MONDAY, 9/23/13
The day starts slow but build up as it progresses. Judy takes off for school, and I settle in to begin writing the website entries for Thursday through Sunday. Lillie calls and says the dryer repair guy is coming from 10:00 to 10:30. He shows up at 10:30 and goes right to work. He replaces a broken belt and we now have air circulating through the dryer. After running a load I begin to hear a squeal. It sounds like a belt squealing, so maybe I’m not through with dryer repair guy after all.
Judy gets the official fapiao (tax statement) on our apartment, so we head to the police station when she gets home. We have passports, copy of the lease, and the fapiao on the apartment lease from BISS. We guide the taxi to the station, which is way off the beaten path. Only two people in line ahead of us, and 15 minutes later, we’re walking out, with our official “Residence Registration”. I’m so excited to get that over with, successfully, I want to celebrate (that means eat a big dinner). However, we “celebrated” with a lot of food in Korea, so it’s back to the apartment and sandwiches tonight.
We bought some tea on one of our excursions a few weeks back, but hadn’t tried it yet. I purchased a cheap electric teapot, and we experiment with our tea. It’s a nice change from our regular diet coke. Time will tell if we actually become “tea” (as in hot) drinkers. We’re already iced tea drinkers. One of the little cultural things you learn here is to ask for cold water. If you don’t, it’s hot water, and I mean scalding hot.
TUESDAY, 9/24/13
Lillie has rescheduled the apartment cleaning for Wed./Fri. this week, so no visitors. I spend most of the day, working on solutions for two problems. The first is where to travel during our Chinese New Years Holiday, the last week of January. I think we’ve settled on the beaches in Phuket, Thailand. The main question is the quality of our hotel property, and whether or not to add a day or two in another city, close to Phuket. We’ll probably end up in Bangkok for a few days. I’m not sure what we’ll do, but there are bound to be some city tours, etc.
The 2nd problem to be solved is how to send a wire transfer to our moving company. They’re almost ready to bring our stuff (23 boxes of stuff, not sure where we’re going to put it). I can’t seem to set it up through Chase. They want to send me a confirmation code to establish the wire account. They want to call or text it to me, but they won’t call or text China. The only number they’ll call or text are our US phone numbers, which are non-functioning. I’ll finish the story tomorrow on the bank, when I know more myself. As you might expect, this is really frustrating since I worked hard before we left the US to assure we wouldn’t have these kinds of problems.