The Little Things in Life that Make you laugh...

Primarily due to our lack of knowledge of the Korean language and lack of ability to find a trust-worthy online translation source, we have had several experience within the four walls of our own house that have made us shake our heads and laugh, "Stupid Americans."

First off, coffee, of course. It is the only way to start the day. We live in an area near a French International School, so it happens that many French expats live here and, as the French enjoy their coffee shops, there is one coffee shop every three storefronts on the main street...Surprising, even by US standards. So, we survived with purchasing "Americano co-pee" (no "f" in the Korean language) for the first few days.

If you cannot read the Korean on this coffee bag, by experience, I am letting you know this is instant coffee and you can brew instant coffee in your coffee maker and it isn't half bad. In addition, it dissolves all of the grinds, so you don't have to do the dirty job of emptying the coffee grinds.

This discovery was not on purpose. Most of the coffee here is instant, nevertheless, pretty good. So, unlike those instant coffee "tea-like bags" that my Mom has used forever and brew water-like coffee, I could live with this instant.

Our second laugh was hot water. Just as those endless commercials for the tank-less water heater in the US, the Koreans have this worked out already (I think.) Instant hot water...if you can read the control pad (always a trick!). We have two of these control pads in our house and they control two things, (1) hot water to the showers and other things and (2) heating in the floors (another great idea since heat rises!).

We have figured out how to get hot water, pretty much instantly, but sometimes end up heating our floors as a side effect. Whoops! Since all of our floors are marble or wood (very common in Korea), the warm floor does feel good on your feet in any temperature!

Finally, our ADT guy. Since we can neither read the ADT panel or understand the automated woman's voice, we simply swipe our ADT card and hope for the best.

Well, the best has not happened and after several visits and several alarms going off, the ADT guy was back for the fourth time yesterday. We communicate in hand signals to eachother, and our driver has translated some things for us, but no elongated conversations are happening here, regardless of his many visits to our house.

One thing for ADT here, their response time is AWESOME!

After four visits this week, I think we have things worked out...we'll see.



It is the little things in life that make each day so enjoyable. We hope to have some big adventures to some exotic places, but I think these little ones are worth mentioning as well.