Korea - our new home

Well, I have been in Korea for three months now, so I suppose it is finally time to start sharing about our adventures here! It has been, by far, the most stressful move we've encountered yet. Not only were we moving to the other side of the world with a very minimal amount of stuff, but the army side of things here is really messed up. To make a long story short, people don't do their jobs, many leaders couldn't care less about making sure their soldiers and families are taken care of, and it takes FOREVER to get paper work signed. This caused my first month here to be very stressful as it took a long time to get into our new home, and we are STILL waiting on paperwork so we can get a car. I spent the first week here at the hotel on post and the following two weeks with a wonderful, generous missionary couple who took us in. Then we finally moved into our apartment (at the end of June) a couple weeks before we were technically allowed to thanks to wonderful, caring Korean people who got in trouble from the army for helping us. But, I don't want to dwell on all that. Time to share our home in Korea!

We live in an apartment complex which is just a five minute walk to gate two, and about a 25 minute walk from gate one (where most everything is.) We live on the 13th floor (good thing we're not superstitious!) in a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment. The apartments here are really nice and pretty high tech. Some of the high tech features include heated floors which have thermostats for every individual room (not that we've had to use that yet), a keypad on our door to enter a code, therefore never really needing keys, a touch pad that gives us controls to all the lights in the house as well as opening the door downstairs and our own front door when people come with video communication, and a radio and tv in the kitchen where we can also keep an eye on kids if they are playing at the playground downstairs (which obviously, my kids are too young for, but still cool.) Also, if we had our surround sound speakers here, they have plugs in the walls in the back so you don't have to have wires going across the floor or ceiling. Oh, and as you'll be able to see, the wall paper selections are...colorful.

Our entry way. The door on the back right is our front door. We also have two large, double-door closets in the front. One of the closets has a huge shoe rack that fills the whole closet. (It actually has in our lease that we aren't to wear our shoes in the house as is custom in Asia. We're used to that anyway though.)

Our living room and dining area

Our kitchen. On the right, you can see our "oven" Koreans don't use ovens so we just have a small one on the counter, which takes some getting used to. The window over the sink looks over the laundry room where we have our washer/dryer machine. Really, it's just a washing machine because the drying function is useless unless you want to take 5 hours to dry a load of clothes. There are tons of pantry cupboards on the right wall - really even more than we need. :) Also, in the back, you'll notice the three red buckets. They are for the crazy amount of recycling. They recycle EVERYTHING here. It's really impressive. The buckets are for sorting the wrappers (like chip bag type stuff), paper, cans, plastic, etc. We even have a separate bag for food trash that they apparently use as compost.

Claire's bathroom

The office which is located right next to Claire's bathroom. There are two large double-door closets in this room. Also seen is the little porch area. Since we have to hang all of our clothes to dry, this is where we do it.

The porch. There are also lots of shelves which are handy for storing a bunch of Chris's Army gear.

Master Bedroom (there is so much room since there is a huge wall of closets, a separate walk in closet, and we don't have our bedroom furniture with us as it is in storage in the states. Notice that whole side of the apartment has floor to ceiling windows (this room, the living room, and the porch by the office.) Lots of light!

Wall of closets. So much storage!

Another view. Claire wanted to be in the pictures. :)

Our vanity area.

Across from the vanity is this walk-in closet.

Master bathroom. Our shower is especially nice. :)

Had to show you our fancy Asian toilet. I plan to one of these days get brave enough to try some of the buttons, but I haven't yet. I'm scared to spray water all over the floor!

The girls' room. It's really supposed to be an office as there aren't any closets except for a storage closet in the back (behind that door.) It's right across from our bedroom though, and Claire especially feels less scared being closer to us.

Another view with little Maddie crawling in. :)

The view from our living room of the playground at the bottom of our building. Every building has a playground at the bottom of it, and there is a larger playground, track, basketball area, and splash park to the side of the whole apartment complex.

 

 

 

 

 

The view from our living room. Just a little tease of the beautiful mountains here. They surround us and are somewhat jagged (which you can't see here.) I LOVE the beautiful mountains. :)