All settled in, in Dongducheon

So I've survived another few weeks here and am still enjoying it!  I think it's crazy that there's so many people that talk about just how much they hate it here...but I think your attitude has a big impact on your view.  I'm just grateful to be able to have this opportunity to be with my husband and to experience a completely different culture.  I realize too, that there is just SO much to do here.  Little by little I've been adventuring out more, and getting more comfortable with the trains so I'm pretty excited to keep exploring.

We were super excited to get moved into our new apartment!  The Realtor had to come and write English labels for the thermostat, kitchen, washing machine, and intercom.  But it's all so new and neat!  The primary type of heating here is through radiant floor heating using heated water and pipes that go to all the rooms. Its different but you can control exactly which rooms you want heated with very little wasted energy.  Every apartment has an intercom where you get a video of the parking garage and outside your apartment.  And the kitchen uses gas!  It was quite the adjustment, and I'm still a little paranoid but it has been awesome to cook with!   Our washer/dryer is a combo unit so we are still figuring that out, and in fact I spent yesterday using google translate to figure out all of the options on it..crazy.  Something that took some getting used to has been recycling.  They are crazy about it here!  

There's a slot for every kind of trash!

Due to some car troubles... we haven't been able to go to the Korean class the past few weeks.. but! I'm glad we have the alphabet down.  It's come in handy a couple times trying to figure out what a food was called.  One of the first times we went out to eat we sat down at this restaurant and looking around at everybody cooking their beef and pork we were excited.  Well we get the menu and it is only in Korean.... So we figure we'll be adventurous and just choose two random items..  Twenty minutes later when they bring out our food we have this piping hot bowl of mystery meat soup!!  So, thankfully we haven't made that mistake again.

Speaking of food...I've seen these bread sandwich things all around and figured I'd go ahead and buy one to try it.  Well, it turns out that brown stuff is not chocolate. It's some sort of soy bean paste I think..

 

A BIG letdown though, is that 7-Elevens are everywhere here..  But! They do not have the signature slurpees in any of them :(

 Now I will leave you all with this:

SQUATTY POTTY!

(Thankfully I've always seen western toilets in addition to these)