September Update

Annyeong haseyo! (Hello!) Thank you all so much for your prayer and well wishes as we moved! We landed in South Korea on September 9th and are almost done with our two weeks of “quarantine” before we can move into our apartment off base! I say “quarantine” because we have been able to freely move around base to run errands since we are both vaccinated and received negative Covid tests several times throughout the two weeks.

We arrived not knowing if we would be able to live on the base. There are several housing towers under construction right now, and the rest were too full for us to be given an apartment. In saying this, we had to go “apartment hunting” off base with a realtor. We are blessed with a realtor that speaks fluent English and Korean and will go out of his way to help us! If everything goes to plan, we will move into an office-tel hopefully by the end of this week or the beginning of next week. An office-tel is an apartment building that is not high enough to be called a high-rise apartment and has office buildings on the first floor. The Korean term comes from a mix of an office and a hotel.

The location of our apartment is in walking distance to the pedestrian gate of the base and is only a block away from the ville. The ville is right across from the pedestrian gate and has several businesses and restaurants along its foot-traffic only road. (The picture for this week’s post is a picture of the ville.)

I hope to share a little bit of Korean culture each time I make a post! This week is Chuseok here in Korea. Chuseok is Korea’s thanksgiving. It usually lasts around three days and is a holiday to celebrate and be thankful for their yearly harvests. Koreans will travel back to the families’ hometown and be with their families during this week, which usually causes traffic jams around the capitol. In America, you might hear the Korean holiday be called the Lunar New Years!