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!



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