The other night I woke up and thought I heard bombs falling. If I had been almost anywhere else in the world I would have told myself I was being silly and gone back to sleep. But being here, in Seoul, South Korea, and within strike range of North Korea I listened and debated if I should wake Justin up. The sound was like fireworks, which I’ve heard from the house before, but there was no holiday and it was 4am. It sounded like thunder, but we don’t get that here, and a big dumpster truck which they also don’t have because there are no dumpsters. And that whistling sound you hear in movies when they drop a bomb from an airplane before it hits the ground. It was that last sound which had me holding my breath to try and hear better and thinking through everything we should grab if we had to evacuate quickly. I eventually decided it was a police siren and some large truck, maybe a fire engine shaking the ground. But it’s these little things that make you realize, you aren’t in American anymore.
I haven’t really talked about my view of Army life and living in South Korea before. The truth is, I’m not really crazy about it. South Korea was never even on my long list of places to visit someday, much less on my list of Places to Live for a Year (the south of France is at the top of that list, by the way). I’ll get into details in a minute.
The other half of this equation is Army life. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my husband being assigned here. The thing is, I don’t consider myself an “Army Wife”, and I don’t really see us as a military family. When I married my husband he only had about a year and a half left in the service and would be spending that time in South Korea. I’ve never had to deal with the nightmare of having my husband deployed to a war zone. And even when we were apart, I got to talk to him every day on Skype.
The other part of this is I’m not command sponsored. This means, while the army pays for my housing where-ever I live, I don’t really have any other privileges. SO when we decided that we wanted to live together (even if it meant in South Korea) I moved here (as in bought my own plane ticket and only brought what I could carry) and changed my residency with the Army, etc and Justin did a bunch of paper work. The end result being that we get a housing allowance and some utilities paid to us each month that we have to put to housing costs. And to-da! I live in South Korea with my husband.
This also means that I’m the low man on the totem pole. If I ever wanted to fly Space A, I’d be last. If I ever wanted to go get flu shots, I’d be last, if I ever wanted to take the bus home from the airport to base, I’d be last. Funny story, while they pay my housing cost to live here, when Justin applied to get Army loaned furniture they would only give him enough for Him because he was here “unaccompanied”, so we’ve been sleeping on a full sized bed since last February, and our cat has his own (empty) room because we only have enough furniture to sparsely furnish our place.
There is also zero community, Army or otherwise. We live off base, in non military housing, so no one near us is military. (Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE our apartment), I’m not in any wives club, I don’t have kids so I’m not in any school groups, etc. There just isn’t much here in the way of community, like none. We have the good fortune to be friends with a wonderful couple (Justin works with the husband) and there is probably one other family we talk to, but that’s it.
Coupled with that is the fact that we live in Seoul, I think it’s the second largest city in the world or something like that, and because we’re not in any Korean groups, we don’t have any Korean friends. Not to mention the fact that the culture differences are pretty big and it’s a lot of work just trying to communicate with the shop owners or taxi drivers.
I sometimes feel like a second class citizen living here too, for a number of reasons.
One, I don’t talk to people on the street and they don’t talk to me.
Two, Korean people spit on the street often, sometimes suspiciously close to me as I’m walking by.
Three, I have to show my ID to get onto base, and every store on base as well.
Four, I have to walk every where- which I don’t mind, until I have something to carry like packages to mail or groceries. I then have to take a taxi which is a whole other post, but they are hit or miss on the friendly scale.
Five, Justin and I share a phone (our choice) but we can’t really get a hold of each other unless he’s at work and I’m at home.
Six, the commissary (or grocery store to you non military folks) will run out of their already small selection. For example, they ran out of redi-whip (you know, that whip cream that comes out of the spray can, not essential, but still lame), and they weren’t going to get any for another two weeks. It’s not like I could just go to another store, there is only the one store. That actually happens a lot, I went to buy a kitchen trash can from the PX and they were out of trashcans and all plastic storage things.
Errands actually take up a lot of my time, much more time than they would if I was doing comparable errands in the states.
To go buy groceries: I have to walk to the store, which isn’t too far, but it’s the farthest thing I walk to. I don’t mind walking if it’s not too hot, or raining, or too cold. Then I have to have my ID and ration card (oh yes, we have ration cards that keep track of how much of what we buy and you can’t go over in some categories), I then push my cart up and down every aisle and hope they have the thing I need (if it’s even a little obscure it’s hard to find, ie lard or molasses, forget it) and hope I like the selection of what they do have (only one kind of baking soda, no choice of aluminum free, Alton Brown). Then wait in line, pay, tip the baggers (because you have to), have them push my cart to the taxi stand and wait in line for a taxi (on a good day takes 5 minutes, on a very bad day it takes an hour or more). Load the food, tell the taxi how to get to my house and hope he speaks good enough English to understand, pay him and lug my groceries to the kitchen in several stages. (my groceries go from cart to conveyer belt, to baggers to cart, to taxi to my front gate to mudroom, to kitchen… and hope I haven’t forgotten a bag anywhere).
To pay rent: All South Koreans pay rent in cash to the bank on the first. If they do otherwise, I sure don’t know about it. To pay our rent I have to walk to base to our bank there (too much to get out of an ATM), withdraw the money and hope the exchange rate is good, carry about $3,500 in cash back to our neighborhood to the Korean bank there, take a number and wait to be called. I give the teller the money and a “rent book” which has our landlords deposit info in it. They count the money and the amount and date gets printed by computer into the rent book that I keep as a kind of running receipt. If you go at the wrong time of day the bank is full of Koreans with rent books and it takes forever.
To pay utilities: I don’t know if you Can pay bills any other way than in person. I asked our one Korean acquaintance (our realtor) what to do about our bills because we were going to be gone for a month and a half, she said that when Korean’s go on vacation, they just pay a late fee when they get home. Anyway, we get two bills delivered to our front gate/shared mail box. I only know A) they are ours because they have Justin’s name on them and B) what amount to pay because I just look for the number that is repeated the most all over the bill, as they are not in English. I can just go to an ATM near the bank to get this money, then I take the money (rounded up to the nearest won) and the bills to the Korean bank. I go in, take a number, wait to be called, give the teller my bills and money and she gives me a little change plus a receipt stapled to my bills.
Trash: I’ve talked about trash before, so I’ll just mention a few things here. But I think we have a pretty good system in place now, it’s been running smoothly for a while. So I have small trashcans lined with grocery bags in the bathroom and under the kitchen sink. When those are full, I tie them off and put them in a large trash can in the laundry room lined with the Official Trash Bag of Korea- I don’t know what it’s called, but you have to buy them from the equivalent of a 7-11 BUT in your neighborhood (so I’ve been told, I can’t read the bags), when the large bag is full I tie it up and take it across the street to lean against the wall (which is where I was told to leave trash) it gets picked up, there is no such thing as a curb trash can here (as far as I can tell). For food waste, you have smaller yellow bags (all gotten at the Korean 7-11) and we have another small trash can under the kitchen sink for the food waste. When that gets full and /or smells too much I tie it up and carry it down the street until one of my neighbors has left out their gray and orange box for these bags (this is also what I was told to do, why we don’t have our own box I don’t know, but they seen to have about one per block). Recycling, I can just put in a clear trash bag and put it next to the trash. And cardboard is taped or tied together in 13x13 bundles. I don’t know what happens to these things, but the old man with the green vest doesn’t yell at me anymore when I take things outside. He also has a broom and leaves a bill in our mail box, I just let the landlord take care of that one since I have no idea what it says.
Our oven... is probably the one thing in the apartment that is complain worthy. It’s gas, which is okay, but it’s the size of a cracker box and it doesn’t have any kind of top heating element so it doesn’t brown food At All. I’ve gotten more cookies burned because they didn’t look done on top but were black on the bottom. I’ve had to return a few pans and cookie sheets because they literally didn’t fit in the oven. Most of the pans we Do have only fit one way. And there is defiantly only one rack in there, I think you can move it, but it really wouldn’t make a difference.
If I want to talk to family or friends we can call them on Skype or just the Skype phone part, and since my parents are so busy I tend to just call them on their phone. BUT there is that pesky 17 hour time difference that makes getting a hold of people so hard.
The phone/time zone thing,
in combination with the cultural isolation from Koreans,
and the differences in Army-life,
and the difficulty of daily necessary tasks-
makes life here a little harder.
But I would not change this year for anything. You see, I haven’t been alone in all this and I’m not here for myself. I wanted to come here and be here every second because I didn’t want to leave Justin alone in all this difficulty. I met Justin when he was home on leave and I talked to him every day when he went back to Korea. I could see the effect it had on him, I could see the strain from daily living taking a toll on him. I felt so helpless being so far from him. When he came back home, on leave again, and we got married we decided that I would come to Korea. Mostly because we didn’t want to be apart for a year or more, but also because I didn’t want to leave him alone in a place as unwelcoming as this and can still be called civilized.
When we were home on vacation people asked me all the time; How do you like living in Korea? I’d say ‘Do you want the truth or the polite answer?’
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