PPE

This is my PPE to go to the bathroom.

For all you laymen out there, like me, PPE is Personal Protective Equipment.  No, the bathroom isn’t that bad.  We even have toilet paper now (when the cleaning lady doesn’t hose it down, literally), which is a vast improvement from my first day here.  C’mon, guys.  Do you really NEVER need toilet paper?  Ever?  Ok, we won’t go there.

But the bathroom is in the one and only actual building (as opposed to the sea cans we work in) currently on our site, and there’s construction going on.  So I get to suit up to go to the bathroom.  It’s really not that bad.  I almost remember to put it on before I start walking to the building now.  Almost.

The fun part is that we only have one.  There aren’t many of us on site yet, so it’s not that big of a deal.  But somebody got locked in the bathroom the other day – I won’t name names, but I swear it wasn’t me and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t his fault – and they had to break the lock on the door to get them out.  So now Blake has to stand guard for me every time I use the bathroom.  Fun stuff!  That’s ok – it’s good fodder for the blog!

We're aliens!

 

We got our alien registration cards.

 So now whenever we go somewhere and someone asks, "Can I see your passport?"  I say, "Will my alien card do?"

How cool is that?



It's Here! (the Hamburger Helper, of course...)

...and the macaroni and cheese... and the cake mix... and the spices... and the instant oatmeal... and the Dr. Pepper... and the Pop Tarts...  and chips that don't taste sweet...  and dill pickles (seriously, they have TONS of pickles here, but I don't care what it looks like, it's NOT going to be dill - they're all sweet, like the chips)... and green beans (yeah, they're canned, but I like them)...  and...  Alright, you get the point.

Ok, so I haven't exactly posted anything in a while (sorry, Aunt Tootie!).  But, in my defense, our stuff is here!!!!  Thank God.  And I truly mean that with all sincerity.  I don't think all that dog food could have ever made it through customs without His help.  Seriously.  Did I tell you the box we shipped over in September so that we could have some of Sadie's food already here (and cat food and litter) until our boat shipment arrived is STILL in customs?  Yes, still.  Wow.  I mean, really?  I took my Starbucks frappuccino through airport security today (more on that later), and they won't let dog food in, seriously?  I just don't get this place.  Ok, but the point is, I have a really good excuse for not posting recently.  I HAD to unpack.  And I had to go to Seoul this week for work... and we went to Busan last weekend... and I've been working late a lot lately...  ok, ok, get off my back, I'm posting now, aren't I?


There are 6 bags of dog food under that sheet.

 But I can't tell you how excited I was when they brought in all of the not one, not two, not three, but eight (yes, eight) 40-lb bags of Purina One Lamb and Rice (easily digestible formula for dogs with sensitive stomachs... thank you, Sadie, because feeding an 80-lb dog isn't expensive enough in the first place) dog food.  I know, you think we're crazy.  But we're not.  Honestly.  We're just cheap.  Do you know how much dog food costs over here?  It's rediculous!  And that's just the regular kind!  It is literally more than double the price at home (like most things here actually).  I'm talking $40 for about 16 lbs (that buys you a 40-lb bag at Sam's, in case you were wondering).  Rediculous!  Did I mention that Sadie is an 80-lb dog?  That it takes only five or six weeks to go through a 35-lb bag of dog food?  And that she has to eat the expensive stuff?  And I mean HAS to.  I won't go into graphic details (you're welcome), but just suffice it say, if I pay extra for it, she HAS to.  Anyway, I think I've made my point.

And then there was the cat litter.  If you think the dog food is pricey, you don't even want to know about the cat litter.  But of course, I'm going to tell you anyway (Rodney, maybe I do complain too much, but then, if I didn't, how boring would this blog be?).  A Minute-Maid-orange-juice-jug-sized container (about 10 lbs) costs about $15 over here (and that was before the US$ started going down compared to the Won).  The stuff we brought from Sam's (40lb tubs) costs only $11 per container.  If you've ever been to our house, then you know Mo Cat goes through A LOT of litter.  Quickly.  So we brought 10.  Ten 40-lb containers of cat litter, so 400 lbs, for a year, which means 33 lbs a month or a little less than 8 lbs a week.  Good luck, Mo Cat.  Crap, good luck us!  No pun intended.  We also brought quite a few bags of cat food because - yes, you guessed it - the cat food costs a fortune here (are you noticing a trend?).  Although, now that I think about it, maybe if we hadn't brought so much cat food, we wouldn't need so much cat litter...

Moving on...  Equally exciting as the animals' food was OUR food.  I love our food.  It makes me genuinely happy when I walk into our third bedroom (AKA "the pantry" AKA "Sam's Korea") and see all of that wonderfully glorious American food.  I think Blake thought I was a little crazy when we bought all that stuff back in early September - me making, checking, and cross-checking 20 lists and him pushing thousand-pound carts around WalMart and Sam's (but he humored me because he's a great guy like that and hey, I was moving to Korea for him).  And I KNOW the people that watched us check out 3 and 4 carts of goods at a time thought we were crazy.  But we were here precisely 13 days before our sea shipment (and air shipment, for that matter) showed up, and I believe his exact words were, "We should have brought more!"  I mean, we did have extra room in the sea can after all.

The movers showed up a little before nine last Tuesday.  And Tuesday was a long and exhausting day.  The other expat families had warned us about how stressful it was having the movers unpack all of the boxes and just put your stuff away in random places.  So we asked them to just bring all of the boxes in and let us unpack them.  So that's what we did.  All day Tuesday.  And Wednesday night.  And Thursday night.  And Friday night.  But Tuesday was definitely the worst day.

By the evening, we were exhausted and sore and almost ready to stop, and then somehow Blake sliced his right index finger with the box cutter, trying to cut a piece of tape off of some heavily paper-wrapped kitchenware.  He instinctively put his finger in his mouth like you would with a paper cut as he rushed to the sink to run water over it, and when he turned to look at me, he had blood running down his chin.  At which point I'm not exactly sure how I didn't pass out.  Because I don't really like blood.  I don't like to watch the gory bits of TV shows and movies, and I've never given blood in my life.  And there was a lot of it.  And I was scared to death that he'd just chopped the top of his finger off.

But he tried to assure me that it was just a slit across the top of his finger, while I tried really hard not to panic.  I just stood there in our kitchen, trying to breathe deeply and not freak out too much about how we were going to find a cab, explain to the sure-to-be-non-English-speaking driver that we needed to go to the hospital (and the good hospital, not the one that I went to with Tiffany in August) without getting thrown out of the car for Blake bleeding all over it and without any cash, and communicate with the doctors and nurses at said hospital (ok, and yes, how on earth we were going to pay for it when we didn't have our international insurance cards yet).  I tried not to think about what they would have to do to help him.  How scary it would be to have them performing medical procedures that they couldn't explain to us.  Whether they even use any form of anesthetic before they give you stitches here.

That was really the worst part.  Because even more so than blood, I hate pain.  I have NO pain threshold whatsoever.  When I go to the dentist, they give me the gas mask just to give me the shots to numb me so they can drill.  Just thinking about how much Blake's finger must be hurting him from the cut alone was making me a little woozy.  I tried really hard not to think about stitches.  But it just wouldn't stop bleeding!

After about 20-30 minutes of Blake keeping pressure on the wound with a since retired kitchen towel, I tried to bandage it.  We waited that long because that's how long it took me to find the band-aids because, remember, quite a lot of our stuff was still in boxes scattered all over our apartment.  I threw stuff everywhere, anxiously rooting through boxes looking for our first aid kit.  As soon as he removed the towel, we had about 10 seconds of reprieve before it started gushing blood again, which was  pretty much just enough time for me to see how bad the cut looked.  It was a 3-sided cut.  Or half of a long oval.  Sure, it was a thin slice, but it was on the tip of his finger and swooped down on both sides, which meant it was bleeding like crazy and there's no band-aid in the world designed to cover a cut shaped and positioned like that.  At least, not that I'm aware of, and definitely not in our little apartment in Korea.

So he put the towel back on and applied pressure.  We then had an argument about whether he should go to the hospital.  I wanted him to go because I was worried about how much blood he was losing, and he didn't want to go (you thought I was going to say I didn't because of the no insurance yet thing, didn't you? Shame on you! I'm not that cheap).  And truthfully, if I was him, I wouldn't have wanted to go either.  So we finally agreed on calling one of the other families and borrowing some cash for cab fare (yeah, in Seoul, Koreans can pay for their cabs with their cell phones, but in Yeosu you have to have cash) just in case, by 7:30 or so, it hadn't stopped bleeding without having a kitchen towel pressed firmly against it.  I gave in because he wasn't continually bleeding while he held it and I couldn't blame him for not wanting stitches, and he gave in because I pretty much convinced him that if he bled to death and left me alone in Korea, I would find a way to bring him back to life and kill him. And that's what marriage is all about, right?  Compromise.  Anyway, so we shamefully called our site leader (i.e,. the boss) to ask if we could borrow some cash, and he not only walked out and met us in the cold and gave us all the cash in his wallet but also told us to call him back if we ended up going to the hospital because he wanted to go with us.  How nice is that?

Then his wife Erin called me a few minutes later and informed me that the wife of another couple that speaks English and lives in our apartment complex is a nurse (Gina's Korean, and Bob's American).  Anyway, so the third expat wife Tiffany knows Gina the best, so she called Gina for us and asked if she'd be willing to look at Blake's hand and tell us if we should go to the hospital or not.  She and Bob were on the way out to go somewhere with their little boy (who is so cute, by the way), but they stopped and came to our apartment to help.  We were hoping to meet them soon, but this wasn't exactly how we had planned it.  Regardless, Gina surveyed his hand, walked to her apartment to get supplies and then back to ours, and bandaged his hand very well.  Her bandaging skills utterly destroy mine, though, in my defense, the cut had finally started to clot by the time she got to it.  But she is a nurse, so I'm guessing she would have easily beat me out anyway.  I'm completely ok with that.  I think I did a decent job re-bandaging it for the next few days, even if it did still make me woozy to look at it.  But I definitely still owe Bob and Gina a tube of antibiotic ointment and some freshly baked cookies.

This is from a day or two later.  It looks much better now, I promise!

So, crisis averted, we turned back to survey the apartment, which of course was complete chaos.  It was late by then and we were pretty tired, so we basically just gave up for the night and cleared the bed of debris that I'd thrown on it while searching for the elusive band-aids.  I wouldn't let Blake help for fear that any unnecessary movement would make his finger start bleeding again.  After several days, though, it's been healing fairly well, and he's kept it really clean.  But he's still not allowed to use the box cutter yet, and he can only use the scissors with supervision.  Just kidding.  About the scissors.  Mostly.

It took us pretty much the rest of the week (at night after work) to unpack everything.  We spent hours putting together shelves, searching boxes for missing pieces of shelves, and getting everything out of the boxes and put away.  But somehow we managed to find a place for it all, and now we just have a mountain of boxes we need to break down and haul downstairs to the trash.

 
I have to admit the apartment definitely has started to feel a little more like home now with some of our stuff in it.  One of these days, we'll find time to put the curtains up, and I'll give you a pictorial tour of the place.  But for now, you can just have a tour of our favorite room...

 

  



This is a panoramic shot - the room's not really as big as it looks here.  But isn't it great?

 Don't laugh.  If you lived here, you'd want a room like this, too!



.

The Little Things

Being in a country as wildly different from our own as Korea is really makes you appreciate the little things in life.  For instance, we went to the grocery store today, and…

I...

FOUND...

AVOCADOS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And I was so excited that I decided that deserved its own blog post.

It’s ok – I don’t expect you to get it.  :)



En Route

It was a long process to get from Baton Rouge, LA to Yeosu, South Korea, hence the long post that follows.  It’s a long route any way you slice it, but taking the animals made it abnormally long.  Oh, did I mention that?  Yeah, we’re crazy, so we decided to take our dog, Sadie, and one cat, Mojito.  We (wisely, for one at least) decided to leave the inside/outside cat in BR with my parents.  (Hi, Dora!  We miss you!  Ok, well, I miss you.  Blake…  He’s, uh, really busy…)  But we insanely decided it would be a good idea to truck our 80lb bloodhound and 14lb cat across the world to Korea.  And, no, I don’t know what kind of cat Mo is – yellow?  House?  Fat?  You wouldn’t believe how many people asked us that!

So as I was explaining, it made our trip a little more complicated to take them.  Because, you see, only one airline (that I could find) in the entire world will fly an 80lb dog from the US to Korea as baggage.  Fly her as freight, you say?  Sure, if you’ve got about $2500 lying around that you don’t need, that’s a great idea!  In fact, if you do, please feel free to email me, and we’ll just set up her return trip for our flight home at the end of this.  Unfortunately, though, we don’t, so Sadie got to fly as baggage.  And in all honesty, the relocation company we spoke to advised it because customs is much simpler to bring an animal in with you than to ship one over as freight.  So United Airlines was our only option.

And of course, the puddle jumpers that fly out of the lovely Baton Rouge airport aren’t big enough to carry the kennel of an 80lb dog, so we began our journey Sunday morning, October 24, with a drive to Houston, which was really a good thing because we got to see Kelley (Blake’s sister), her husband Josh, and our niece Riley one last time.  We spent a nice evening in Houston, ate what was probably our last steak for a long time, and flew out bright and early to San Francisco very early Monday, October 25.

We had decided not to make the two flights to Korea back to back.  Again, having the animals with us made things a little more difficult.  If we had simply sat in the San Francisco airport waiting for our next flight, we couldn’t get the animals back during the layover.  And they would have been in their kennels for close to 30 hours, which was just way too long.  I really didn’t want to do that to them, and I don’t know if you’ve ever smelled cat pee before, but riding in a car for 6 hours with a urine soaked cat kennel just did not sound like fun to me.  So we stopped for the night in San Francisco.  And like Houston, it worked well because we got to see Ryan, Blake’s brother, one last time.  We missed not seeing his wife, Anna Colleen, but we’ll catch her next time for sure.

We arrived in San Francisco around 10am their time, and that’s where the fun really began.  In Houston we got to drop the animals off at a building just outside the airport for Continental’s Pet Safe program, with the help of Blake’s parents (who so graciously drove to Houston with us to help us off and bring our car back home).  But when we got to SF, we had to figure out how to juggle 4 suitcases (LARGE suitcases – in fact, I’m pretty sure they’re technically over most airlines’ size limits, but they didn’t notice and I’m not telling), 2 carry-on bags, 2 book bags, an extra-large dog kennel, and a cat kennel.  I meant to take a picture of all the craziness, but just know that we got A LOT of strange looks – I mean, seriously, I felt like we were in Korea already.  Are we really the only people who have ever flown our pets anywhere?  That’s awfully nice of the airlines to make up these special pet programs just for us.

 But somehow we got both the animals, found all of our luggage (one flight later), managed to get all of that stuff and ourselves on the hotel shuttle, and, 3 hours later, made it to our hotel.  No exaggeration, it was 1pm by the time we got there.  But the hotel was nice, and we finally got the animals settled.  Sadie was NOT a happy camper about the plane ride.  She was fine, but she was not going to forgive us that easily.  Thankfully, the animal-friendly hotel (thanks, Crown Plaza San Francisco Airport) gave us dog treats and a stuffed toy for her, which of course she loved (and which of course we accidently left in San Fran).  And there was a park literally right next to the hotel that even had a dog park, so we went for a nice walk after lunch.  It was beautiful there, but the dog park was a little odd.  It was like a 1/4” deep layer of cat litter or something – no grass.  I’m used to nice, lush, grassy dog parks at home.  Oh well, Sadie enjoyed running around anyway.

This is what Sadie did in San Francisco...

...and this is what Mo did.

 

Then that night Ryan gave us a CliffsNotes tour of the city, and we had a really good time.  It’s a neat area, and I’m excited to go back and see him and Anna Colleen for a real visit after we get home.  Here are some of the things we saw while we were there…

the Bay Bridge

Alcatraz

the windiest rule in the world (or something like that)

the sea lions at Pier 39

the carousel at Pier 39

and the shops and restaurants

Mom, check out the crab!

 



And, drum roll please… dun tada dah dun tada…             The Golden Gate Bridge!

…yeah, that’s what I thought, too…  But I’m sure it’s as cool as ever in daylight, and we’ll be sure to see it then when we come back.  And we really did have a good time.

Tuesday morning, October 26, the adventure continued; and we (somehow) managed to make it back to the airport with all our stuff and the animals (sans Sadie’s new favorite toy).  It took a ridiculous amount of time to check in, including the airline rejecting the fasteners on the kennels and our replacing them with the nuts and bolts we had brought just in case (though not enough, of course), Sadie getting one more opportunity (and refusing, of course) to use the bathroom in the dog area at the airport before the 12+ hour flight, and the woman at the check-in desk trying to give at least one of us a heart attack by (incorrectly) informing us that we would need some sort of papers (which we didn’t have… of course) to board a plane to Korea with a one-way ticket.

Then I had my first mini-meltdown in the international terminal of SFO.  Because for my last meal in the States, all I really wanted was some McDonald’s breakfast.  One last breakfast burrito and hash browns, or maybe a sausage biscuit, because even though they have McDonald’s in Korea, the meat just isn’t quite the same over here.  But of course, because that’s how our day was going, once we got through the security checkpoint, all the food available (and keep in mind, this is for breakfast) was either Japanese (you’re kidding me, right?), Mexican, or some little deli with sandwiches.  Poor Katie Ebey got to listen to my rant about how just because it’s the international terminal doesn’t mean that needs to be the only choice of cuisine.  But I finally calmed down and ate my quesadilla, and honestly, the salsa was pretty good.  It really did taste like the salsa in Mexico, which I LOVE.  Not really what I had in mind at 9:30 in the morning, but it beat the heck out of pretty much everything I’ve had since we got over here (except Tiffany’s homemade vegetable soup… AWESOME!).

Eventually we boarded the plane, and I have to say I was really nervous.  I was so worried about the animals, and we were afraid that we’d gotten spoiled by our flights on Korean Air on our original trip to Korea and would be disappointed by United.  But I have to say, I was really impressed.  Just after we boarded the plane, before we even had a chance to get settled and ask someone to check that the animals had made it safely on the plane as well, a stewardess brought us a little ticket for each of them, verifying that they’d been boarded.  And the seats lay completely flat, which was wonderful!  The service wasn’t as good as Korean Air (although Evelyn was great), but they had snacks and sandwiches out for us to get to the whole flight and a decent selection of movies, games, and TV shows. 

The flight was relatively uneventful, though I didn’t sleep the whole time because it was daytime to us.  So I arrived in Seoul pretty tired but so excited to see the animals!  They were both fine and, somehow, not drenched in pee.  They both did very well and got through customs without any problems.  Sadie let us know her disapproval of the long kennel time with some new tricks she’d learned from my parents’ Irish setter (thanks, Rowan – she can now whine and sigh like a true spoiled rotten Adams dog), but fortunately we found some grass outside the airport and let her walk for a little bit.  Mo apparently didn’t mind the 17 some odd hours in the kennel and opted to wait till Yeosu to go to the bathroom, even though we actually poured litter on the ground for him.

Then the next and final leg of our trip began – the 6-hour drive to Yeosu from Seoul.  We had found a relocation company that could provide us a driver (albeit not an English-speaking one) and a van that could hold all of our stuff and the animals.  It took him a couple tries, but he managed to squeeze it all in.

Then we had to call a contact at the relocation company and get her to translate to the driver that we were starving and wanted him to stop somewhere to eat.  Stupid, spoiled American that I am, I decided not to go back into the airport where I KNEW there was a McDonald’s and instead let the driver hit one on the way out of town.  Ha!  Let me just give you a word of advice – if you want to go to McDonald’s, and you see one – just go!  Don’t stop, don’t wait, don’t pause, and definitely don’t expect there to be another one later – just go!

So anyway, we got to experience the wonderful world of Korean rest stops instead.  How do I describe a Korean rest stop?   If I hadn’t been awake for over 20 hours, I might have had the presence of mind to take a picture to show you.  And I’d tell you I’ll just take one if I ever have the opportunity to visit one again, but I really, really hope that I don’t.  Ever.  Again.  Next to the gas station was a decent sized building, long and skinny, with some food places outside that had what looked like a Korean adaptation of carnival food – various fried foods and items on sticks (do NOT get the French fries – I know they look like the potato sticks from a can that we had when we were kids, but they’re not – trust me).  The majority of the inside was an open area with lots of seating and a couple of small, manned kiosks with pictured menus (thankfully and not thankfully) where you ordered from one of several “restaurants.”  You then went to the particular restaurant from which you’d ordered and picked up your “food” (Note:  I’m using these terms very loosely).  It looked similar to a food court in a mall, except you ordered from all of the restaurants in the same place.  And you’ve never heard of these places before.

I took one look at the menu and headed straight for the little food shop that occupied one end of the building.  And that was where I had my first real meltdown.  Exhausted, starving, a little scared, and even more overwhelmed from my much too fresh, across-the-globe move, I walked around the few shelves of the little store, quickly realized that I wasn't going to find anything I recognized except Coca Cola, and started crying right there in somebody’s Korean version of a gas station convenience store.

It got better after that.  I ate as much as I could manage of something called a “shrimp burger” (Blake didn’t bother) and told myself that we’d just cook a lot.  An awful lot.  And the driver made friends with Sadie right away; he even let her ride on the floor of the van by me instead of staying in her kennel.  She and I slept most of the way there, and Mo didn’t make a peep.  Poor Blake struggled to get comfortable in the front seat and slept very intermittently.  But we finally arrived, exhausted, after 11pm Wednesday night in Yeosu, which to us was like 9am Wed morning (almost 24 hours after leaving San Francisco the morning before).  I don’t care what anyone says, that night, that bed was one of the most comfortable places I’ve ever slept!

In total, for travel time alone, it took us about (5+4.25+12.25+6) 27-1/2 hours, over 14 time zones, to get to our new home.  And it was a long, hard trip, but now that we’re all here, safe and settling in, I don’t regret bringing the animals at all.  And, no, Josh, not one person has chased Sadie with chopsticks…yet.