The ROK-y Road

“From there, you submit the form in secret to your school. It’s none of their business what you said on this. That’s nice because it’s really the only time our opinion will be noted. From here it will be up to the school, co-teachers and metropolitan office of education. So what are we doing? Absolutely staying (if we can). We worked for over a year on paperwork just to get here. to be Staying…

Some Earthquake Facts and Rumors

Last Monday (September 12th) we were hit with 2 earthquakes, then this past Monday (September 19th) we had another. All of these we felt  even though the epicenter was 108 miles away from us. In the biggest one our air conditioning unit was shaking, the toilet water was sloshing around and while I was sitting on the floor I was rocked so much I almost tipped over. It was unnerving. The big one…

What We Did Part 2

Day 5? We had heard about this cool beach up north called Ritidian Beach that’s a wildlife preserve so we decided to just drive up there and see what it was. The cool thing about Guam and driving is that there are only a few major roads so you can just start driving and you’ll probably get where you’re going just with common sense. We picked up breakfast – spam and rice and Chamorro sausage and…

What we did in Guam

Days 1 and 2 The first 2 days we didn’t have a car yet because we were being stubborn and cheap. Also we’ve never really rented a car before, There are just  so many horror stories about renting cars online. So we didn’t. Yet. We haven’t really seen the sun in a while because we work indoors and also because the sky is blue maybe 1% of the time. The haze and air quality usually blocks it or…

The Feel of Guam

We wanted to talk about the feel and the look of Guam because it’s such an interesting mix of cultures and ideas. We had no idea going there what it would be like. The Koreans we had talked to didn’t like it and said it was “too American” which we thought was laughable because it is American. Reservation Feel Growing up so close to Ute Mountain Ute, Southern Ute, and Navajo Reservations – we can…

A History of Guam

  We’re going to do a history of Guam first because it’s interesting and it’s all probably stuff you didn’t know about Guam. A lot of it relates to some of the stuff we saw and did. Brief History – colonies The US was a colony and didn’t like that so we quit. Britain obviously said you can’t quit, we had a war. We quit. Then decided the only real way to be a country and prove ourselves as a…

We’re Off

We’re leaving for Guam tonight for almost 2 weeks for a much needed vacation. The heat, humidity, culture, students, coworkers, summer camp, food, smells, culture, air quality, neighbors, people, culture, routine, and culture have been on our nerves terribly  so we’re excited to go to a tiny 30 miles by 9 mile American territory island. There will still be heat and humidity but at least we can…

YNKUWT You’ll Never Know Until We Try – Traditional Korean Alcohols (well, some of them). The traditional section of our local supermarket We bought 6 traditional alcohols that we had never tried before, busted out two shotglasses and got brave. First up was Sansachun… Sansachun 13%  – $3.03 – rice, yeast, cornus fruit, hawthorn berry We didn’t know what a cornus fruit was. We looked it up – it’s…

And Now for Something Completely Different…

It’s no real surprise that we don’t blog anymore. It comes down to a few things. We’ve been here for over two years. Nothing new is going on. We’re preventing new things from going on. Taking an hour taxi to get on a three hour train to get to some “special” town that’s not all that different than all the other “special” things is not appealing to us. Traveling around Korea isn’t rewarding to us.…

Germany: What We Saw

We re-visited a lot of places we had been before/lived 5 years earlier. So we don’t include pictures of famous landmarks mostly because we’ve seen them and you have, too. In Karlsruhe we visited the old standard places. There isn’t honestly much to see in Karlsruhe but we still like it. The most interesting thing that happened while we were there was Karneval (Carnival if you’d like or even…

Probably the  biggest news to come out of our big trip to Europe was that we got engaged there! The whole time we had been planning our vacation Chris was researching rings. We decided on Australia for a while so Chris researched getting a ring there, we changed to New Zealand, Chris diverted his research to New Zealand and on and on (Guam, Hawaii, Colorado, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, all…

The Great Germany Vacation

It took us a long time to decide where to go for our longest vacation of the year (our winter vacation time). We had actually been talking about it for about 4 months and intermittently planning it the whole time. We considered: going back to the US again going to Australia or New Zealand but not both seeing somewhere new in Asia going back to Germany or seeing something new in Europe What we…

A Clean-ish Bill of Health

On Monday I went back to the hospital. I had blood-work done and got another x-ray. My lungs look more or less the same – a little more black which is important. For those who don’t know pneumonia is a bacterial/viral (or even caused by foreign objects) infection where the air sacs in your lungs fill with pus/liquid. This makes your lungs appear whitish when you want them to be black. The blood…

No Hospital For Me- Yet

At 3 o’clock I went to the hospital hell bent that I would not be admitted and no one could do anything to make me stay. Seriously, what would they do? Because there are no hospitals in our area we had to drive about 30 minutes away into proper-Daejeon. I’ve only been to a Korean hospital once last year when I got my renewal checkup. They’re all laid out pretty much the same, it’s pretty well…

This is extra long but I don’t feel like breaking it up into multiple posts. Instead I will put labels at the top of each part so you can leave and come back if you’d like. Also I guess this is a story where I used 10 words when 3 would’ve sufficed but it entertained me to write it so I’m not editing it down. Background Story In which the author tells you about the past month’s terrible air…

This is just a little update mostly about money money money. Everybody’s money. Our money, Korea’s money, and then our future money, I suppose. Our Money: We’re pretty chuffed to announce we paid off Chris’s loans in full over a month ago. It was a pretty nonchalant deal, no parties were had or thanks shouted to the heavens. We paid it off and by the time it cleared we still owed a dollar in…