Home Sweet Home!

Ok, so maybe I will only get to update the Blog once a week. We are BUSY!! Whew! School, homework, playdates, Korean Tea Ceremonies, Bingo, Hiking, I tell you, it's like living on a cruise ship. For those of you not on FB, the latest news is that the Koreans that Jeff works with told us this week that they are all coming over for a dinner party at our place this Thursday to welcome us (!) 7+ of them and their spouses. Ok, I have like 6 plates and we did have 4 wine glasses but we already broke one so now we have 3. Are you kidding me?!? So I know what I will be doing this week - buying plates, glasses, and figuring out what I am going to cook. They are all bringing a dish thank goodness. I expect this means we will be left with a fridge full of very marginal leftovers. The kind where you want to eat it so you don't waste food, but dear Lord, what IS THIS? Yeah, that kind of leftovers. PSYCHED!

I told the kids that they should each pick their fav American thing and we will have it out and Teddy promptly told me that his pick is a dish of M&M's. Sasha hasn't gotten back to me yet. I would serve them pretzels but the only ones I have found are the mega bag at Costco. You know the ones they serve at huge gatherings that are little, too crunchy and always slightly stale. I am going to inport Rold Golds and change everyones lives. (BTW, any care packages sent our way needs to include some Rold Golds - even if it's the little 99 cent gas station size. Use a bunch of 'em for packing material you guys, I'm serious...)

Ok, so I promised you a tour of the place now that we are all settled in. This is home sweet home:

Our complex is high on a hill and you can see it from all over town so it's always easy to navigate home. Our building has peek-a-boo views of the ocean and the Hyundai cranes, but it faces in a fantastic direction, so we get amazing sunlight all day long which is great.
Many of you will see this and wonder how I (hates cities, loves green space, hates crowds, loves wilderness) am dealing mentally with living in a high rise and many of you have already asked. I am just fine with it folks, because I know it's temporary. It's kind of like trying on someone else's life and it's kind of fun. Also there is no yard work and no fire ants! Seriously though, I told Jeff that for the kids' sake I hope that each experience we have of living in a too big house with a swimming pool is balanced out by some time in a small apartment. They need to get that most of the world does not live like that.
Our building is very cold and stark all the way up to the door of the apartment. So I hate it on the outside but love it on the inside.

Once you get inside the main door, we have a little vestibule with a coat rack and a ton of cabinets and some Japanese-style sliding doors. It's like a little transition area from the industrial feel of the elevator and hallway to the cozy interior of the place. We all keep all of our shoes here since we have much less closet space in the bedrooms and no one wears shoes in their house so it's great that this little room is literally lined with cabinets from floor to ceiling.

When you go thru the sliders, the kid's bathroom is to your left:

And their bedroom is straight ahead:
We brought these loft beds from IKEA anticipating much smaller spaces. They barely fit in the room, but they were SUCH a good call. The kids have the entire floor space of the bedroom to play. As you can see, under Teddy's bed is Dinoland USA:
And under Sasha's bed is Kit and Emily's house. She goes in there and I just hear her chatting away with the "girls" and their dogs. Max likes it under there too..
Next door to their bedroom is their playroom. It is really, really sunny. The camera kept making the picture dark so the sunroom wouldn't be overexposed, so you'll have to take my word for it.
Ted loves coming in here to spread out his train set or Playmobil. It's a fun space.
Then we go down the hall (it's not dark like this) to the living room on the left, Kitchen on the right, and at the end of the hall, our bedroom (left) and study (right).
This is our living room and again it seems very bright and open with sun streaming in all day. Looking forward to sitting out on the "veranda" when the weather gets warmer.

This is our Kitchen. Very functional, but NO workspace. Especially after the counter space I got used to in TX. Very spoiled....

Our Bedroom. Note the awesome mirror I got from mousesurplus.com that originally hung at Disney World. Oh yeah baby!

We have this little dressing area/closet area on the way to our bathroom which is nice when Jeff gets up in the morning. He can go in here and close the slider and get dressed and not wake me up.
The think-tank. Always a disaster, but what haven of productivity isn't my friends - am I right?

This is our little dining area attached to the kitchen. Love the sliding doors. We had friends over for dinner Friday night and when the adults were having conversation and the kids got too loud we just shut the doors.

This little speaker is on the wall in the hallway. Several times a week a little chime will go off and someone makes an announcement in Korean for anywhere from 1 - 5 minutes. All I can do is stand and listen and hope that the message is not "the building is on fire, please exit via the stairs in an orderly fashion" or "North Korea has invaded. Grab your children and get out while you still can!".
Usually after one of these messages I run to the window to make sure that people are not fleeing the building like rats leaving a sinking ship. After a few minutes, if nothing has happened, I go back to what I was doing. I have GOT to start learning Korean....
The rice cooker. Waaaay too many options.
The washing machine. I have after 3 weeks I have sucessfully found a washer setting AND a dryer setting that results in clean, dry clothes. Jeff used the Ipod translator to try to figure out the drier settings and is pretty sure that one of the options is "fire lip". He is lobbying heavily for this to be his new Korean name.
So there you have it. You can picture us in our little abode, all snug, comfortable and happy and hopefully (grandparents) worry less. We are all settled in and it's hard to believe we have only been here 3 weeks. We are off to go on a "Hash" this morning, it's something organized by the Aussies, Kiwi's and Brits: everyone goes on a hike and then shares a community feast. My kind of outing. I will take lots of pictures. So have a great weekend yourselves, and please, if North Korea DOES invade, somebody send me a text; You'll probably know about it before I do....