Electricity - Part III

This is take out from a Chinese restaurant. All this came to $28.00 U.S.
All I know is the stuff on the right is sweet and sour pork. It was all quite
delicious. The food was on plastic and we were told when we finished to
just pile it all up and leave it outside our apartment with paper covering it.
The restaurant would be by the next day to pick it up.

Part of the reinforcements sent to wait for the air conditioner guy.

I'm loving the food too! But it was sooo humid in the apartment.
Do you notice I'm the only one sweating? Curt is too but he was
taking this picture.

How many Koreans does it take to fix an air conditioner? A LOT!

We were awaken yesterday morning at 2:00 a.m. by our power going out again! When the repairmen left the day before, I was assured everything was fixed, and everything did work until 2:00 a.m. Every time we turned on an air conditioner, it took out the power. So when Curt got to the office, he sent a very terse email to our relocation agency basically stating that this problem is entering our 6th day and if it wasn't fixed we were going to a hotel and looking for another apartment! He called me shortly after to say that someone from the agency was coming over from Seoul. They showed up in the early afternoon with the President of the company. Curt decided to come home too and his plant manager sent three people from the plant to help too.

Eventually, we ended up with a houseful of Koreans. Three from the relocation agency, three from my husband's work, the owner of the apartment, the real estate agent, the building manager, two building maintenance workers, and a guy from the company that installed the air conditioner. There got to be a lot of yelling (they call it being passionate) at one point. I'm not used to people talking loudly and angrily but it is common here. It actually turned out that when it started raining last Saturday, that shorted out a wire in the compressor which is hanging out of our bedroom window. But the building maintenance workers said that the building was fine, and the air conditioner repairmen said the unit was fine. I lost count how many times someone turned on the air conditioner with the results always being that our power went out. They didn't seem to believe this even after 4, 5, 10 times. It went for hours and hours into the night. Finally, at 9:00 p.m., they had done something that somehow fixed the problem. Although, everyone said nothing was wrong and that nothing was fixed, the air conditioning now works.

One of Curt's co-workers asked me a question that really caught me off guard. She asked, "Who is the most handsome man in this room?" I told her, "My husband, of course." She didn't like that answer and really wanted me to pick a Korean. I told her I couldn't do that and asked her the same questions. She said that she couldn't answer that question.

So then I asked her if Korean men ever wear wedding rings as I had rarely see them on men. She said that all the young married men do wear their wedding rings but when they get older, they stop. I asked why and she said that they wanted to appear unmarried. I didn't ask why! Curt still wears his wedding band so he hasn't taken up that Korean tradition (It's not a tradition, but I don't really know what to call it).

I also learned that Koreans DO NOT like cats. They consider them very bad luck so they are to be avoided at all costs. Good thing we left Louie at home with our son. It's really his cat anyway. They do have dogs and the dogs are trained to go on a disposible mat in their apartments.