Ahneong-haseoyo!

*Warning: Please proceed with caution, this is a very long blog.


We finally have internet access at our apartment! So, welcome to the first real blog/update from Pyeongtaek, South Korea! John and I have been here now for 11 days and already feel at home in this far away city. But let's start at the beginning...

We flew out of SFO on Friday, August 8th at around 2 pm. My parents and sister accompanied us to the airport, which meant a great help with our NINE BAGS but which also meant a bloated and teary face for me over our long goodbye. I've never been so far away from my family before; I take great comfort in Skype, however, and the fact that I chatted with my family just yesterday with full web camera access so that I could see my parent's dear faces and my sister's new haircut (everyone who loves us needs to download Skype so that they can talk to us for free (it's a free download, even if you don't have a web camera, www.skype.com)).

Ok, so. The flight was 12 hours and it felt that long. Korean Air runs a very nice flight, though. We found ourselves impressed with the touch screen TVs on the backs of every seat which provided us with hours of entertainment. The food was really good, surprisingly; they served us traditional Korean bi-bim-bop with spicy red pepper paste, sticky buns, fruit, and all of the 7up that I could drink. Sounds pretty good, right? Well the down side was that we had requested exit row seats because of our ridiculously long legs but we didn't get them, sad face. (They actually gave us seats one row behind the exit row...just to taunt us) So it wasn't the most comfortable 12 hours of my life.

We landed at the Incheon/Seoul airport at 6 pm Saturday, August 9th Korean time. The first thing that struck us (besides Korean mothers loudly yelling for the children) was the humidity. Even inside the airport our skin could feel the difference in the air and I felt as if my skin was begging me to get back on the plane. Humidity = instant sticky. We were exhausted, neither of us had slept on the flight, and now we were sticky but we knew that we had to mentally prepare ourselves for what was coming next: retreiving our NINE BAGS and heading towards customs. John set up a good system for retreival of the NINE BAGS; he set me up in a corner of the baggage area with two of the airport carts while he waited for our NINE BAGS to head down the carousel. After about 15 minutes we had retrieved 7 bags and 1 djembe and were still waiting on my guitar. I was getting a little worried so I walked around the baggage area looking to see if it had been put with the fragile items. Sure enough I spotted my guitar, being held by a Korean customs agent walking my way. I tried to gesture with my hands that the guitar belonged to me, pointing to the guitar and pointing to myself. He also began to gesture to me and I got the idea that I needed to follow him. So I gestured to John and the two of us pushed our heavy airport carts after the customs agent.

He brought us to the searching area where a Korean traveler was having his luggage "searched" which basically is where a customs agent takes your suitcase (or NINE BAGS, in our case), opens it up, turns it over, dumps everything out of it, looks through it all a little, and tells you to put it all back inside. John and I looked at each other worriedly; with our NINE BAGS this process could take forever. The customs agent who was holding my guitar motioned for us to stay put for a second and called over another Korean woman who looked like she was in charge of the place. They began speaking Korean to each other, motioning to us and our bags. The woman's eyes got big as she looked at all of our stuff. I'd like to think that she also noticed the sweat dripping off our foreheads and the worry in our eyes. My heart leapt for joy as she smiled at us and motioned for us to just go, bypassing any customs procedures at all. The man holding my guitar looked taken aback, but she was in charge, so after running my guitar through what looked like an X-ray machine he let us go. And that is the story of how we waltzed through baggage claim and customs at the Incheon airport in under 20 minutes with NINE BAGS. Praise the Lord!

Our good friend Johnny (who is also a teacher at the same Center) and one of our new bosses Mrs. Eem were there to greet us after we escaped from customs. The four of us got in an airport bus with our NINE BAGS and began the hour trip to our new home, the city of Pyeongtaek. Pyeongtaek is considered a small city here in Korea, but for John and I it is anything but. I mean, it's no San Francisco, but with a population of 400,000 people, Pyeongtaek holds its own. It's a rectagular shaped city with a bustling downtown area, loads and loads of restaurants (including many Western ones like McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, etc.), many community gardens, shopping malls, and mopeds. Our apartment is located in a quiet area of town right next door to Johnny's apartment building and also right behind the Pyeongtaek Youth Community Center which is our place of work. So, thankfully, in this land of stickiness our commute to work is nothing but a 2 minute walk.

And now for our apartment, the moment you have all been waiting for. It's wonderful and we love it. We were anticipating it being much smaller than it actually is, and it turns out that it is the absolute perfect size for us. I can't tell you how much I wanted to upload a video tour of our apartment for you, I may have even told many of you that that was the plan. However, sigh, after many (and I mean many) attempts at uploading our video tour, we've come to the unfortunate realization that it's just not going to work. So, instead and only slightly lamer, for your viewing pleasure, a photo-tour of our lovely new home:

COME ON IN!
Click here to view the photo-tour.

So, that's our apartment, we love it. We're pretty much settled, we have a few more things we'd like to pick up, but for the most part we'd really like to keep it simple here.

For the last 10 days, John and I have spent our time setting up our apartment, shadowing classes at the Center, familiarizing ourselves with our new city, experiencing Korean food and culture, and studying the language. We've also been able to hang out with Johnny quite a bit which is great, it's wonderful to have a friend here. We're so excited to finally be here and although the pangs of homesickness have hit us a few times already, we've found that as long as we commit ourselves to keeping in touch with those we love we will be just fine.

We've also committed ourselves to this blog, so over the next year you will find us blogging regularly about our new culture, language, food, and teaching experiences. So please stay tuned! We are so very grateful to all of you for your support, prayers, and kind words, WE LOVE YOU. And praise to God for His constant grace, His never-ending love, and for tasty Korean food.