Chapter 2: All about Daejeon

We are really settling into Korea. We have made friends with six couples and two singles. (sounds like a tennis match!) Our neighbour Nancy Andrake who is her 60ties, she has happily taken on the granny role and baby sits when we go shopping etc. She is a no nonsense kind of person but great fun and really easy going. Our friends are Steve and Sheryl Minarick - they have two boys the same age as ours - and the kids are good friends. So it is easy to spend time with them. Sheryl is just like Jean Thomas my American friend from Gabs. She is kind and really funny; her and I get along well. Steve her husband and Ken are good buddies, they are quite a riot together and so we all spend a lot of time laughing! Lara and Terry Linderman, Jim & Julie Brownlee are other friends these are all Americans we spend time with and are also apart of the crowd we mix with. We have also made friends with Jane and Michael Moi Moi who have four kids and they are between 8 - 12 yrs. Shannie loves Abby who is 12 and dotes over her. They are New Zealanders. Wendy & Werner Van Wyk are also friends as are the other RSA Family Lisa & Brian Thompson; we had all purposely avoided each other so as not to create a clique. They are really great people and we all get on well. Sometimes one just needs to Braai Boerewors!

Josh has joined the worship team and I am seeing a real change in his life. He is working hard at school and hopefully will reap the benefits soon. Ethan is struggling so much. Please pray for him to have a break through in reading and spiritually too. His eyes have improved so much he has two more rows to go before he can identify all characters on and eye chart. The opothomologist was thrilled with his programme and he is doing well but there has been so much lost during the last two years of his education that I am feeling really defeated. (He can barely see out of his left eye we only found out in April this year - his right eye has been doing it all!)

Shopping in Daejeon is a real eye opener. I can't read any labels, all of them are in Korean. The shopping malls are huge - four, five floors high and there are no escalators just flat conveyor belts: which move around from level to level so that you can take your trolley from floor to floor easily. The boys love them and run wildly up and down them. There are also massive play areas with jungle like swings and velcro suites which the boys love. They throw themselves against sticky walls etc.The stores stay open 24/7 and there are always kids in the play areas. We leave ours at home with Nancy if we have a late shopping evening but even when we've gone at 11:00 pm there are kids at the shops! I can't find Vanilla Essence or Cinnamon and spices yet. They also don't sell deodorant, I am really glad we brought our own supplies! The food is interesting and most of it is either hot, hot spicey or sweet. So there are even sweet crisps - chocolate coated etc. No salty or savoury flavours! In the malls they have a market section - where the assistants - shout, scream their wares to prospective buyers. It's so noisey and initially I got scared and would avoid this section but now I am tougher and occasionally go with the boys to see the "pets" - live fish, octopus, worms, roaches etc. on sale. The boys haven't worked out that this is supper yet! They think Korea is cool to sell roaches as pets! It's also strange to see pet sections in big malls, you can do your grocery shopping and buy a dog, cat, hamster, snake, ferret or fox as well! They do love their pets though and it's fun to see Koreans carrying their pets around the shops, on chains, etc. On T.V. THEY HAVE PROGRAMME AFTER PROGRAMME ON "MY PET". It's touching to see Korean men wailing over their dogs who are sick ect. Most T.V is in Korean, we have cable - which is more Korean programmes! We do get National Geographic and CNN in English and movies in English. We don't watch a lot of T.V. because we are so busy. We spend weekends travelling and seeing places.

Last weekend we had Monday off so we went to Seoul for the weekend. We went to Lotte Land - Disney in Korean! It was wonderful and we had a good time on all the rides, the shows were fun and the kids want to go back. This weekend we'll go shopping in Song Tan - a US Marine Base. They have all kinds of US stuff and its really easy to shop there because everythings in English and the shopping village is closed off to traffic so the kids are relatively safe. Ken did get propostioned last time we went there and he felt great about it until I reminded him that it was the mighty American dollar the Asian woman wanted and not his mighty muscles! We had a good giggle anyway. So basically everything is still new and exciting and we feel more settled - our stuff arrived and it felt like Xmas, unpacking! They used a crane to lift 50 boxes into our top floor apartment! Quite funny and Ken had a few snide comments about me taking the kitchen sink etc!