Fun and Randomness before the Holidays!

Being in a foreign country for the holidays can bring many worries, challenges and new experiences.  As you can imagine, T.G. and I have see them all so far.  I want to put this blog post out before the real holiday blog (holidays were wonderful, by the way) just so y'all can get a feel for pre-holiday craziness in South Korea.  

 
In the spirit of the holidays, the leaders on post do their best to bring holiday spirit all around the post to make those of us far from home not feel so out of touch with the fact that it is a major holiday that is highly celebrated in the United States.  For instance, there was a tree lighting on Yongsan on December  2.  Unfortunately, we were unable to attend due to T.G. working a night shift that night.  They also put up very festive decorations around post at places like the commissary, the fire station and The Dragon Hill Lodge.  I believe Santa even visited The Dragon Hill!  

T.G. and I managed to take advantage of his schedule and take a trip to Busan, as previously mentioned.  We also had the military ball on the 14th, which was my first official military function.  I found it quite fun and exciting to see T.G. and his colleges dressed in their dress blues or tuxedos, enjoying a night outside 'the office' just having some fun!

Side Note:  Nicolle and I bought these dresses in Itaewon on the Thursday before the ball, picked them up on Friday after alterations and were ready to go on Saturday night….talk about customer service!

I completed my Korean Language Class after 10 weeks and learned a lot, but have decided to take this next session off, due to a lot of planned travel.  Missing class is frowned upon.  But I feel that I learned a lot in the basic course and now my friend, Nicolle, will be taking the same class this next session, so we can study it all together!  If I decide to take the next course, I can test in and move forward with my Korean Language learning.  

Many of you already know, but T.G. has offered to stay in Seoul for an extra year in hopes to put him in a position that he would prefer later in his career, not to mention that we still have a lot to do here…nothing is official as of yet, but it's looking that way.  Luckily, we have amazing foster parents for our babies at home and all have agreed that they want to continue to care for them until we get home.  

Speaking of our babies, since we have extended another year, our landlord agreed to allow us to have a small dog or cat.  SO, we adopted Colby from the vet shelter on post!  He's the sweetest thing and I just know he will make an awesome little brother to Mr. Chedder once we are all together again.  

I've also started watching one of Julie's children, Rachel, on Wednesday afternoons.  Julie, my flower school teacher and dearest of friends, has had some schedule changes at the flower shop and her nanny, who was from the Philippines, had to return to care for her own family, so I offered to help out.  Rachel is the cutest 6 year old and we have a lot of fun together.  I hope we can learn a lot from each other!

Amongst all of this, we managed to get our Christmas gifts sent, on-time, as far as we know and even sent Christmas Eve goodies to each of our families.  Many of the gifts we chose were from areas in Seoul, where we found unique things we knew people would appreciate the fact that the item was from Korea, others we ordered their favorites from the internet…why buy people junk they won't really use or want, right?  Just before Christmas, T.G. had to work a tough stretch of five nights in a row, but at least he was off for Christmas!  More to come about Christmas later!