New address

This is not the most exciting post but just a heads up if you ever need to send anything here.  The government changed our school's address the new one is listed on the sidebar of the blog at all times.

Here it is:

Tom and Bonnie Meyer
c\o Gyeonggi Suwon International School

451 Yeongtong-Ro, Yeongtong-Gu,

Suwon City, Gyeonggi-Do

Republic of Korea 443-808

Civil Defense Drill

We have signed up with the US embassy to get email notification of any important news that we need to know about at Americans living in Korea.  This one came into my inbox today:

"The U.S. Embassy in Seoul is transmitting the following information as a public service to all U.S. citizens in the Republic of Korea.
Seoul Metropolitan Police authorities advised the Embassy that on Thursday, August 18, at approximately 2:00 p.m. an air-raid siren will sound for one minute to signal the start of a nationwide civil defense drill.  Pedestrians in open and public areas should seek shelter in nearby buildings or subway stations.  All drivers/vehicles on the road must pull over and come to a complete stop. At approximately 2:15 p.m. a second siren will sound, signaling the conclusion of the drill.  Local authorities will give further instructions if necessary."

I have never actually seen one of these take place because we are always in school.  I feel like it would be super creepy to just be going about your business on a Thursday afternoon and then this siren goes off and everyone goes into "holy crap we are being attacked" mode.  The crazy thing is that there is a reasonable degree of necessity to the drill based on who our neighbors to the north are.  I'll do my best to remember to honor the drill tomorrow by doing a good ole duck and cover under my desk when I hear it.

Nesting

One of my assignments while being here in Korea is to get stuff ready for our new addition.  When I got back one of the first things that I noticed was the awesome folks at our school that work in the housing department had set up our crib and moved in a dresser.  My task was to inventory all of the stuff that we have here so we know what we have and if we need to get anything else before bringing Everett here.  I also wanted to get the room cleaned up and organized.  I've still got 3 weeks over here but when you are living the single life and jet lagged there can be a degree of boredom involved from time-to-time.

So over the past few days I counted up all Everett's baby stuff, cleaned up his room, hung some curtains (and in the process put about 5 unnecessary holes in the wall), threw down a rug, and put a sheet on the mattress.  The walls still need a little love but I may have to wait for Bonnie on that one.

I can't wait for Bonnie, Everett and I to get settled in here.

a brief separation

Today is the day that I (Tom) have to head back to Korea to end my paternity leave. It will be really sad for me to leave Bonnie and Everett but there is also a good amount of joy involved in going back to reunite with our great community in Korea. I come back to Missouri on September 7th (only to depart again as a family Sept. 15) so we will only be apart for roughly 3.5 weeks. I'm sure in many ways the time will both drag along and fly by. I am so curious to see what Everett will be like then. To my friends, in America it has been great seeing you over the summer! To my friends in Korea, I will see you soon!

A family photo before I head out:

from hospital to home

So to put it bluntly Everett is awesome.  Now I say that knowing that it is a little ridiculous to think that a kid's parents wouldn't think they are awesome.  The staff at the hospital were great and we got some quality time with our little man while there. 

Dude has BIG feet. 

I had to do a decent amount of washing dishes and pump pieces at this sink that was not well suited for someone of my stature.  So I pulled up a chair.

We thought about bringing E home in this polo because it would be fitting considering I wear polos to work pretty much every day but it is a little too big still.

Right before taking off for Platte City.

Ready to roll!

The trip was great.  Everett slept the whole way home.  Our first home visitors were Chris and Jan Patterson.

And an open eyes picture for good measure.

The hospital was great but man it is good to be home.  2 days are in the books and our hearts are stolen.

Mr. Moon

One thing that I thought about doing since moving here is getting a suit made. I had not done it up to this point in time because I never knew who would be a reliable and reasonably priced tailor. Well over the past year or so I began hearing good things about Mr. Moon. He runs a shop just outside the main gate of Osan Air Base so he knows how to make suits for foreigners. About 3 weeks ago Bonnie and I paid him a visit. I picked out fabric for two suits and he took the measurements. A week later I came back in for a fitting. It was crazy because the suit was in such a rough outline of what it would be. That is the two pictures below with Mr. Moon's helper checking his work.

This past weekend Bonnie and I went back to see Mr. Moon and pick up the finished products. I thought overall they turned out pretty nice. The one below is a dark grey three-button, two-piece suit.

This one is a two-button, three-piece suit, that is black with very light white pinstripes.

Mr. Moon makes sure to leave his mark on every suit he makes. Though it kind of looks like he spelled my last name "Meger."

The best thing about Mr. Moon is that the suits are pretty darn good and the total for both was $350. Bonnie had a bridesmaid dress altered to fit her pregnant body and three other dresses converted to short sleeves for a grand total of $40. Thank you Mr. Moon. Thank you.

demo

Across the street from us there has been a lot of demolition going. There is a gas station outside our window that is being remodeled and several other building that are simply being demolished and rebuilt because they were old and crapy. The other day the gas station was ripping out one of their old utility buildings and I saw a device that I have never seen before. I will let the video speak for itself:

Here is the end result of T-Rex's efforts:

Washing Machine Jingle

Korea loves jingles.

North South conflict

As a lot of you have probably heard there was a little bit on conflict yesterday here in Korea. To give some context the map below shows where we are located and where the island that was shelled is located.
Point A is Yeonpyeong Island.
Point B is Suwon.

As you can see it is a pretty precariously located island. At this point in time we are not terribly concerned about the conflict. This is a little more serious than some of the things in the past (first time South Korean soil has been attacked since the Korean War). It has been the norm that North Korea does stupid things in an attempt to get attention and aid. However, they have yet to do anything so stupid that it has warranted war breaking out. Though you could argue these last two (Cheonan sinking and this shelling) are pushing it pretty hard.

We think things will be fine but feel free to send up prayers that things don't escalate. Thanks to Kim Stewart for inspiring this post.

good morning

I may have blogged about this before but one thing that I love about our apartment is that we get to see some great sunrises.

Our morning view (and really dirty window).

Pumpkin Duck

Last weekend Bonnie and I went to visit our good friends Andy and Lindsay in Gangneung. When we were there we experienced, what we have determined to be our favorite Korean meal in our 2 years here. It was called Pumpkin Duck (no clue what is it called in Korean). It looks like this:
This is a generic picture from the web.
We had to have a Korean friend call in advance to get it going. They take a squash (pumpkin in Korea), cut the top off, and scrape out the seeds and gunk. Then you stuff it with duck. Finally you smoke it for like 2 or 3 hours. It was absolutely amazing. The squash soaks in the roasted duck goodness. Oh I wish you could smell it and taste it as opposed to just read about it. I wish we knew where we could find it in Suwon.

Remembering Germany

So I am in grad school this weekend from 6-9PM Friday and 9AM-5PM Saturday. This happens twice a month for me. All that to say I get off task very easily when trapped in one room for that long so I will probably be posting some random blogs throughout the day. Like this one:

Last Saturday morning I was getting something out of our cabinets and one of our souvineers from Germany caught my eye. I just had to use it. Bonnie thought it was humorous so she snapped a picture.
This was a delicious stein of chocolate milk. And no I did not fill the whole thing up. A liter of chocolate milk would be delicious but devastating.

Typhoon Kompasu

I never would have guessed at any point in my life that I would experience a typhoon before I ever experienced a hurricane, let alone a tornado. But as fate would have it on Thursday morning from around 3AM to 8AM Typhoon Kompasu rolled directly through the greater Seoul area.

Where we live there was not much big damage. We saw a bunch of leaves and branches on the road, a couple of trees blown down here and there, and a window that got ripped free from its hinges and crashed to the ground 15 stories below at our apartment complex. That was about it. I heard some stories of more costly damage being done to some areas farther to the north and tragically there were at least 3 people that were killed from typhoon related incidents.

The extreme wind speed was the primary thing we noticed. It wasn't very rainy. Watching the clouds cruise through the sky was the creepiest thing to me. They were moving pretty dang fast. Rumor has it there is another typhoon headed toward Korea next week. This could turn out to be an interesting fall...

Acro Crash

We have talked before about the fact that there have been a lot a crashes at the intersection right outside our apartment. They reconfigured the stop light at that intersection to reduce those crashes. A few nights ago we were sitting in our apartment and heard a lot of commotion outside. We looked out our window and saw this:
Looks pretty normal right? We went down to take a closer look and noticed the following things:
This is the railing right outside our apartment.
There are some benches that sit under this little gazebo thing. I'm glad that we weren't sitting there.
I kind of felt bad for this person. There were a lot of people standing around gawking and taking pictures. Oh, wait, how did we get these...

Nobody was hurt in the crash but is certainly made for an interesting evening.

Our next trip

Ever since we watched the Long Way Round I have had a strong desire to visit some of the places featured in it. One of those desires was fulfilled when we got to see the Church of Bones in the Czech Republic this summer. Bonnie and I are planning to fulfill another one about a month from now. Every fall we get a break for Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving). In the past we got a 5 day weekend for Chuseok. This year it falls just right that our school decided to give us a full week off at the end of September. So we decided to head here:
(the map is a little old, "Soviet Union") Why would we want to go there you ask? I would recommend you watch the Long Way Round; maybe it will make you want to go to Mongolia too. So what is in Mongolia? A few highlights:
Horses:
We might go horse trekking while we are there. Might... We are both have a slight discomfort with horses and Mongolian horses are on the small side. But it seems silly to not ride a horse while we are there.

The Gobi Desert:
I don't think we will be able to see the Gobi. Unfortunately, it is pretty far from Ulan Bator. However, it would be cool to see the source of the yellow dust we experience so often.

Gers (or yurts):
I will be disappointed if we do not spend at least one night in one of these bad boys.

Blue Sky:
Again, I will be disappointed it we don't see a lot of this while we are there. Mongolia is often referred to as the "land of the blue sky" because it sees over 250 sunny days a year.

I am really intrigued to see what Mongolia is like. I can't wait to experience it and snap some pictures of it myself.

Homeplus

Homeplus is our primary grocery store here in Korea. Bonnie and I made a trip out today to pick up what we need to get us through our last week here before we head back for the summer. While there we couldn't help but indulge ourselves in these:
Korea is gearing up for the World Cup this summer so you can find spirited shirts all over the place.

Another more random side of Homeplus is that a lot of the time they have give-aways if you spend enough money there. Once we got a jug of fabric softener. The past three times we have been they have given us ramen. I don't know what the heck we are going to do with all of this:
You have to take your receipt to a redemption table to claim it and Bonnie told me not to go this time, but I just can't pass up a free prize. We will probably have to give it away. Anyone want us to bring you some?

It's 10 PM, why not

Prior to this video we had been hearing a lot of drilling outside our apartment at around 9:40 PM on a Friday night. I got curious about what was going on and this is what I found.

car repair

Background knowledge: Ever since we bought our car back in September our door locks will randomly spasm and lock themselves when we lift door handles, shut doors, breath heavy and make other sudden movements.

So the other day Bonnie is driving our car. As our friend Lori-Ann is pulling the passenger door handle the interior handle just decides to detach itself from the door. This made our car just a little more ghetto than it already was because we had to start rolling down the window to open the door from the exterior handle.

A couple days later I go to unlock the passenger door for Bonnie (chivalry). The locks start to spasm and automatically re-lock after every time I try to unlock the door. I decided to get smart and keep the key in the unlock position as I lifted up on the door handle at the same time. This action proceeded to disconnect the exterior door handle and thus the passenger door no longer opened at all.

I think Bonnie should have started getting in and out the Dukes of Hazzard way but she opted to start riding taxi cab style. We decided that we should pull the trigger and get the door repaired. I was a little leery because we had an automatic door lock problem on our Accord and I think it cost around $150 to fix each door.

The school mechanic takes the car to the shop for us today and brings it back later in the day. When I go down to pay for it he is really apologetic because it was more expensive than he thought it would be. It was $55. I was totally cool with that considering my door lock repair past. Then he relays to me that the reason it was so expensive is because when they went to fix the passenger door they found out that the automatic locks we also broken so they fixed that too.

BOTH DOORS FOR $55! Amazing.

post season hair cut

Since the basketball season ended recently and we are going to Guam tomorrow I figured it was time for a hair cut.

Before:
During:
After:
It feels so good to be rid of that thick mop for a little while.

Life goes on

Well, there hasn't been a whole lot of excitement so far since we've been back. Sunday we woke up at like 4AM because of jet lag so we went to Homeplus at 7AM and later in the day Costco to restock our kitchen. Since Tuesday we have been in training sessions for school and also been working to get ready for the first day of class which is Monday.

We have been having a great time hanging out with our returning staff friends and meeting some new staff. I feel like community has been especially awesome since we have been back. We have really had some fabulous time with our friends. We think that we have some quality new hires too. My HS math partner from last year Kevin Wendling is our new principal so I have a new Kevin in my math life, Kevin Arndt. He is going to be a solid dude to work with.

One fun activity that we do have coming up is that we are going to meet up with a friend that Bonnie formerly student taught with. He is working at and English tutoring center in Seoul. We are going to go catch a baseball game with him and hang out. It will be good times.

First day of school is Monday... ready or not...