First: thank you all for your concern! My luggage arrived on Tuesday and I have plenty of clean clothes now! And I think all our mailed packages arrived today, so we have all our stuff and are ready to go.
Okay, cars and groceries isn’t a terribly inspiring title, but they’re pretty exciting pieces of our new life here. On Saturday, we maxed our all our ATM withdrawals, and bought a car from a teacher here.
The previous owner had to upgrade to an automatic, because his wife just couldn’t figure out the manual transmission. After my first attempt yesterday, I think I’ll be only driving around here on the rural roads for some time yet. I definitely stalled out several times just trying to back out of the parking space.
Having our own wheels gives us a lot more freedom to explore. We spent Sunday during the day in our closest town: Molseulpo, which is about a 7 minute drive and right on the coast. We explored the volcanic shoreline for a while before finally finding the beach.
The water was pretty warm, but dirty – there’s definitely a lot of trash just thrown along roads and beach fronts here. We waded a bit and watched the tiny crabs in the tide pools.
We also stopped at Kosa-Mart, a medium-sized grocery type store. We spent about an hour wandering the aisles and trying to figure out what we were finding. Some things had recognizable labels, brands, or a few words of English. Others we just held up and tried to guess from the pictures. My favorite: the whole wall of SPAM! Felt right at home.
Here’s some of our haul. You’ll recognize a couple western things (Frosted Flakes) and some less recognizable. We’re trying to dive into local foods as much as we can. You can find most anything western you’d want, if you’re willing to pay for it. So we’ll have tastes of home, but mostly eat what’s most easily available, which means lots of rice, spicy things, seafood, and new tastes.
Speaking of eating, we’re both trying to learn to eat like real Koreans, with real Korean chopsticks. They’re different than any chopstick I’ve ever seen – they are metal and flat, which means they’re slippery, pretty heavy, and harder to use, but we’re catching on! The tip from the pros: hold the chopsticks further back (basically all the way to the end away from the food) to look more like a native!
Food is helping us create our sense of place a bit, and the car is letting us really explore. We’ll have more stories from our first hike, first trip to the city, and the beginning of the school year soon.
Also – sorry if you tried to access the calendar already. Should be up and running now!