Anyeong Haseyo (hello) from South Korea!

We have been in South Korea for about a week and a half now. I almost can’t believe it! I have so much to write! My goal in this post is to fill you in on what all has gone on since we’ve arrived, and then I hope to update the blog every few days, so I don’t have to remember as much! Also, I think Michael is actually going to take some time to post on the blog as well. So, you will be able to hear things from his perspective, as different as it may be! ☺ I apologize for not posting sooner--we have had some technical difficulties as we have not actually had internet hooked up in our apartment yet and we have to pick up on neighboring wireless frequencies. This has been quite frustrating sometimes, having to set the laptop in the windowsill or go up to the roof of our apartment to pick it up. Yes, we can go on the roof! Pretty sweet. Okay, I digress…back to our arrival in Korea…

We left the states very early Tuesday morning, June 3rd after spending about 4 days in Houston with Michael’s sister, Rachel, her husband, Aaron, and their new baby Phoebe! We are so thankful we were able to meet Phoebe before we left. She is adorable and we are already pestering them to email us more photos of her!! The Lord worked everything out for us! Rodney, my father-in-law, came back from Houston earlier than Vicki, my mother-in-law, did and so he took us to Little Rock the evening before our flight to eat a delicious dinner at the Saddleback Grill, and then drop us off at our motel. Our flight left at 6 am, so rather than have someone drive us SO early in the morning, we stayed in the Comfort Inn Airport and had a shuttle drive us instead. The motel had freshly baked cookies in the lobby at 8 pm, so that made me very happy. ☺
We flew from Little Rock to Atlanta, and then from Atlanta directly to Seoul
On Delta/Korean Airlines. The long flight was honestly very uneventful, with the exception of my travel-sized perfume bottle shattering in my “airline approved” Ziploc bag when it fell out of my purse while checking in. I spent a good half hour in Atlanta cleaning all of my other liquid containers and rinsing off shards of glass into the sink, and now that purse and everything in it still smells of Jessica McClintock perfume. The kind of sad part is, I have had that perfume sample for YEARS, and never really wore it. I found it while packing to move and decided I really liked it, wore it for 2 days, and then shattered it. Oh well!
We arrived at Incheon International Airport in Seoul on Wednesday afternoon. We were told that we would just need to look for a driver holding up a sign with our names on them. We never found him. We seriously waited for over an hour, walking around, looking for names at other gates, just to make sure we didn’t miss the guy. He wasn’t there. Praise the Lord that the week before we left, one of my co-workers here had found me on Facebook and gave me her phone number in case someone didn’t show up to pick us up, so I called her from a payphone and was given directions on what to do. We took the airport bus from Seoul to Suji, our area of Yongin City, and were dropped off at a bus stop, where a second later, 2 guys from our school were there with a van to pick us up and drive us to our “accommodation” as they called it. 

  Here is the sign for the Airport "Limousine" (bus) that we took.

        

Here are some photos of us at the airport, waiting for the bus.  I look nasty.  We had so much luggage and Michael was a little frustrated. :)

We got to our apartment, literally put our suitcases down, and then they decided to take us to our schools and show us around and out to dinner. So, we got a little tour of the schools (our schools are 3 blocks from each other) and then got to eat dinner at an amazing little restaurant where we had galbi, traditional Korean barbecue. It was AMAZING! We sat at a little round table with a sort of grill in the middle of it, and they brought us out tons of sides and 4 huge pieces of pork that they cut up with scissors and cooked over the flames with vegetables and stuff. You take the meat, rice, soybean paste, and other veges and wrap them in lettuce and eat them. I could seriously eat this every day (if I had a lot of time to eat each day)! It was delish. Michael’s already had it twice since then with some of his co-workers, and I have been very jealous. So, we had an incredible introduction to Korean food, and then we headed home. We live like 5 minutes from a huge shopping store called Lotte Mart,

Lotte Mart!

so we ran there to pick up some towels so that we could shower, and then we went back to our incredibly TINY apartment, which will be our home for the next year!

Our Apartment building, Charmant. We live on the 10th floor.

Our apartment is basically a studio, with an extra room attached. Unfortunately, our bed will not fit in the extra room, so we sleep in the main area in front of a huge window with no curtains.

Our lovely bed, under the window!

We are on the 10th floor, though, so it’s not too bad privacy-wise. I have just had a hard time sleeping past 6 am because it is too bright and wakes me up. We are still working on getting some curtains! So anyway, that was our first day here. We were exhausted and both crashed quickly soon after we got home.
This blog post is really long, and its only about the first day, therefore I am going to just post separately about the rest of our time so far, so you don’t get too bored! I hope to spice it up with photos as well, because I know that’s all you are really interested in! ☺ Come on, that’s why I check people’s blogs, just to see their photos! I think I will start some online photo albums as well, and put a link to them, so that you can see more photos than what I post on the blog. Alright, happy reading, and to be continued…

Leslie

More photos of our apartment...

Our closets.  They are just shelves, no hanging rods.

Here is our entertainment center across from our bed.

This is our little bathroom.  The shower is amazing, though!  Best feature of the place!

Our kitchen/washing machine.  Notice, no oven, just a stove, with a clothes washer below.  It is an LG Intellawasher!  

Our fridge with some random food that we need to throw out, left from the guy before us.  It is strange, the fridge is above and there are like 3 freezer drawers, but others have told us that the freezer doesn't freeze so well.  Oh well, without a microwave we don't really need much frozen food!