We've Moved Into Our New Home!

Greetings from our new Home in Korea! Check it out. Here is a picture of us with Mom at one of the entrances to our building (that's the address on the plaque). It is a 4 storey apartment block that they call a "villa" here.

Our neighbourhood is called Hannam-dong ("dong" means neighbourhood), which is a part of Yongsan-gu (a "gu" is a distict) which is located in central Seoul. The second picture is a view of Hannam-dong. Our place is less than a block to the right of the main road in this photo, at the bottom of the hill (you can't see our place in this shot). There are small shops and restaurants a little further down this road. This part of the city has a lot of embassies and many foreigners live here. The Embassy of Thailand is just around the corner .

The past couple of days Mom and Dad have been very busy, making all the banking and rental arrangements, packing our stuff at the guesthouse and moving us over. They said to say thanks to Debbie at BMO for helping with the money transfer. It was real quick! The people at real estate or rental company were great too. Yesterday they drove Dad and most of our luggage through the afternoon rush hour (Dad said he'd never seen so many cars on the road at once!) from where we were staying in Yeoksam-dong (Gangnam-gu) to our new apartment. And today they came to check in on us and brought us a house-warming gift of laundry detergent. This is the custom here and was good because we need to do some laundry.

Here are a couple of pictures of the inside of our place. Here we are watching TV in the spacious living room. That's part of the kitchen and the dining room table in the foreground. The other photo shows us tucked into our new beds.

We bought these Korean style beds (thin mattresses on the floor with a quilted bottom sheet and a duvet) at the E-Mart at the huge Yongsan shopping complex (bigger even that the COEX mall!). We took a subway to the store but had to take a taxi home because we bought a lot of stuff. The shopping was boring for us, but the subway and taxi rides were fun! While we were shopping we had lunch/dinner at the e-mart restaurant. We had a couple traditional Korean dishes: bulgoki (marinated shreaded beef) and donkasu (breaded pork cutlet). The restaurant was a sort of cafeteria but much better. Mom and Dad said the food was pretty good (we liked the rice the best). We have to do some major grocery shopping and more shopping for house stuff so we can start cooking in our new home.

Although we love our new place, it was really great staying at the SWS Guesthouse for the past week. The people there were great! They even arranged for a driver to take us to our new place. Here is a photo of our family ("uri kajo" in Korean) standing in front of the guesthouse.

The other photo above shows us on an unusually empty Seoul subway. The subway here is great. It gets us around the city fast. And we are learning Korean numbers by counting down the number of subway stops we have to go.

Speaking of learning, the son of the building manager is about our age and goes to kindergarten. We might get to go to his school with him. We haven't met him yet. Hopefully we'll see him tomorrow and then go to his school and make lots of other friends here in Korea.

And speaking of school and friends, THANKS to all our friends and classmates at R.L. Beattie school for sending us your comments and best wishes. We miss you guys too!

Love,

Jin and Lili (and Deb and Derek too)