Here or there

Last night, I'm sitting in Chili's sipping a margarita and watching Nick Collison (go KU!) play basketball on the big screen tv, waiting for a takeout order of a swiss mushroom burger and shrimp pasta. The serving staff began a parade out with tambourines and noisemakers to sing the birthday song to a booth stuffed with merry-making 20-somethings.

But Shannon, you say. Aren't you in Korea? Not only Korea, but didn't you just move from the capital to a less metropolitan area? Ah, reader. You forget that I am on a military base- where you can forget entirely that you're in another country. And when you look a little closer, you can see some small differences. All the servers are Korean and have the language around the menu down pat but are eager to work on other conversational English. Most of the folks in Chili's (and pretty much anywhere we go these days) are in military uniform.

It's been hard to write lately because there's so much changing I don't know where to start. I can already tell that some of the things that seemed insanely weird to me before are now less so. When I went to the gym last night, the woman at the front desk was happy to give me a tour and only about halfway through I realized she probably thought I was military myself instead of a civilian. And for the first time, that struck me as a compliment instead of a strange miscommunication. Yesterday we met some of the folks hubs will be working with and one of the guys was nice enough but was quite down on Korea and couldn't understand why anyone would want to live off base. It seemed like a logical argument until I remembered that living on post was something I would have shuddered at a mere month ago.

Some of the great things about moving so far: time with the sister and her fiance, who have given us awesome tours of Seoul, learning the characters of Hangeul (the Korean alphabet) so I can read if not understand what I'm reading, spending more time with the hubs than we've been able to since we've been married, and having no work or school to attend to for the moment (though I'm already planning how to finish my teaching masters' degree online).

Ben should be back in a few minutes with news of if we're moving to another post today (which should allow us to go house hunting this weekend in addition to hopefully getting phones!) so that's it for now.

Love from Asia- tomorrow is a good day already.=)

Vocab of the day:
Korean: 서울 = Seoul    서= s+ough   울= oo + l
Military: BDTD = Been there, done that