Home Sweet Home

Greetings from Geoje Island!
I have had a few requests for pictures of the apartment... so here you go! It is fairly new, but very small! It is amazing to me that people that live in a country that has the fastest internet in the world can live so simply, and in such a small space. It isn't easy, but we are working out any difficulties and making the best of this apartment situation!

Above is the entry way, you can see we take our shoes off before coming in the house, it gets really dirty really fast so this helps cut down on the sweeping and mopping you have to do. When you have a bigger house it can be a bit dirty and you don't notice, but if your small apt gets dirty you can tell really quick! Our towels were drying off on the chairs, but we were new when these photos were taken, so now we just shove them outside on the drying rack with the rest of the laundry!

We were still moving in and unpacking so that is why my make up is on the kitchen table, but this is our refrigerator and freezer and oven! haha. We can only do so much fresh produce shopping each time we go out, so at least we never over buy and let food go bad. I think right now we have bread, cheese, pepsi ( which is much cheaper than coke here... weird) and some left over pizza in there!

Ahhhh the bathroom... it is literally a shower head attached to the sink... They say you don't waste so much water this way, but I say I end up ruining alot of toilet paper this way when the shower head gets away from you! Right now it is in the storage position, but you can just take it down and wash with it durin a shower. There is just one big drain on the floor under the sink, but the floor is usually still pretty wet most of the time... That has taken alot of getting used to!

Here is the kitchen, we have some food in the cubbords, (we got rice!) since we don't have a real oven, just the one above the freezer, so we use the burners to cook alot of food! Also I do dishes pretty much every day now since we only have two of everything, and if something is dirty, it is easier to clean it right after you eat than just leave it in the sink to set.

Like our cool seventies style wall paper, it is only on one wall for some reason, I guess that is an accent wall, I know my interior design friend Amanda is gonna love this! I didn't get a good picture of it, but we had a big yellow couch on the side wall, but we had a really nice working table/desk on the porch so we moved it inside so we had somewhere to sit and work on the laptop once we get internet! Don't let the comfy blankets fool you, we have a Koreanized bed... it is very very firm.... I really don't like how I wake up after sleeping on my side and my arm is asleep and then I suffer through pins and needles for ten minutes.

This is the desk, as well as part of the drying rack on the back porch! There is a porch that runs the legnth of the apartment, and all our windows open up to it... it is somewhat of a hallway, but it is very common in all Korean style apartments to have it

And on the other end of the porch is the washer! It is in Korean, and totally electronic, so we had to get our friends from work, Daniel and jenny to come over and show us how to use it! We now have clean clothes... but they are air dried, they don't use dryers much here in Korea, which is really hard to get used to... I love warm clean clothes from the dryer, not still line dried jeans that take a day's wear to get soft again! Oh well, we are making a few sacrificies to get this amazing experience, but we will certainly appreciate warm fuzzy towels when we get back to the states!

Since our apartment is so small we try to go out as much as possible during the day! Here is a shot I took when we walked up to the big hill on the other side of the harbor, they have an abundance of beautiful wild flowers here, and since the sun was getting ready to set, this was a great shot!

We then walked over to the Geoje Pleasure Cruise Dock to see people fishing, and just sat on the benches for a bit trying to work on our hangul or telling each other funny stories from that day at work.
Here is a picture up the Boardwalk, it felt almost like being at Long Beach, but the fact that when you looked over the side you could see a motorcycle or scooter covered in barnicles makes you realize this is not a small town on the coast, it is a big city! Korea is kinda dirty sometimes. For a country as advanced in technology it would not hurt them to put a trash can out in public places, but Koreans are still very neat, if one person leaves a cup, then more and more people will put trash in the same place so there is just a small junk pile that builds up until whoever owns the area cleans it up!


I told Joseph he could have this scooter if he really wanted one!

We then stopped at a small grocery store and bought drinks, It is in Korean, but you can still tell what it is by the label. We got a pepsi and a orange fanta!

They are really into indoor golf here, we hiked up this hill to get a better look and this place had people on the roof shooting golf balls into this big green net, this place was also a hostel ( like a hotel for poor backpackers) and a restaurant. But we had other plans for dinner that day!

We decided to go the only self-declared western restaurant on the Island, it had been about two weeks since we had any mexican food, and On the Border was really calling us, so we went to the WA-BAR and had NACHOS!!!! ...kinda

They were spicy, but it was not the typical mexican spice you expect, and this was not ground beef it was technically beef, but it was Bulgogi which is a different cut and part of the cow, and the throw in the fact that you eat them with chopsticks... well the wa bar had good beer, but the nachos ( that cost 17,000) were a bit of a dissappointment. We did discover though, that Korea has a really nice beer called Hite, that is not to bad, and both of us enjoyed a small bottle and they also gave you unlimited rice crunchy things, so we pigged out on those!

Chopsticks and Nachos... who knew!