly behaved! They especially love blonde-haired babies! One friend of ours said that she puts a hat on her little girls (blonde) head when they are out in public to avoid the attention as much as possible because her 4-year old daughter doesn’t like it. They will come up to you and go on and on (in Korean so you have no idea what they are saying) about blonde hair. And they aren’t afraid to touch either! A similar thing happened with us one day. A group of high school aged girls were on lunch break in the Ville shopping area outside of post. John had Caden strapped in the Snuggli so he could see the world as we walked and shopped. The group of girls approached us and soon we were surrounded by maybe 8 to 10 girls, all oooohing and aaaaahing over Caden and touching him and even pulling out their camera phones to take pictures of him! They LOVE American babies.
Ajumma will let you know if she thinks your baby isn’t warm enough, too. She will rearrange the blankets I have tucked around Caden to cover his head, feet, etc. the way she thinks it should be. It’s funny and makes for funny stories, but it is also quite annoying! One of the first things I learned to say in Korean is “baby sleeping.” I quickly learned that the phrase was not serving its purpose! I learned that phrase so that I could communicate to the Koreans to please be quite the baby is sleeping. It didn’t work that way! Instead when I would say “agee chyanda” (which is my made up way of spelling the phrase that says the baby is sleeping) they would just repeat over and over “agee chyanda, agee chyanda” like they were excited I could say something in Korean! And the people I’ve run in to so far seem to have two volumes of speaking voices: loud and louder! So, I asked Mrs. Chong (who is a Korean national who works for John) how to say “QUIET, the baby is sleeping” (cho yong he chyanda). I haven’t had an opportunity to use it yet!
I was on the phone with Misty (my Sister-in-Law in Ohio ) one day when my doorbell rang (or the door phone). I started talking to the men on the video screen and they spoke NO English whatsoever. They were very persistent about coming in so I finally let them in. It was cute because Misty was a little uneasy about me letting these strangers in to my house! It was the weirdest thing, and even still I have no idea what they were doing, but these two Korean men came in with a bucket of gray paint and a step stool. They walked around to all the doors in my house and painted the top of them with the gray paint and then the other man came behind and wiped the paint back off. When I say the tops of the doors, I’m talking about the part NO ONE sees! The part that faces the ceiling… so strange. And then they made me sign a piece of paper and they left. This was one time when I had to use “agee chyanda” because they wanted in the nursery and Caden was in their napping. Well, they could care less and just opened the door anyway and woke him up. Ugh! I am guessing those men were doing something for the apartment complex. We have an intercom system that runs through the whole complex and every couple of days they will make annoying public announcements (in Korean) that I can’t understand. Maybe they announced one day that those men were coming….
We still haven’t had an opportunity to do much exploring. One of the places we have visited a few times is E-Mart. It is kind of like a Korean Target. The nicest one is three stories high and the escalators are my favorite part! They are wider than the ones in America and they aren’t stairs, but instead are ramps that move up and down! They are made for you to ride up with your shopping cart! We have a picture in one of our shutterfly albums of Caden on the “escalator” at E-mart in his stroller!
I hope that in my next email I will be able to include some sight seeing adventures!! In the meantime, a lot of other things have been going on in our day to day lives that I didn’t include in this email. I mentioned above that I try and keep everyone updated back home through our Family Blog. I will share the link to that below, as well as a link to our shutterfly pictures. If you go to the blog there are two links of interest: one is a link to our family photos (shutterfly) and the other to our family videos (you tube). We have a lot of videos of Caden on there! I think the most watched video is the one of him eating rice cereal for the first time! It’s definitely worth checking out (but we are a little bias)!
We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!
With love,
John, Amanda, Caden, and Charli Nichols!
http://johnandamandanichols.blogspot.com
http://johnandamandanichols.shutterfly.com
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