Culture Shock (From My Own Culture)

We landed in Augusta just before midnight on Friday. That was pretty much the longest Friday ever, because we woke up at - oh wait, we didn't wake up because we stayed up that entire night - at 4:30 AM to catch a 6:00 AM bus. My flight didn't leave until 5:45 PM. Then I traveled for like 19 or 20 hours to arrive at 11:38 PM; by the clock it only looked like 6 hours. That day lasted as long as a normal day, plus 13 hours.

Walking into the Augusta airport was one of the first of many mind-blowing experiences I've had in the past couple of days. It was so familiar; WE HAD BEEN THERE BEFORE and had never expected to see it again! The last time I'd been at that airport, I was saying goodbye to Joe with his mom and dad because he was leaving for South Korea.

We got our rental car and stepped out of the airport to see a huge American flag. We drove to our hotel along familiar roads, and we're in the hotel where we always stay when we're in Georgia, and it's just so weird.

We went to IHOP for dinner that night at like 1 AM. That was our first American meal. I was really excited and excitable and I wanted to tell the waitress lady that we had just gotten back from South Korea for the first time in two years, but I didn't. We had a pretty good meal and then went to the hotel and slept until 10 AM and then spent the whole day touring homes with a realtor.

After we decided to buy a house while we were still in Korea, I read the internet about pretty much every single house on the market in Augusta. Once we got here, we had about 11 or 13 places to see. Our realtor took us everywhere we wanted to go on Saturday, which was very nice, and took us to an extra place that I had seen and then taken off the Maybe List...and then fell in love with anyway when we saw it. It's a foreclosed $25,000 split-level from like the 60's or 70's with a pretty much perfect layout. It's sunny, it has a decent-sized kitchen (decent-sized everything else, too,) and one bathroom. There's a second bathroom, too, that had been entirely gutted. There's also probably another $25,000 and 3 months of someone's life in repairs, and tons of competition for the property. We were too tired to talk about financial/house stuff when we got back to the hotel, so we went to sleep. Then for some reason we woke up at 4:00 AM on Sunday, hungry and not tired anymore...so we went to McDonald's and, you know, crunched some numbers, and decided that the fixer-upper just wasn't going to work out. Not at this stage of our lives. I was really sad to let it go. And also really relieved, because since we'd decided on it, I had been incapable of thinking of anything except for how to win the bid for the house with the one chance we would have.

Maybe next time. Next time we look for a house, we can buy a giant project and pour sweat and blood and tears into a place where we'll keep uncovering surprise problems. That would be so great.

For now, we're going for Choice #2, a move-in-ready place that has spots we hate (which makes me happy, because now we can still have major - but not too major - projects to undertake together.)

Like, look at this room:

It's right off the kitchen, as you can see. With the location of this room in the house's floorplan, between the kitchen and the bedrooms, there's nowhere to put furniture, so it's just like a really wide hallway...with a fireplace in it. With the wood paneling and the dark floor and the fact that that room has zero windows, it's REALLY dark. We call it "The Lair." We want to put windows on either side of the fireplace and take out at least the upper cabinets of that part of the kitchen that connects to the room; that would really open everything up (and make a gigantic mess of the ceiling. Making a mess of a ceiling is always a terrible idea.) Then again, we might just move in and decide we have better things to do with our money and live with the flaws. But it's fun to imagine the possibilities. Not optional: painting dat paneling.

If we actually win the bid we'll put in tomorrow. Losing this place would mean settling for choice #3 or, PLEASE NO, #4.

This is so exciting!

This morning, after we went to McDonald's (AND KRISPY KREME!, eating away my sadness at that we wouldn't be bidding on a house where the basement might have been leaking,) I wasn't in the mood to go back to the hotel and be bored. So we went...TO WAL-MART for the first time in two years.

I took pictures. This is a Wal-Mart, obviously, like you probably just saw earlier today.

This was our Commissary. At least five of them could easily fit inside the Wal-Mart.

This is the orange juice selection at Wal-Mart. (The orange juice I had at McDonald's this morning tasted like soap.)

OH MY GOODNESS, LOOK AT THAT SELECTION. Even looking at the picture is blowing my mind. Just...wow. Wow. At Camp Carroll, our entire selection of orange juice, yogurt, and pre-made cookie dough was kept in a refrigerator unit one quarter of the size of that massive row of orange juice.

And the yogurt section!

THAT IS ALL YOGURT. How is that even possible? At Camp Carroll, the freezer containing most of the frozen foods - ice cream, waffles, Hot Pockets, frozen pizzas, seafood, meat - WAS THE SIZE OF THIS YOGURT SECTION.

I know you get the point, but here's the coffee, just real quick.

Wow! That's a lot of coffee!

Joe and I grew up with orange juice aisles the length of moving trucks, and we didn't even know how crazy that is.

Also crazy was when I landed for a layover in Detroit at the end of my flight out of Seoul and I could understand the conversations of everyone around me.

"...had her baby on Monday..."
"...he hadn't eaten or dranken in a month..."
"...showed up an hour early..."

Me and Joe talked about how we've been so used to tuning out the voices around us because we can't understand Korean. Hearing what people talk about made me wonder what they were talking about in Korea. Probably pretty much the same stuff.

Also, whenever I think of talking to our family and friends, I check the clock and automatically subtract an hour and switch between day and night to find out what time it is where they live. Like, it's 11:30 PM right now, so I'm like, okay, it's 10:30 in the morning at my parents' house...BUT IT'S NOT, BECAUSE WE'RE IN THE SAME TIME ZONE NOW.

All this has made us glad to be home. Other countries are pretty great, too, but...that was a lot of orange juice.

We'll be even happier to live in America once we have a house and can stop worrying about bids and inspections and loans and get on with our lives.

A List of Things About Going Back

It's been 1 year, 9 months, and 1 day since July 25th, 2011, when I left America.

Here's a list of things about going back.

1. Haven't seen our families or pets since then and am super excited to see everyone

2. Haven't driven a car since then and am super excited to see my car again

3. I'm tired, I've been awake for over 24 hours because I never went to sleep last night, and my flight doesn't even leave for another 3 hours and 45 minutes. I'm sitting on the floor in the airport with my back against the wall and my computer plugged into an adapter plugged into the wall. I had to buy the adapter because Korean plugs are different and I didn't bring any adapters from our apartment sadface. It would be fantastic if I could just lay on the floor right here and take a nap. Then when I woke up my stuff might still be there. I'm bored.

4. Having Wal-Mart and a lot of superstores will be convenient, but I'll also spend a lot more money on stuff just because it's there, while here our PX was tiny and only had...not much. We had to order a lot of stuff online. Sometimes I just wouldn't get around to it, and I'd know the thing must not have been worth it. Wal-Mart = no waiting period = kinda bad

5. All the stuff we own that we've purchased over the course of our marriage that's in a storage unit probably getting eaten by mice right now? We get to see that stuff again! And probably throw away a lot of it because being over here with minimal stuff has taught us what we really need!

6. A new exciting thing is that we're going to be looking at houses to buy when we get back. Then I'll get to PAINT. In 5.5 years, Joe and I have only ever painted 1 room together. The rest of the time we were in rentals where we couldn't do that.

7. On North America the continent, the United States takes up a lot of room. In South Korea, it only takes up little tiny patches of room, and you have to walk to those little tiny patches for it to even kind of seem like you're in America, and even then, the America is diluted by Korean signs and employees. When we go home, everywhere we walk and drive and go will ALL be America. There will be English everywhere, and people who look like us, and I'll have to stop talking about things that you can't talk about in public, because the people around me will definitely be able to understand me instead of just maybe.

8. I'm worried about going back, because what if it's not that great in the USA, or too normal and boring? But that's a stupid thing to worry about because life can get normal and boring over here, too. I'm sad that our adventure is over, but really it's more "accomplished" than "over" because we got to see the things that were important to us. I just don't want to get home and be like "Wow, is this all there is?" But I'll probably like it.

I'm so tired. I think I have movies. I'll go do that now.

What's Different About Korea

I've now been in South Korea for one year (and one week.) I want to be like, "Oh wow guys this is so different," but living here feels so normal now.

Once in a while, though, I'll see an advertisement for a common product which I'd forgotten existed. Our Commissary is the size of a large 7-11 and has a relatively small selection of goods, so a lot of products just slip from my memory. Or I'll look at the pictures I took of our storage unit, where almost everything we own is stored right now, and see stuff I'd forgotten we had. I think there are a lot of things like that: Forgotten products, forgotten belongings, forgotten what it's like in the States.

Like, when I think about it, I'll remember that I own a KitchenAid mixer. And a round cookie sheet for pizza. And we have a fan for our bedroom with a remote control. And we have way too many little junky things that will probably be getting thrown away when I rediscover them. In a plastic container, we have two pounds of quinoa. We have a red cooler and our own refrigerator. We have a whole bunch of lamps. We don't have desks anymore because they didn't survive the move into the storage unit. I have houseplants waiting at my grandparents' house, and a dog at Joe's parents' house, and my birds at someone else's house. We have plastic mats for our computer chairs to roll around on. We have...a car. With a CD player in it, and a SUNROOF, and a huge trunk. In the car are my CDs, hopefully not melted.

I think the biggest difference with our life in Korea is travel. Without a car, going anywhere new requires extra planning and other people's timetables. Also, when you don't have a little pod of climate control on wheels, almost every form of weather just feels oppressive, smushing against your apartment door, keeping you from going anywhere. And you definitely can't wear painful shoes whenever you feel like it.
 
Without a vehicle, multi-errand trips have to be strategically planned. Whatever you buy, you have to carry around, since you can't just dump it in the trunk. One bright and sunny 90-degree day last week, the plan was: Go to the bank first, it's nearest; then go next door to check the mail; then walk across the big gravel lot past the Commissary and go to the library to check some stuff out; backtrack, go to the Commissary and buy only what will fit in half of my backpack; carry groceries and books allllll the way over to the military clothing store near the pool; then, carrying groceries and books and a couple of new uniforms, walk alllllllllllllll the way over to the ACS building, the farthest walkable point from home; then, backtrack allllll the way back to the library and PX area, buy a microwave; then, thank goodness I've collected enough stuff to justify taking a taxi home. I was proud of myself for saving at least $12 in taxi money. I really needed a shower.

See how much I've gotten used to it here? I'm in a different culture, and all I talk about when I think of what's different about living in Korea is not having a car. It's not the rice fields or the mountains (I don't even see them anymore) or the Buddhist temples or beautiful Seoul, but having a remote-controlled bedroom fan. I'm pretty sure I need to do some more exploring.

Routine Check-up

Smile Restaurant is a hole in the wall with maybe six tables. Before the place shut down, the door was usually open when I walked past, and I always glanced inside, and there were always two or three women seated at one of the tables, eating fruit and watching Korean soaps on the little TV. When you went in, one of the ladies would stand up and smile and give you a menu. You would get your glass bottles of Coke or Chilsung Cider (which is like Sprite) or whatever from the refrigerator in the back of the dining room. Once you were ready, the lady would take your order and then go behind a half-wall partition to cook for you in the kitchen area while the rest of the ladies kept watching TV. The one time we ate there, one of the vegetables in my meal was seaweed, so we didn't try that place again.

That was about two weeks after I arrived in Korea. See? I was still taking pictures of things just because they had another language on them. Everything was new and amazing. Now, six months later, the novelty's long gone - or at least moved out of Waegwan - replaced by routine, obligation, the everyday struggle of adult life, and dietary restrictions.

My family visited New York City a few times when I was, like, 11 or 12. I'd never seen a city like that, and I fell in love. For years after those trips, I would ask my parents when we could go back, and write poems about how much I missed NYC, and cry. I haven't been back, because even from Virginia, it's too far.

I'm hoping I don't do that with South Korea. What if, as soon as the plane takes off to take us home, I develop a giant hole in my heart that bothers me for years? I couldn't even get back to NYC; how would I ever find the chance to go across the world and 14 hours into the future to see here again? 

I wouldn't. Won't. So every morning when I wake up, I'll have to remind myself where I am, and try not to let routine interfere.

Orders

Once Joe got here to South Korea, he learned that he could submit paperwork to extend his tour here. That would mean a bigger paycheck and, if he could get me here with him, it would mean a longer time we were guaranteed to be together. He got me here and then submitted the paperwork. It didn't go through. He tried again, and it didn't work that time, either.

We were waiting to hear news on the fourth submission of the paperwork when we instead got the news of his projected next station: Maryland. Just hours from our families and our hometowns.

Our options were to try to cancel the extension paperwork or to keep waiting for it. The choice was clear. I hated cutting short our adventure in another country, especially when I didn't know when we'd ever be able to have another, but we decided to try for home.

Five days later, today, Joe came home early to tell me he couldn't cancel the extension paperwork. It had already gone through.

In those five days, I'd thought up a list of what we HAD to do before we left Korea, and what we had to see, and thought of when we could fit everything in. Then I'd started to think about having my car again. And sitting on our couch again. Buying a house. Having my own walls to paint. Wondering if we'd ever see another foreign country. In the dark, falling asleep, asking, "We're going home?" to get it cemented, to hear his tone so I'd know if this was good.

Then the news. Now, we have time. Now, we can still explore and experience. Just today, I noticed how close to Russia we are. And China, and Japan, and even India. (Kinda.)

Now, I have months before I get to see the amazing sister I don't talk to enough, or attend a family gathering. Now, we have months before we see our dog or my birds or Passat again. Months before another Wal-Mart or Ruby Tuesday or Lowe's.

Now, instead of choosing the house we want, we'll be renting for at least another year. Forming the walls of all my days, all around me, surrounding me everywhere I look will be wallpaper I didn't choose in an apartment like a hotel.

Now: Permanence. Safety. Stability. Eighteen months? Seventeen? Two years, total?

I finally started settling in tonight. Started thinking about what needs to change to make this home and not temporary. Of course "DISHWASHER" immediately came to mind, but first things first: We'll need a Christmas tree. It won't be the one we've used every Christmas - we'll probably be without our things as long as we're here - but I guarantee as long as I have that tree to look at, I won't even notice the wallpaper.

Our Korean Apartment

We live on the "5th" floor of an apartment building located in a cluster of apartment buildings. That one with all the yellow is ours (and the window with the white box, second from the top, is ours.)

Our building has an elevator. Check out the numbers on the keypad:

Yeah. There's not a four. In Eastern Asia, 4 is their 13; their words for "four" are similar to their words for "death." It's not uncommon for hospitals, apartment buildings, and other public structures to omit number four from the floorplan. So, we live on the "5th" floor.

Here's our little foyer/entrance thing. It has a cabinet for shoes. People don't wear shoes in houses in Korea. When the cable guy came to our house to hook up the internet, he took off his shoes in the foyer. Our landlord had to come over a couple of times, and he removed his shoes, too. Two restaurants we've visited had shoe shelves at the door.

Say you're visiting someone's house with your shoes off, and you have to use the bathroom. Do you want to walk on their bathroom floor in your bare feet? EWW! NO! That's why there were already bathroom shoes in our guest bathroom when we moved in.

One of the shoeless restaurants we went to had bathroom shoes in their bathroom for people to use. I was barefoot. I didn't use the shoes. I ended up wishing I had.

We have a couple of smallish spare bedrooms, one directly across from the foyer and the other directly across from our bedroom. One's for Army stuff and the other one is for other stuff.

Here's the kitchen (and computer room, since we only have one table):

Here's the living room, right across from the kitchen:

(Our landlord was kind enough to provide us with the couch, the TV stand, and the table & chairs.) The small white boxes next to the TV stand across from the couch are electrical transformers. There's also one under our kitchen table/computer desk and one in the kitchen. Almost everything we own gets plugged into transformers because the electrical outlets here don't speak English.

The tall white thing in the corner by the couch is our air conditioner. None of the Korean buildings we've visited (except for a museum, I think, and the Crown Hotel) have had central heating/cooling. Here, if you're lucky enough to have air conditioning, it's one of these individual air conditioner things or an A/C unit sticking out of a window. In Korea, electricity can be ridiculously expensive, so you try not to use it, which means trying not to use your A/C unit, which means opening your windows and wearing as little as possible and hoping it's a breezy day.

There's another A/C unit in our bedroom. We only run it at night. It's the white thing in the upper right-hand corner:

Those things on the floor are Army kneepads. They're to hold the door open.

I can remember our dad yelling when we were growing up, if we left the back door open when we came inside from playing, "In or out! Close the door! Are you trying to air condition the whole neighborhood?" Now, at night, if Joe leaves the bedroom to go get something from somewhere else in the apartment, if he leaves the door open, I yell "Close the door! Are you trying to air condition the whole apartment?"

 

The above picture was taken from the window of the porch outside of our bedroom window. It's the garden on the roof of the building across from us. Some mornings, we see a shirtless Korean man walking around up there, smoking cigarettes and tending the plants.

In this picture, you'll see the little room between our bedroom and our bathroom. In the little room, there are two wardrobes. The wardrobes and the shoe cabinet in the foyer are the apartment's only closets. Also in this picture, next to the light switch, you'll see the panel that controls our water heater. You have to push a button when you want the water heater to come on. The water heats up fast - you can be taking a shower three to five minutes after you turn on the water heater - but the water temperature of the shower is very inconsistent. I adjust the faucet every two minutes or so to balance out the random temperature changes. This panel also controls the apartment's heating system. There's pipes or something under the floor, and heat comes from them.

That's our bathroom. The walls and floor are tiled. The ceiling - and all the bathroom ceilings I've seen here - are made of plastic panels. The showerhead is on a hose, and you can detach the showerhead from the wall, which is how they build showers here. In Korea, showerheads don't just come out of walls.

You know what else is cool about our bathroom? The floor drain where the water from the sink goes. I can hose down the walls, the toilet, the floor, everything, and it all just washes into that drain. That's even where the shower water goes.

This is a picture of the little spot of mildew in the grout over the mirror, and the medicine cabinet, and the bathroom window. When you look out of that window, you see this:

The green grassy patches aren't grassy. They're rice paddies. Here, rice paddies are as common as cornfields are in Virginia.

This is the laundry porch that runs the length of the apartment behind the kitchen and one of the spare rooms:

The washing machine is a washer/dryer combo. Because of how expensive electricity is (and because of the inefficiency of that machine,) our clothes are dried on a rack. That takes a while. I can only do a couple of loads of laundry per day.

That's the other side of the laundry porch. It's the trash side. In Korea, they recycle aluminum and plastic and other stuff, of course, but they also recycle food.

Your food goes in the green bags, your non-recyclable trash goes in the white bags, and your recyclables go in a giant pile on the floor until you get around to sorting them. The trashbags are expensive; four or five white bags and three or five green bags cost me about $8. When they're full, you put them outside and someone comes and picks them up once the stray cats are done eating out of the green ones.

This (zoomed-in) picture was taken when I was at the laundry-porch window. Mist was rising from the mountains at sunset.

I'm living in a country where air conditioners are an afterthought and I can't read the trashbags and there are mountains outside my bathroom window. Times like this, I'm pretty glad Joe joined the Army.

The Korean 7-11, or, Experiments in Snacking

After we were done with our first Korean-food meal, we were still hungry. The food had been good, but there hadn't been much meat and the beds of lettuce under our meats weren't very filling. We had seen a 7-11 on our walk to the restaurant and decided to stop there and pick up snacks on the way back to the hotel.

I don't think it really occurred to me that the 7-11 was going to be carrying Korean snacks rather than normal food.

We couldn't read the labels, which were all written in Hangul, and we didn't recognize any of the packaging, except for:

We didn't buy this one, but it was funny enough to take a picture of:

An angry chicken? Okay. But why are those two creepy obviously evil guys dancing? And why do they have bubbles coming out of their heads?

We probably spent twenty minutes in that store, looking for stuff we recognized and figuring out what Korean foods we wanted to try. Here's what we ended up with:

First, I'll tell you about the green and white sparkling Tropicana drink in the can. It's actually been one of my favorite things I've found here so far. It was fizzy and cold and tasted like a sour apple Jolly Rancher. And it has English on it, so I bet you can buy it in the States, too. Somewhere.

Then there were the triangle things in the two similar-looking bags (left corner.) They're made by Kellogg's. They were like crunchy triangular cookies. I liked the apple ones and Joe ate the honey cranberry ones. (At least I assume those are cranberries...you never know, in foreign countries where you can't read.)

Next: The orange and white bag. These were sweet puffed rice and peanut snacks. They tasted like Quaker rice cakes, with peanuts. I liked them and would have liked them even more if they hadn't had peanuts in them.

Then there was the chocolate ice cream inside the plastic tube. (It's inside the package in the lower left-hand corner of the picture with all the food.)

It was delicious. It was like a Fudgsicle stuffed into a Mondo bottle minus the popsicle stick.

Next: The Soft Chocolate (upper left in the big picture.) It was one of two things we bought that night that had an English name (on the back of the box.) I wasn't impressed with Soft Chocolate. The candy came individually wrapped in powdered-sugared, bite-sized pieces and tasted exactly like the creme inside of a Keebler's E.L. Fudge cookie.

And then, the next day, there was one Soft Chocolate left, and I put it in my purse, and then a few days later it was mushed and flat and I opened it to see if it would taste good and it didn't.

I saved the weirdest food for last. The round thing in the upper right-hand corner of the big picture. We tried to figure out what was inside this frozen container before we bought it, with no luck. I guessed that the things illustrated on the outside were beans, though. Little black beans. The container was in the ice cream freezer, so I thought I was probably buying some kind of bean ice cream with colorful little square chunks of something in it. Unfortunately, I was 100% right.

The best way I can describe this concoction is as very sweet shaved ice studded with black beans. The pink square things covered in white sugar to the left of the tip of the spoon - I don't know what those were made out of, but I'm pretty sure it was bean paste. Joe liked the stuff and ate it all, which was good, because I certainly didn't want it. It didn't taste bad...it was just too weird to eat (like many foods I've found here.)

We were excited with each new package of food. We never knew what was inside or if it was something we actually wanted. It was like opening presents.

And that is what filled us up on the night of our first Korean-food dinner.

Shriveled Yellow Things: Our First Food Adventure

Our first night off-post was the first night we went to a Korean restaurant. When it was dinnertime, we left the hotel, chose a direction, and walked that way.

We went past a few restaurants before stopping. "This one looks classy," Joe said, so we started to read the menu posted over the sidewalk. (Actually, we just looked at the pictures; the menu was in Korean.) While we were staring at the pictures trying to decide if we wanted to go in there, a man came onto the restaurant's porch and started setting up some sort of Hibachi grill. Then a woman came out and smiled and waited for us to say something, and we hadn't really decided if we wanted to eat there or not yet but we followed her into the restaurant anyway.

She asked if we wanted a table or a room. We saw the rooms to our right. They were walled off with thin wooden partitions covered in paper with flowers in it, and had sliding wooden doors with translucent panels. I got all excited because I wanted the most Asian-ey experience possible. We took a room.

We had to remove our shoes before stepping inside, because we walked on the knee-high platform where we'd be sitting. At first glance, it looked like we were entering a tiny room with an elevated floor where we'd be kneeling at our table.

The waitress seated us and brought menus. We stared at them. She came back and took our drink order, and we were still staring at the menus. When she came back five minutes later...still staring. She said in poor English to let her know when we were ready, and closed the door. She had left two small bowls of food on the table.

She shouldn't have brought the two little dishes. They just distracted us from our menus.

One dish held a vinegarey sauce with raw white onion chunks and two pieces of spicy pepper. The other dish was yellow, and the things in it were kind of shriveled and smelled like a beach at low tide and were cold and chewy and kind of fibrous, like cold chewy shriveled fibrous pieces of...I don't know...celery or something. It was some kind of vegetable, and before we got here everyone always talked to us about Kimchi, so that's what I assumed it was. We asked the waitress what it was. She had to think for a few minutes of what the stuff was called in English and, after a few moments, said "Yellow beet?" The taste wasn't bad, but I couldn't get past the consistency.

Once we identified the weird yellow things, we asked the waitress to translate a few items on the menu. We ended up ordering by pointing at pictures. I pointed at a picture with beef, smothered in a thick yellow sauce, over lettuce-like vegetables. Joe ordered something with chicken in it.

My meal was delivered first. It was beautifully presented. Small slices of beef were arranged in a circle over a bed of lettuce, with a flower made of beef on top; also, a slice of cucumber, some lemon slices, and a little tuft of what I think was sliced lemongrass. The dish didn't have a thick yellow sauce at all. The beef looked uncooked. The waitress left the room after placing the dish in the middle of the table. I looked at the red meat and then at Joe. "That's not what the picture looked like," I whispered. He shrugged and smiled like, what do you want me to do about it?

I picked up my chopsticks - this was the first restaurant we'd ever been to with no forks - and used them on a piece of meat. It was partially frozen. Not enough to be inedible, just enough to where you could tell it had been frozen or on ice. Cold, lightly-cooked beef. Mmmm.

It wasn't what I was expecting, but it wasn't bad, so I kept eating. Joe helped. Five or ten minutes later, when the waitress brought Joe's food, the Beef Tataki and its bed of lettuce in another vinegary sauce were almost gone.

Joe's food tasted like normal food. It was chicken deep-fried in a thick batter, over a bed of lettuce, with lemon slices.

We eat off each other's plates anyway, so it was pretty convenient that the waitress placed each dish in the center of the table. From what I understand, that's how you eat in Korea: Everything goes in the middle, and everyone eats from each dish. That's why there was a small plate for each of us on the table.

I had caught a brief glimpse of the clothing of the men seated in the room next to us. They were wearing business clothes. Their meal had been going on before we got there, and through the time we spent staring at our menus (ten minutes,) waiting for our food (twenty minutes and then another ten minutes,) and eating (maybe fifteen minutes,) the businessmen were loudly talking. After we'd put down our chopsticks and began to thoroughly inspect our little room, bored, we heard them still eating and talking. We'd been done for at least ten minutes. In the States, we would've paid our check and been getting ready to leave by that point. Instead, our room's thin door was closed and Joe had begun to make faces and poke things with his chopsticks. We felt like we'd been forgotten by the waitress. We came to the conclusion that meals here take much longer than they do in America.

Finally, we opened the door a crack to signal that we needed service. A few seconds later, the waitress came to the door. "Do you have any dessert?" I asked. She smiled and looked away for a second, figuring out what I was saying, I think. Then, sounding unsure: "Like...ice cream and cake?" "Yeah," I said, "Except...like...Korean." They didn't. I was sad. But we asked for the check.

When it was time to leave, we climbed out of the room and put our shoes back on. We hadn't left a tip on the table. In Korea, apparently, you don't leave tips. I read that, generally, the only workers in Korea who collect tips are strippers. So don't leave money for your waitress.

Walking out of the restaurant, I asked Joe if he was still hungry, 'cause I was. We both were. We stopped at a 7-11 on the way back to the hotel. I'll tell you about that in the next post.

Wallpaper on the Ceilings

Our four-star on-post hotel, the Dragon Hill Lodge, ran out of room on what was to be our second-to-last day in Seoul, and we had to find a new place off-post. They gave me a list of nearby hotels with contact information, and I called around until I found a place with vacancies. At $120 per night, it was the fourth-cheapest place on the list.

Joe was at work, so I packed our two suitcases, two Army duffel bags, two backpacks, and two laptop cases and then packed a taxi with all of it. I couldn't communicate with the Korean taxi driver very well, but I told him I needed to go to the Crown Hotel. He pulled away from the Dragon Hill Lodge (in the rain, because it's rained every day since my arrival) and off we went. And then we drove out of the gates of the Army post.

I was alone in a country where I didn't know the language or customs or anything. I was nervous. As we passed Korean road signs, I was wondering if we were going the right direction, and wondering how long we should drive before I should just jump out of the moving vehicle and escape from this guy who was probably kidnapping me so he could sell me on the black market.

But we pulled up to the Crown Hotel and I got out and dragged all my stuff out and paid the guy and was not kidnapped.

A Korean bellhop whose cheeks were puffed out like he was holding his breath helped me get my stuff to the room after I paid for the night. He had to unlock the room's door after I struggled with the antiquated plastic punched-hole keycard for a few seconds.

It wasn't a name-brand place - not a Sheraton, a Marriott, not even a Best Western or Ramada - but the Crown Hotel looked nice from the outside. The lobby looked nice, too. But the rest of it...

Oh, sure, the picture makes it look cute and quaint. But it wasn't. The hallways, carpeted in dirty uneven holey carpet, were dark enough to make you look at the ceiling to figure out why all the light bulbs were burnt out. It was hot in the room, hot enough to wake me up twice, because there wasn't an AC/heating unit in there, just a vent on the wall. The ceiling had been wallpapered and was lumpy. The room smelled like it had been smoked in every day for the past 400 years. The hallways smelled like acetone fingernail polish remover.

The pictures don't show the weird inch-high change in elevation between the room and the bathroom, or the weird six-inch-high change in elevation between the room and the closet, or the crack in the thigh-high bathtub with the showerhead that had been added long after the hotel had been built with just a bathtub, or the disturbing garish shades of pastel green and peach paint detailing the furniture.

Also not pictured: on the wall over the bed was a dial which read SPEED: HI MED LO OFF. I turned the dial and nothing happened. I'm pretty sure the bed used to vibrate.

The bed felt like it was made out of cardboard, but I didn't really care because the sheets, at least, were clean. There was that. The sheets were clean.

The elevator was probably the smallest I'd ever been in. It advertised massage services.

Apparently, leaning on the elevator's door could result in you falling down the elevator shaft. (Probably not, but that's what the picture looks like, isn't it? And that's creepy.)

The hotel had Korean power outlets and zero American power outlets. Oh, and there were only two power outlets in the tiny room, probably because there weren't as many electrical appliances 400 years ago when the hotel was built.

Maybe I'm being horrible. There were no bugs, and I guess except for the carpets and the smell, the place was clean. It was just another case (as with the day I first walked into my apartment) of not-what-I-was-expecting.

But if there's one thing I'm picky about (and there are actually a lot more things that I'm picky about,) it's hotel rooms.

Anyway, the next night, we had to stay in a hotel again. I was more careful when making the reservation. This one was a Best Western.

I learned that the thigh-high bathtub thing is normal. Also, tiny elevators are normal. And it's normal for there to be an elevation between the bathroom and the room.

But there's really nothing normal about having a speed dial installed on the wall over the bed.

My First 1.5 Days As a Foreigner

My flight out of Seattle left on Sunday morning. About ten and a half hours later, I saw Japan for the first time. For hours and hours and hours there'd been nothing to see but clouds and some in-flight movie about trains that I'm pretty sure they played twice (I think it was "Unstoppable,") and sometimes you could pretend you were seeing the ocean down there, but really there wasn't much to look at. Actually, at first, Japan looked like more clouds.

Can you spot the continent?

 Then it didn't.

Just that morning, I'd been in the US. Now, I was over another continent, another country - and not just another country, but one with a culture so different it was fascinating. The US borrows so much from, is based on, European culture, but Asian culture seems so far removed from everything I know. I was in awe. That was Japan down there.

We landed. It was just a two-hour layover, and I was crammed into a tiny room with like 100 other people. I didn't really care because I had entertainment and because I was prepared to be relatively uncomfortable for the duration of my travel.

This airport was where I first saw other languages dominating English words.

Eventually, we got back on the plane. By the time we landed in South Korea, I'd been traveling for over 65 hours with 4 hours of sleep and had gone close to 70 hours without a shower. I was exhausted and gross.

I dragged my heavy carry-ons through a long line and filled out customs forms and then I had to figure out how to move my 2 heavy carry-ons and 2 heavy suitcases without a luggage cart...but then I finally saw Joe. He really did look different in real life than he does on my laptop's screen.

With two people, moving the luggage was a little easier. We dragged it maybe a quarter of a mile to a bus stop and waited a couple of hours for the bus. The bus stop smelled like rotting onions. It was furnished with stained seats that I wasn't going to sit on, so I sat on top of my suitcase. There were people at the bus stop who had been on the plane with me all day. Joe bought me some Skittles. Then I laid down on top of my suitcase. At my head, Joe was sitting in one of the gross chairs. He closed my eyes and told me to rest and petted my face. I fell asleep. Then the bus came and we stuffed my luggage underneath it and got on it.

The bus was an hour-long trip to take us from the airport to Yongsan. The sky was overcast and gray. I looked out the window as the bus drove past fields, and gardens by the side of the road, and billboards with Korean writing on them. Then I fell asleep. When I woke up, we were somewhere else (though I've completely forgotten where,) and we took a taxi to our hotel.

"NO FORGET THEM! Your Personal Belongings!"

I think it was about 7:30 PM by the time we got checked in and got the suitcases upstairs. I took a shower and cared way more about going to sleep than eating, but Joe coaxed me into putting on something other than pajamas so we could go downstairs and eat. Dinner was at the Mexican restaurant he'd been "saving for us" so had never visited.

We were so happy to be together. It seemed unreal. We shared a seat in a booth and ate each other's dinners while the Korean waitresses cleaned the tables around us and prepared the restaurant to close for the night. In a tank top, I was freezing. I was also pretty glad we'd eaten instead of slept.

But then we did sleep, and that was nice, too.

The view from our room, with a playground, and a mountain that you can't really see 'cause the clouds

The next day started around 7:00 AM when Joe had to wake for work. He got ready for work while I stayed in bed, then I put on jeans and a turtleneck because I was tired of being cold in air-conditioned buildings, and I had no jacket. We walked to breakfast at an American restaurant at the PX food court, probably half a mile away. There was a Taco Bell, a Subway, a Burger King, a Baskin Robbins, a Popeyes, all run by Korean employees. 

We had bacon, egg & cheese biscuits with home fries. Then Joe and I kissed good-bye - but just a peck because he was in uniform - and he went to work. I went to the PX to buy a jacket but they were still closed. So I walked back to the hotel. My jeans were sticking to my legs from the heat and humidity and half-mile walk, and the turtleneck also had been a bad idea. I took a shower and went back to sleep. (Being in an actual bed after sleeping on the floor of my apartment for three months is pretty darn nice, but not as much of a change as I thought it would be. Apparently, as long as I have blankets and a pillow, I'm happy.)

I woke up when Joe came back to the hotel room so we could have lunch together. We went downstairs and ordered Pizza Hut. While we were waiting for our food, I watched a TV hanging on a wall. The channel was turned to a Korean cooking show. All the writing on the screen was in Korean. I watched two men and a woman putting together some food. Then it was time for the unveiling of the dish. And VOILA! Steam billowed out of the pot when the lid was removed, revealing a bed of some green vegetable which was cradling...four whole fish. Mmmm. Their eyes stared out of the steam.

We took our pizza outside and ate at a picnic table. The sky was overcast and gray. We went on a short walk. The grounds of the hotel are very nicely manicured.

I kinda expected there to be at least a few buildings in the style of this gazebo - you know, Asian-looking buildings - in Korea. So far, this is the only Asian-looking building I've seen in this country...and it's in an American area.

After lunch, I still needed a jacket, so we walked to the PX again. I didn't have a ration card, so I couldn't even go in there. Bummer. So we left. We were right next to Joe's temporary workplace, so that's where we walked to next.

One fascinating thing about Korea is that there are gardens everywhere. (Well, I guess I can't say "everywhere" because I haven't been everywhere, but before I fell asleep on the bus, I saw quite a few roadside gardens out the window.) There was one right next to Joe's work building, on a curbed corner of a parking lot.

"Do not eat Tomatoes. One should not do what troubles one's conscience. - Tomatoes Farmers"

I went back to the hotel, did some ration card paperwork, probably fell asleep again, I don't remember.

Joe was released from work a bit early. He took me to a war museum he'd been to. I think it was about 3/4ths of a mile away. I began to realize why Joe thought nothing of dragging the suitcases a quarter of a mile the day I got here; here, he walks everywhere.

"Pedestian Prohibited"

My camera couldn't capture the size of the museum building.

In the top picture, in the background on the mountain, you can see Seoul Tower.

One eye-catching exhibit was the teardrop made from the dog tags of men who died fighting in the Korean War.

Also at the museum:

Some kind of Tropicana sparkling apple-flavored drink I would've tried had I had Won to put into the vending machine.

After the museum, we walked to the PX for dinner. It was raining. Joe had bought an umbrella for me before I arrived in Korea, and we spent most of the walk both trying to fit under it. (Well, that's what I was trying for, but he didn't really care and ended up soaked.) Dinner was Americanized Chinese food served by Koreans. We walked back to the hotel in the rain and bought dessert from the hotel's small bakery, then watched TV and went to sleep.

The end.