Meagan in Korea: Happy New Year!

I will start off the New Year by showing off our "Hoopty" car that we got a few months ago for $500. It is a Kia Capitol which I believe is not available in the U.S. It runs pretty well and works for what we need it for. I cannot drive it cause it is a stick shift. Also I do not have my license here yet. I am hoping we can get a different car before Court leaves for ANCOC in June. I REALLY miss my Kia Sorento we left back home. *sigh*

The week before Christmas we managed to lose 2 kids and so we tried to finish up our Christmas shopping. We went to Walmart for this and I feel like we found a lot of goodies. They had a huge display of books for kids in English and they had amazing prices on them. I think everyone got at least 2 books. Everyone got some sort of hat/mittens/ear muffs etc. I was able to get P.J.'s for Maddie. Seems like most things for girls are Disney Princess or Hello Kitty which is just great for us. Anyways the above picture I took out the window as we were stopped at a light. It was one of the few Christmas decorations off post.

I took this from the parking garage at Walmart. These are all apartments. This is out towards the edge of Daegu but the area seems to be growing fastly.

Here we have the World Cup Stadium shot from the parking garage also.

Christmas Eve

Christmas eve was a crazy day for us. I spent all day in the kitchen baking all sorts of goodies and yummies. Above is Maddie helping with the Magic Layer Cookie bars. We left the nuts off these so she could eat them. I used nuts in so many things that I think all the chopping must have released some sort of oil in the air. Maddie ended up with an allergic reaction. I will have to remember that for next year.

All three of the kidlets dressed in their new Christmas Jammies. Thanks mom for making them!

Court and I stayed up until 1:30 am putting things together and wrapping presents. You can see here what it looked like after Santa came. The desk was Maddie's Santa present.

And another shot. Abby got the bike and grocery cart from Santa. Notice the commercial on the TV is for Malaysia tourism. We get a lot of tourism commercials I have never seen before...Vietnam, Malaysia (...Malaysia truly Asia.....), India and so forth. Also a lot of different airlines. One showing a Muslim man looking like the King of Saudi Arabia flying about.

Ok so back to Christmas....here is Gavin's spread. A Nintendo DS with 2 games.

Christmas Morning

Would you believe we actually slept in until 8 am? I think that is the latest I have ever slept on Christmas Day! Here we have the girls checking out the gifts. Abby was enthralled with the desk and would not leave it alone. In fact she had me up all night wanting to play and at one point I found her wandering in the living room...think this was at about 3 am or so.

Stockings here....

Abby opening a doll from Grandma and her Papa.

As you can see Abby has morning hair. This is what she did all morning. We kept having to drag her back to the presents. She wanted to play with all of Maddie's things. Gavin and I ended up opening most of her gifts.

Gavin showing off the new Dream Station. He was sooooo happy to get it and he loves Kirby.

Abby with another gift. This is a Little Tikes mirror set with play make-up etc. She was pretty happy with it.

This is how Gavin looked for the rest of the day. The DS is really neat and the bottom screen is a touch screen. It comes with a stylus and I was not sure if Gavin could handle it but as you can see in the above shot he had no problem playing it.

This is what the living room looked like after the kids were done. It still looked this way 2 days later.....

Christmas Dinner

Since we hosted Thanksgiving someone else hosted Christmas. We went to Steve and Ju-he's apartment around 2 or so. They are a super nice couple and I love their apartment.

It was Margie's 26th birthday and here is a gift someone brought for her. I thought I would show the neat wrapping job that was done. It looks like a folded shirt.

Steve and Ju-he made a TON of food for the party.

Oysters or something above. I did not try them since I am anti-fish.

Below we have Sweet and Sour Mandu (?). Those are little meat/veggie filled dumplings in sauce. This was fabulous!

Ohhh this was really good too. Ju-he told me she marinated it in Teriaky sauce.
Ok I am still not 100% sure what this was. I heard mention that it was Acorn or nut Tofu. I was not brave enough to try this. We brought sweet potatoes, rolls and a ton of home baked cookies as well as various alcoholic items. There was also a turkey and a ham. Loads of good food.

Abby is always so popular at these events. She does not know a stranger and enjoys all the attention. Above is Rob and Sue. I really really like Sue a lot. Her English is almost better than mine and she does not care if I ask her a million questions. We are trying to get together to go shopping. She is a teacher...think she teachers middle school math.