Won Rate/Flying/Random Stuff

So I have my fake CROCS and they're one Korean size too big, but they're sure comfy (except for the blister on my foot) but hey, for 7,000 won, what do you want? I want better shoes!
And I wish I had brought more flight suits. I have 2 that don't make my eyes bug out when I sit down. At least I wear jammies to work. If I can do that for 10 more years, I've won. Besides, wearing a flight suit makes people automatically think you know what you're talking about and I need all the credibility I can get.
Julie called me when I had $5,200 in cash and I'd handed to the guy in the money change booth (hole in the wall where he plays Mah-Jong all day and smokes) and just then Julie called and said not to change the money so I asked for my money back and ran out of there. Burned that bridge! Apparently the won rate is supposed to go to like 1500 or 1800 to the dollar. So you get more bang for less buck.
Korean TV is sure funny. I love the commercials to death. The anti-smoking one is good too. It's 'cheeky'. And the telephone one with the chick and big, white mallet. I think it's long-distance. Or the COLD brand orange juice lady that is actually eating an orange, not drinking the juice! If only the subtitles to the shows made any sort of sense to me, I could learn Korean faster, but they flash as fast as they talk here so you can't keep up. I can recognize the characters at least and what they sort of sound like. Half of them sound the same to me, but I'll never learn Korean to the point I could speak and be understood. Spanish on my mission was bad enough- 'lost in translation' is the rule with me and that's if you're speaking English, let alone Spanish or Hanguk-mal.
Why does bedtime become so lame when you have kids? Violet fights her sleep and by then she falls asleep at 10 and your night is shot. Gift from heaven, my keister!
I should have at least picked up the violin today. I need to take it down to Insa-dong (there's a lot of dongs around here- but it just means 'village'), and get the violin fixed. Do I dare trust a family heirloom to foreign hands? And cheaper hands at that. I'll take all that money and change it into won and buy a lot of toys and labor with it. I wish I had 200,000 won the other night for the car to get fixed, I used US and lost about $80 in the change. The mechanic should have dropped the price. Maybe I'll go to the guy next door for that.
I'm learning Hangul from the signs even better now, but I still have no idea what the words mean and they don't sound right in English. Sindorim, Sadang, Yeongdunpo. I could write all that in Hangul, but it doesn't work here and I usually get it wrong anyway.
There's a chili cook-off this week. I need to take some magic won and buy some tomatoes off the street vendors, and some more secret ingredients so I can bag the #1 spot again. I have to win chili cook-offs. When you're a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, you have to be good at something. Shoot, I used to make chili in the jet and eat in front of my crew when it was 10 hours into the 16-hour flights. Stale sandwiches to my hot food. I should have sold it for 5 bucks a cup. When the won hits 1800 per dollar, I'd be crazy not to buy one. Dang, I miss having a gun around. But since I drive like a native, it's good to be in a place where there's not any guns because the road rage here could make 22 million Seoul-ites become 3.
Spencer about lost 2 fingers on the subway today. He put his hand on the door as it was opening, and I had to grab it since I was worried he'd lose it. This is a limited-liability country, so if you hurt yourself, you can't just sue Korea.
Here's Spencer's pic from the school field trip to KBS (Korean Broadcast Studios) here in Seoul. He had a good time- and I was bummed I had to work and couldn't skip out to see the place.

Korean Generosity

I had a screw in my front tire and it of course caused a slow leak in that tire. So after Amanda's soccer game I took it to the tire shop and the guy saw it right away. His English was about as good as my Korean. So there was a lot of pointing and talking that no one understood. He grabbed some tools and a tire patch and patched it in about 1 minute. Then he filled up the tire. I asked him what it cost and apparently "FREE" is in the Korean Vocabulary. Well, that's fine, but I wanted to at least pay the guy something. So I held up a King Sejong (10,000 Won bill) and said "Chom Shim" (Lunch) and tried to give it to him a few times. I guess they are supposed to refuse stuff the first time, and you're supposed to push it on them. I was going to wad it up and throw it past him so he'd have to chase it down to give it back, but that might have offended him and I might have backed into a car since it would have been hard to make a fast get away without running someone or something expensive over. I asked a few more times and walked toward him with the money (basically $8) and he backed away and wouldn't take it. Monday I'm going to get a bunch of rice cakes or something and run them over there to the tire shop. That was really nice of the guy- but the people here are like that. I don't know that would happen in other countries around here- I may be wrong.

By the way, I bought one of those tennis-racket looking bug killers. I only regret I didn't get one years ago! Amazing device. Go out and get one while they're on sale and bug season is almost over. Then you're ready to zap those jerks when Spring hits. Mine charges on 120 or 240 volts (it's all 240 over here!) and it has a nifty flashlight on it as well. I hate mosquitoes enough to enjoy hearing the loud pop and snap when they get the insect electric chair.

Julie finished Violet's fairy costume. Here's a shot. A red-headed angel.

Parade, Airshow and Seoul Grand Park

Here's the pics from our busy weekend. The kids were in the parade on base on Saturday, and I got some other good shots as well. Spencer and Amanda marched with their soccer teams and Tabitha and I watched from the side and collected a LOT of candy.

Then we got in the car and made really good time getting down to Osan AB to see the airshow. We got there and a few hours later, they were kicking everyone out. There was an A-10 and F-16 demo. But the best part was the kids being able to get in the F-4 Phantom. And the ROKs that were supposed to close up their aircraft and throw us out, allowed us to get inside and look around. We went to Chili's for dinner and then it took 2 1/2 hours to drive 35 miles in bumper to bumper traffic all the way to Seoul. We should have taken the train. Next time we'll remember to go right from the parade to the train and spend more time at the Cultural Festival. I wonder if they'd like to see American Culture, but then again- they turn on the TV and they can't get away from it. Not that it's really true, because I'm not like any TV characters- and I don't plan on it, either. No wonder they think we're freaks.

Sunday we had General Conference and stayed home to listen to it on the computer, because the tower computer blew a power supply ($50 at the repair shop) we had the laptop so we just had audio. I detect a definite "strength in adversity" theme there. That's scary. And the won was at 1400 to the dollar. But that's over with, so I should have moved faster and gotten my money changed over. I could have made $500 on the exchange. But they closed the bank and threw us out when I went to change the money over. But it's good their economy is on the mend.

Monday was Columbus Day, and after we got everything settled at the apartment, we hopped the subway to Seoul Grand Park to look at the Zoo. They have an amusement park as well, but we didn't get there until 1 in the afternoon, so we just wanted to look at the Zoo and enjoy our time. On the way there, they had stands selling ice cream, rice cakes (these had red bean paste in them YUCK) and little shells were you suck out the crabs and eat them. I tried one of them. They also had little silk worms boiling. Silk wouldn't cost so much if they didn't kill the silkworms and eat them! I didn't eat that. But they also had little cakes with pudding inside, called Manjoo. Those were yummy. Those are my favorite. Since I didn't like the rice cakes, I saw a group of teenaged boys walking by, and I gave the rice cakes to them to eat. In the US, you'd get some rude remark, but these guys actually took them and ate them, and then came back with ice cream cones to give us. We didn't expect the ice cream cones, and I wish I had a way to tell them it wasn't necessary. But they feel so obligated to give a gift if you give them one. You just can't argue with 5,000 years of tradition and culture. And if you don't speak Korean, you can't even try.

Today Julie and I took Violet to Incheon to look around for dishes. They don't really open until noon and it takes too long to get out there to even think about staying past 1PM to wait for everything to open. So we had lunch at one of the Chinese restaurants out there in Chinatown. Incheon is the port where MacArthur made his famous landing, but I couldn't find his statue. I looked around for the old Korean War vets that stand a constant vigil over him. He was apparently very popular here. Then again, so is the CSI series. All 3 of them. You can watch CSI (the original), CSI: NY, and CSI: Miami every night. Enjoy the pics.

Cultural Festival/30th Anniversary of CFC

These people really enjoy their shows and culture, and it's downright fascinating. I wish I had my camera to take pics of the drill teams today. They had the guys in the ancient garb and they did a mock battle as well. It was really fun to watch and interesting. Attached are the pics that made it into the limited memory of our camera since I left the memory card at home. That was dumb of me. This was not the day to have a camera with 8 pics in it.
Today marks the 30th Anniversary of the Combined Forces Command, the US and ROK. So we celebrated with a Sports Day and Cultural Celebration. This has been a successful alliance. We get awesome products from Korea, and they get protection and a boost from the US to make their economy work.
Julie did the pottery demonstration and we bought the 'married' vases- they sell pairs of vases like yin and yangs, and they're supposed to complement each 0ther. We need to get the little wooden ducks they have here. When you're married you get these ducks and I guess they face each other when things are going well, but if they're not, one of the parties in the marriage will turn them away from each other. Julie told me I'd just put my duck on hers all the time, so she knows if we get any, they'll just be misused.

Economic "Butterfly Effect"

So the won has lost almost 40% of its value against the dollar. It's good for us, because we can buy more (if we want to do that sort of thing), but I just feel horrible for the people here. They're already paying $5 a gallon for gas around here. At least we can get gas cheaper, but wow. How do they survive on this? I guess their economy has tanked before, but there's no way to take a picture of it. I guess we just trade in a bunch of dollars for won and take advantage of the situation. You learn to keep an eye on the won around here so you don't get soaked when it drops.
The Japanese index lost 10% of its value KOSPI lost 5%. This is a really turbulent part of the world for economics anyway, but with our self-inflicted gunshot wound to the wallet isn't going to help them. So who gets hurt when our problems reach across the world? These people. And the Japanese and the Chinese, etc. I guess if the won hits 1400 or 1500, I'll buy a lot more of it. It makes the rent cheaper because the military isn't silly, they adjust our housing on that same scale.

Fireworks Competition

One of the nice things about living here in a huge city like Seoul is that they have cool things like this. I didn't get any pictures of it because they all look the same. It's one of those things you see when you're there. We walked down the Gangbeyon Expressway to the Dongjak Bridge by our place and saw a decent show for about an hour but the kids were cold because it was over the Hangang River. It's funny in a place like this- people just pull onto the bridge and park their cars so they can watch the fireworks. Nevermind the thousands of cars they're holding up that can't cross the bridge. That's what is so funny about Korea. I think a lot of people are in the 'small town' mentality and forget that there's a lot of people around here. Certainly 15 years ago before more people had cars, it was probably OK to park your car in the middle of the road because no one would care and the 14 cops in the whole town couldn't find you, let alone bust you for it. There's still 14 cops and none of them came by to tell people to move. I think we saw one on the way to Seoul Tower - asleep in his car.
I took the 3 girls to Seoul Tower and had to call for backup in Korean because the old cabbie didn't think he could get me to the tower. I called Major Ji Duck Hong to tell the cabbie to get me to the entrance to the park and I'd walk the rest of the way, but boy it was a long ways up there. We paid the 2000 won to get in and he was able to drive us up to Seoul Tower- I think he was trying to ask if we needed him to take us home, but then an old couple wanted to take the cab, so that solved that one. There's actually a bus that goes up there, but it's not marked very well as to where it stops. So now we know. You can see quite a ways up there. As usual, Violet was a huge hit, they love the red hair on that kid. It would be funny if she actually did learn Korean and people would see another American kid that speaks Korean.
A comment on this part of the world. In the last 5,000 years of people being here, I'd be willing to bet that this last period of 55 years is the longest this area has gone without a war. Granted, it's just a stalemate, but at least the Japanese aren't out making war, the Russians aren't trying to expand (around here anyway) and the Chinese are staying put. There's a lot of economics at play as well, but I dare say the American presence is a good thing around here with the potential for things to get much worse without us around. So there's that, but you'll never get a peace-nik to say thanks for that. They just hate war and those of us trained to make it. But that's why they're wrong- and free to be that way.