Another week come and gone.....or is it 2 weeks. I don't know, just so busy that I can't keep track. Well, life is improving. We are starting to get our collective feet on the ground and are staying very busy. James Dean is hooked up with Boy Scouts, and Ryan just started Tiger Cubs this last weekend, so he is happy. Jordan had a cool field trip up to some caves with some ice sculptures...it was pretty neat. Paris is trying to stay busy with the Young Women at church and Kylee just loves spending her days with her mama. Tracy has got her driver's license and is venturing out some now....Thursday's are story time at the library on post so her and Kylee have been hitting that every week.
We had our first mingle with the natives tonight.....pretty cool. We had 3 glass shelves broken inside of Tracy's china cabinet during the move, and right down the street from us I found a glass shop, so off we went. For those of you that don't know, Microsoft Word has a cool feature: Open up a blank Word document, type out your message, highlight it, right click and choose translate.....this will open a toolbar on the right side that will take you out to a different website that will translate the entire document into the language of your choice. I typed out my questions about the glass, had it translated and off we went. Worked like a champ.....the glass guy could read my note and was able to write out the cost, etc. for me. The people here have been extremely nice and are truly forgiving of us foreigner's that don't know their language. Oh, buy the way.....3 large pieces of heavy glass shelves will cost us 15,000 won, which is just under $11.00. This glass would cost triple that in the states.
We also had the opportunity to go out last Saturday with our Korean landlord and his wife.....they are helping us try to find an entertainment center for the apartment. Trust me when I say communicating on issues like this are impossible without some translators present. After our running around all afternoon we decided to grab something to eat.....this is where Tracy starts to get a little nervous! We went to a Korean food court and they ordered kind of a sampler plate for us to all share......it was very hot; i.e.; spicy but it was delicious. I think he called in tapoki and mondu.....I'm sure that I'm not saying/spelling it right but let me try to explain. First of all everything is in a red sauce, there was noodles, fish cakes, cabbage, and large rice noodles that were more like dumplings. We also had Japanese pickled radish on the side. It was all very good but I would have never known because it truly looks disgusting. Oh, yeah, I forgot the hard boiled egg that was in the middle of all of it.
We plan on getting together with them again hopefully this week and taking them out to eat on post.....unfortunately I think they will be disappointed! We had a great time with them!
Wow, all for now.
Love to all, James
