Another year older and shallower in debt...

Wednesday was Michael's 31st birthday.  It was also our 3rd anniversary.  How time is flying by!  I sound like an ajumma (Korean word for older lady).  But anyway, I am here to brag about my amazing husband.  I love Michael Preston Rains more than anyone else on this earth.  And, if you know Michael well, you know that life with him is rarely boring.  Actually, it's the complete opposite.  Strange things always happen when he is involved.  I blame it on the ADD.  haha  Anyway, so despite the crazy things and sometimes seemingly annoying things that have plagued us, I mean happened to us, over the past 3 years of marriage, I am still very thankful for my husband, very much in love with Michael, and am so thankful that he feels the same way about me.  Don't worry, nothing strange happened to us that day.  It was a surprisingly normal day!   So, Michael planned for us to go to eat at a galbi restaurant.  Galbi (pronounced kalbee) has quickly become my favorite food here in Korea.  You sit at a round table that either has a gas grill in the middle or just a pit and they bring flaming hot coals and set them in the center for you to cook your food.  It's a Korean barbecue restaurant, and the food is SOO good!  He took me to downtown Suji to a galbi place that I hadn't been to yet, and it was delicious.  Oh, yes, something disappointing did happen, now that I think of it.  I brought my camera and was SO excited to get some photos of us on our anniversary eating galbi, and as soon as I turned the camera on, the batteries died.  And emotional me actually shed a few tears over it. but Michael helped me get past it.  We ate a delicious meal, walked around and bought some new shirts at a place that was having a 2 for 1 deal, and then had to get back to go to work.  

When I got home from work (Michael works until 9:30, I work until 11) we decided to open our gifts.  I gave Michael a full-sized ironing board!  Yeah, so romantic, huh?  Michael is obsessed with having his clothes completely wrinkle-free and since we don't have a dryer to tumble press our clothes, we had just bought a little cheap one that sits on the floor.  So now he can stand and iron the wrinkles away every morning!  I also bought him tickets to go see the Suwon Bluewings play at World Cup Stadium.  They are the best Korean soccer team and play only about 25-30 mins away!  So we are excited to go see them.  The other nice gift I got him was a new watch.  This is the 3rd watch I have bought him in our 3 years of marriage (actually, I think one was when we were just engaged), but I think he has finally decided that he will wear it and take care of it, partially because we don't have cell phones yet and he gets tired of asking me what time it is.  It is very nice, and he likes it.  I got him a few other little odds and ends, including tortilla chips and salsa that I found at Lotte Mart!!  We ate it all in 2 days.  Yum!

Michael's gifts are what I want to brag about.  I think I mentioned in the previous post, with Smill Woman, that he bought me a bunch of art supplies so I can spend some time working on my artistic side that has been so repressed all these years of school and teaching.  I found some old drawings that I had done in high school when we were moving to come here and showed them to him, so he decided I needed to work on developing that creative side that rarely comes out of me.  I forgot how much I loved to draw, and that I was actually not too shabby at it either!  Then comes the best gift ever! My favorite painting of all time is called A Young Girl Reading.  I have always loved it since like 10th grade or earlier when we had to do an art report, and I did mine on Jean Honore Fragonard. Then last week one day I had to go to a shop by my school to get some passport photos taken and I saw the painting in the window of the shop next door, and I told Michael all about it. I never thought anything else about it but he got one of his co-workers to go with him and help him haggle for a lower price, so he got an awesome deal on it and I was so surprised!! It's in a really ornate/gawdy frame, that doesn't really go with our little apartment, but who cares. I am happy! 

Here's to another year!

~Leslie

Ode to Konglish

I just decided tonight that I would take pictures of all the "Konglish" that we have acquired in our apartment so far to share with you. Prepare to laugh. If you don't, you're a stick in the mud. ~Leslie :)

Okay, so this is not in our house, but I mentioned it in the blog last night, and I took a photo of it tonight when I walked by on my way to eat dinner.  Hehe  I guess you could be "loving" someone while you are sitting inside a Dunkin' Donuts or something.  Beats me.

"Beautiful Life" is the title of a photo album that Michael gave me for an anniversary gift.  It was just so funny to read the ridiculously long sentence below the title that makes no sense, and doesn't have a period.  We will put all of our cherished Korea photos in this album.

Smill Woman?  What?!  This was yet another gift from my loving husband.  It is a pencil case that he bought me and stuffed with colored pencils, to go along with my nice sketch book that he bought so I can actually sit down and draw some while we are here in Korea.  But, I just can't figure out what it is supposed to mean.  I took it to work tonight and showed it around, and we were bewildered.  Is it supposed to mean "Small Woman" or "Smile Woman" or maybe even "Smell Woman?"  She is a fascinating superhero of some sorts it appears.  We also wondered if there was a "Smill Man" out there somewhere.  Let me know if you find one. Her cape is removeable pleather.  haha

Okay, I was pretty proud of this card that I bought for Michael.  Not only does the white girl look like she has too much freaky blush on, there is also lots of glitter on the heart, and read the caption below.  My favorite line is, "Ever since I met you, things are looking pretty good."  

Another delightful fancy here in Korea is the gift bags (I know that's not a grammatically correct sentence but I don't care).  They don't sell just plain, pretty gift bags with a design on them.  They ALL have some sort of writing on them.  Some talk about how sweet you are, or how much they love you, but this was my all time personal favorite one so far.

It is a gift bag that also teaches you nutrition!  How informative!! :)

This bag looks cute and normal, but looks can be deceiving.  Do you see the word Loving written in the bottom right corner?
Let's take a closer look, shall we??
If for some reason you can't read the font, here's what it says:  People are always forgetting the important thing.  But, you should not forget that.  You are responsibleto somebody you got used to

First of all, it never tells you what that important thing is!  And the best new vocabulary word is:  responsibleto  Wow!  Never heard that one before!!  No wonder they hire so many foreigners to come teach English here.  This is how many of the essays we grade look. :)

Aww, this one is cute.  Michael's card to me.  It WAS a happy present.

And in the stores they have TONS of little notebooks that have the most random sayings on them.  I bought this one for Michael because it has a soccer ball on it.  Let's get play!

I hope you have enjoyed reading this as much as I have enjoyed writing it!  I think we will definitely continue to add Konglish photos as time goes on.  

Here's one more photo, just because I have been waiting to get a good photo of a dog here.  Many of the dogs here get their hair dyed.  People seem to be very homogenous and don't dye their own hair, but they sure love to make their dogs look wild!  I saw one little white dog with yellow ears and a yellow tail.  Here's a dog that looks like he sat on a smurf or something.

He's like, "Please save me before they turn me into a blueberry!"

That's all, folks.

Korean Musings...

Well, I know that Michael has already posted about traffic lights in Korea, and about how no one obeys them, especially not buses. So, just a few minutes ago I was walking around the area of Suji by Avalon, because I am at work right now. Here at the Nokjiwon campus we have what's called "holding period" for the next 2 weeks. What that means is that our students (middle schoolers) are having big exams at their Korean schools, so most of them do not come to Avalon during this time in order to study and prepare for their tests! This also means that we have fewer classes to teach and very few students actually in those classes, but we also have other kinds of work to do instead, like paperwork, lesson planning, revising the textbooks, etc. Anyway, back to my story (sorry, I am definitely a "prefacer"). Since I had no students show up for class, I decided to walk down to the bank and then go to Dunkin' Donuts to get a strawberry banana Coolatta. I was standing at the crosswalk, obeying the red light and waiting for it to turn green, and I noticed there was a Police car parked across the street from the crosswalk, with about 5 or 6 cops (do they use that term in Korea? Maybe it's cop-ee) standing around talking. Some looked like they were going into the building next door, or maybe behind it. I couldn't figure out what they were doing there and I was wondering what was going on, when all of a sudden this car pulls up behind another car waiting at the red light and honks at her. Mind you, she is sitting at a red light with 6 cops in front of her, and the car behind her is honking for her to go. She kind of inches forward but is being very cautious, when the honker decides to swerve to the left of her and go around her, just as a car had turned left onto the street they were coming from. That car honked loudly to avoid a collision, and the annoying honker guy swerves between both cars and makes his right turn. All this is going on, and the policemen NEVER batted their eyes--they didn't even turn around to see why the car had honked!! Wow. I don't know what is in their job descriptions, but it certainly doesn't include enforcing traffic laws!

Here's something else that cracks me up. So, as I mentioned, I was heading to Dunkin' Donuts. There are Dunkin' Donuts shops in pretty much every little neighborhood around here. They are pretty yummy too! What I love is the caption on their drinking cups. It says, " Loving in Dunkin' " on the side. Haha. What does that even mean?! We have discovered the joys of "Konglish"--like Spanglish, but Korean instead of Spanish. The signs and the translations into English of things are SOO hilarious. I will have to take some photos of these for examples when I get home tonight. Michael and I joke that it's similar to Yoda talk. hehe Really, if you say an English word and add the schwa sound at the end, or /ee/, it helps them understand what you are saying. For instance, today we were buying something and we didn't think our Mastercard was working. The clerk said "change-ee?" to us, to see if we wanted to use a different credit card. Haha, it just really makes me laugh.

By the way, today is Michael's 31st birthday and our 3 year Anniversary! I'm going to add some more when I get home tonight about our great day and gifts and everything. So, wait on the edge of your seat!! :)

~Leslie

The many uses of toilet paper...

Since moving to South Korea, I have learned that toilet paper is a multifaceted tool.  I will attempt to list them here for your reading enjoyment!

Different Uses:

1.  As toilet paper

The most common way to use toilet paper is after using the toilet.  That's pretty obvious.  One strange thing though is at my office, there are signs on the restroom stall doors (that have a big skull face and say "Beware!" in English, but the rest of the words are written in Korean, so I don't know how they expect us foreigners to abide by them) which I have learned say that you are not supposed to put the toilet paper in the toilet.  Instead, you are to throw it away in the trash can.  That is still difficult for me to remember or follow, I have to admit.

2.  As tissue, or kleenex

Now, this is something that I don't really find so odd.  I have usually just used toilet paper to blow my nose at home since it is pretty much the same softness (if you buy the quilted Charmin kind) as a tissue, and it saves you from having to pay the extra money for a box of Kleenex.  Usually I save my tissue purchasing for the special mentholated tissues that help your nose in the middle of a bad cold.  However, the toilet paper here is pretty much very thin 1-ply, so you have to tear out a sheet long enough to fold over about 3 times in order to blow your nose without it ripping a hole.

3.  As napkins in a restaurant

So this was a little strange for us.  Depending on the restaurant, the toilet paper/napkin types vary.  In the little Korean dives, they have a square holder on the tables and you have to pull several of the tiniest little squares out to wipe your hands and face with.  Sometimes you just pull toilet paper off of a roll that is located by the purified water cooler (which I think I explained about in a previous post), that every restaurant has.  

4.  As paper towels in the restrooms

So, if you are in a nice restroom in a fancy building, you might get to use actual paper towels.  However, in most restrooms, you wash your hands and then you have to step back into a stall to grab a handful of thin, 1 ply toilet paper to dry your hands off with.  This is the worst, because you know how really thin t.p. will rip apart and stick to your fingers when they are wet?  Yeah, that's just a typical occurrence over here.

5.  As a cleaning rag

Yes, toilet paper is also used to wipe up spills or messes.  Don't need the quicker, thicker, picker upper.  Just run to the restroom and grab a handful of toilet paper!  Then, run back for more, maybe 2 times, when it doesn't soak up all of the mess!

I'm sure that as we are here longer, we will discover even more interesting uses for the wonderful paper.  We'll keep you posted. :)

~Leslie

Traffic lights don’t mean a thing here in Suji, South Korea. Neither do cross walks. Buses, cars and pedestrians ignore all the usual traffic niceties. They run red lights, walk right in front automobiles and honk at everyone else as if they should know they were going to break that law. 

It was raining today, so I took the bus to work. In the 10 minute ride to work, we turned left on an obvious red, almost hit two walkers, who just ran out in front of us, and had to swerve two lanes to get to our stop. As we got off the bus my boss looks at me and states “For Korea, that was a pretty chilled bus ride.” I sure ain’t in Arkansas anymore.

Adios, Michael

My first

I have decided that is time that I enter the world of blogging. My wife has been asking me to ever since she started this here Rains Record. So here I am writing my first post. Most of you know my wife and have read her musings about our life before. I think she does a fine job, but I think everything about her is fine. I figure before I start pontificating about our new life in Suji, South Korea, I need to introduce myself to those who do not know me, or barely know me. I am writing this listening to country music. This would not be so just a few years ago, but as I grow in years, I deeper in appreciation for legends such as Willie and Waylon. I think my wife might be the greatest and dang near prettiest woman alive. I live in mortal fear that the Cubs are going to win the World Series while I live way on the other side of the world. This can not be. I have to be on Wavelen when this happens. Strange things happen to me. I do not know why, but bizarreness has decided that we are going to be good friends. I will write about some of this partnership in the future. You will notice, or already noticed that I don’t like grammar and sometimes refuse to follow its fascist rules. I am a rebel. I will leave you with a quote from one of my favorite musicians, Jack Johnson; “Slow down everyone your moving too fast, frames can’t catch you when your moving like that.” Jack makes me smile.
Adios, Michael

Our First Weekend in Korea

As I probably have told you, we work in the evenings, at hagwons (after school English schools). Michael works 2:30-9:30 and I work 3-11. On our first day in Korea, we got up, spent some time at Lotte Mart getting groceries and a few things for our apartment, and eating lunch. There is a food court there and we decided we would eat at Lotte Mart because they have a bunch of meals that are numbered, so we could just hold up the number that we wanted on our fingers. Ha ha that has been hard, eating out, because most of the time the menus are written in Korean characters, and we cannot read them yet (I am working on learning the alphabet). So we sort of figured out how to get some food, however once we were done we had no idea what to do with our dishes. So, we went over to the trash cans, scraped off our food, and put our dishes in a plastic tub above the trash cans. We later learned that that was all wrong: the plastic tub was to put used water cups in (no one here drinks tap water, so in every restaurant you go in there is a water machine with little cups to drink out of), and you are supposed to take your dishes back to the counter you got them from. Oops.

     

Here we are eating our meal at Lotte Mart.  We were going to share one but we accidentally ordered 2.  It was meal # 2. 

This cracked me up.  A snack with a fried chicken taste, shaped like drumsticks!!

We went to our schools at regular work time that night to “observe” for the evening, and kind of learn our way around and the system, meet people, etc. That went well. We were both taken out by co-workers for dinner and so we are slowly learning how to order things from restaurants that are pretty much staples (kimbap: seaweed rice rolls; bibimbap: a hot bowl of steamed rice with lots of vegetables and a spicy sauce & egg on top; bogumbap: fried rice)

Then, Friday was a holiday (Korean Memorial day), so we got a nice 3-day weekend! We spent Friday exploring around Suji, our district of the city Yongin. We discovered (after lots of walking) a skate park with a climbing wall, E-Mart (another big department store like Lotte Mart), Shinsegae (a huge, very expensive department store that is like 10 stories high, and a CGV movie theater, on the top floor of the department store. 

Here are all 3 aisles of rice cookers...how the heck can one brand manufacture so many different types of rice cookers?!?!

Michael preparing for Ninja Warrior! :)

Something else that we’ve noticed and found funny is that on the basement floor of pretty much any department store, there is a grocery store with lots of food. Kind of random. We also found that the nearest train station to us, Jukjeon, is about a 20 minute walk from our apartment. That is nice, because we like taking the subway and it will take us pretty much anywhere into and around Seoul. It is pretty cheap to travel that way also. Cabs are stinking cheap here also! We are still working on figuring out the bus system: which buses to take where but we are slowly learning more about that. Friday night we saw the new Indiana Jones movie, which was fun. Theaters here are different: you buy your tickets and they assign you a seat. So, you don’t have to worry about getting there really early to save seats, you just have to buy your tickets before they sell out.

Saturday we got up and decided to try to find a place that my Korean co-worker from Searcy had told us about possibly meeting at, Samsung Plaza. Supposedly it was like a big mall with lots of shopping. We read in some papers that our school had given us about a certain bus that would take us there, but then we could never find the bus station or that number bus! We literally walked around downtown Suji for probably an hour and a half trying to find the bus stop across from the Pizza Hut. We later discovered that the Pizza Hut is being remodeled, so that’s why it wasn’t there! ☺ But it didn’t bother us too much because we were able to kind of see more parts of Suji and learn where more things are. We finally decided to walk to Jukjeon and take the train to Seoul for the afternoon. We didn’t have a clue which train station to get off at, so we just agreed on Seoul Station. We figured that would take us to the center of the city, maybe. I did have a map of downtown in my travel book that I had bought back home at Barnes & Noble, and I was determined to find the visitor center and get some good maps in English. Here’s a quick run down of what happened to us in Seoul: we couldn’t figure out how to get across the street (we forgot that if you go underground, you can cross the streets that way) so we asked a cab driver to take us to Samsung Plaza, which was kind of back-tracking. She proceeded to yell at us for about 10 minutes in Korean, we had no idea what she was saying, but knew that she didn’t want to go the other direction than she was already traveling. Oh well. She took us there but yelled at us several times along the way, and when I looked up in my book how to say “thank you very much” in Korean, she said “yah yah.” Whoops. 

There are lots of these neat looking gates all over Seoul.  On the right is a river called Cheongyechon.

  

Michael looked away right as I took the photo.  Oh well.

Turns out the Samsung Plaza we went to was just a big office building for Samsung. We later learned that there are like 3 or 4 Samsung Plazas, and 2 of the others are shopping centers—not the one that we had ended up at! So we just decided to walk around Seoul. We got close to City Hall and saw a ton of people that looked like they were having a carnival or party of some sort. We heard a band playing and decided to check it out. This is when we discovered we were in the middle of the beef protests! I think the mass amounts of people with cow hats and other cow garb on tipped us off. There were people throwing water balloons at a big sign of their president, George Bush, and a cow. Wow! Fun! We walked around for a few minutes and then decided to keep walking. We ended up in a shopping district called Insa-dong and walked around for a little bit looking at some of the goods. I found the most ADORABLE purse, but we did not have enough cash to buy it since we hadn’t gotten all of our traveler’s checks cashed at the airport when we got here. I am keeping my fingers crossed that they will still have it when we go back sometime. 

We found an Italian restaurant to eat at, called Il Mare. The menu was in English, so we were able to order some good food! The interesting part was I ordered Penne Pasta in a cream sauce with mozzarella & frutta. I assumed the fruit would be tomatoes, since they are considered fruit, and I see tomatoes here at fruit juice places. I was wrong. It had pasta, broccoli, and mandarin orange slices and pineapple, in the cheesy cream sauce. Looked strange but was actually pretty good! Michael had a seafood dish that I’m not really sure what all was in it, but he said was very tasty. We got home late that night and crashed again!

Sunday morning we actually got up and were picked up by an Australian couple who took us to a church in Suwon that I had found on the internet. I emailed the pastor and he set us up with a ride, which was great. It is an international, English speaking (for the most part) church called Life Church.  Check out the website.  We met a lot of very friendly people there, and several young couples who are here doing basically the same thing as us: teaching English, saving money, and traveling! I think the craziest part of it all was meeting a couple who had actually lived in Searcy, gone to grad school at Harding, and went to Fellowship Bible church, where I went to church before Michael and I got married, and where we went for the last year that we were in AR. What a small world!! Several of the couples made plans to go out to dinner at a restaurant called Brasilia (a churrascaria!) in an area called Bundang, so we went with them. We met them at the actual Samsung Plaza (we found it!) and walked to the restaurant, and had an amazing meal! It was a lot of fun hanging out with other young married couples who have been here a while and some who plan to stay a few more years as well. We really enjoyed the church and think that we will probably make it our church home while we are here. 

That concludes our first weekend in Korea! Thanks for reading (sorry its so long, like I said, once I catch up I will try to blog either daily or every other day or something so there is not so much to say!). When I get a spare few minutes, I am going to start some online photo albums and link them on here so you can see some more photos besides what I put on the blog.
~Leslie

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!

Babies, babies, and leaving the country!!

I am taking a short break from packing to write a quick post.  I said I would post some photos of my trip to New Mexico, we went to Houston last week and now we have an adorable niece to brag about, so I am going to share some of those photos as well.  Phoebe Rains LeMay was born on Thursday evening, about 6:30.  She was 7 lbs and 20 3/4 inches.  She is precious!  Unfortunately, my camera batteries died after I had taken about 5 photos of Phoebe, and I forgot to take my battery charger to Houston, so I had to wait for some to be emailed to me!  We were able to get our visas without any problems in Houston, so that was great!

Here is the brief update on our travel plans, and then some photos:

Our flight leaves at 6 am on Tuesday morning out of Little Rock.  We fly to Atlanta, and then straight to Seoul, on Delta and Korean Airlines.  Since 

the flight is so early, we are actually going to stay the night in Little Rock Monday night and get a shuttle to take us to the airport early Tuesday morning.  This will get us to Seoul at 3:10 pm on Wednesday, June 4th.  I know we are supposed to look for someone holding a sign with our names, and after that I have no idea what will happen!  We will try to update the blog as soon as we can get internet access, though I don't know how long that will take.

Okay, here are some photos of Phoebe, and then a few of my trip to New Mexico to see my best girlfriends, Christina (& her new baby Lily), who lives there, and Amber, who lives in Tustin, CA.

Here is Phoebe in her adorable caterpillar nightgown given to her by her great-mamaw!  She is one day old!

Rachel and Phoebe are all dressed up and ready to go home from the hospital--two days old!

Here we are eating lunch on a golf course in Las Cruces!  Nice!!

Here are Christina and Lily--she's just napping away!  She was 9 days old in this picture.

Lily and her turquoise bracelet.

Our classic couch pose.  Amber, Chris, Lily, and Leslie.  Friends since we were 8 years old!!
My "pseudo" niece and me.  Don't I look like a natural? :)