Eumseong-gun; Chungbuk-do

Anyone who's ever been overseas for an extended period of time (or just away from home) knows how nice it is to receive mail from home. So here's our address in case you ever want to send something! It is actually the school's address which is more secure than our apartment address. So everything sent to us will get here (hopefully). We even have our own mailbox at the school.

Ashley and Taylor Hankins
549 Jochon-li; Wonnam-myun
Eumseong-gun; Chungbuk-do
369-862
Republic of Korea

I'm always interested in what everything means so here's a description of the address:

Jochon = the small farming community where our school is Wonnam = the nearest village Eumseong = the county Chungcheongbuk-do (abbreviated as Chungbuk-do) = the province.

And yes, I did say small farming community. We are in the country! The nearest city is about an hour away. We actually went to one of the nearby cities- Cheung-ju last night to celebrate our anniversary at the Outback Steakhouse. It was just like going to the outback at home, except with Koreans everywhere! Here's a picture from the Outback:


I (Ashley) am still having a little bit of jetlag. I woke up at 5:30 this morning and decided to get up and try to get on the internet to update the blog. I was very surprised to find a network to connect to (we still don't have internet hooked up in our apartment). Apparently wireless routers are illegal here, but I'm thankful for whichever neighbor decided to break that rule.


We are still getting acquainted with the town of Eumseong. We live in the Porangel (por-ahn-gee) Apartments. Looks like Poor Angel, huh? Here's a picture from the streetview:

We live in Building 104 (back right corner) on the 8th floor. Here are some views from our apartment:


This is a view from the back of the apartment, where our laundry room is. Those are all rice fields, except the bottom right corner.


This is the view right off of our living room area. We are surrounded by mountains!!


This is a close up of the trash/recycling area in the previous picture. Korea is very big on recycling. Plastics, glass, and cardboard are separated into different bins. Food waste, such as leftovers, banana peels, apple cores, etc(but not bones or egg shells) goes into white bags and that is taken to feed pigs! We call it the pig trash. Still not exactly sure what goes into the white bags but we try. Everything else goes into these giant yellow bags. We've heard that the trash people actually go through the bags and if they find recycling in your yellow trash bags they yell at you. So we'll try to stay away from that one!


Here's a view from the other side of the living room of our apartment complex. Like I said, we live on the 8th floor but I think it goes up to 15 floors. High rise apartment complexes are everywhere. Most people live in apartments vs. houses.


We're still waiting on a couple of things to get set up in our apartment. Once we're all set up, I'll post pictures.


Well, it's time to get ready for work! Hopefully I can sleep in a little later tomorrow!