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In my last post, I didn't explain our house-hunting process. Check it out in Slide 2 in today's deck. Some of you may not know, but YouTube is very popular in Korea. For example, several young entrepreneurs have made millions 💰producing 'meokbang' shows, videos of them regularly eating incredible amounts of food (On your toes, Joey Chestnut. Tzuyang could wipe the floor with you. Check out her videos and you'll be amazed!) Samchun, Mom's older brother, may be the biggest YouTube fan in the world. To aid our search efforts, he spent hours daily reviewing videos of houses for sale. Whenever we found a house we loved, we made a trip plan. Then Mom and Auntie packed lunchboxes and we hit the road. Some spots were near the West Sea, others near Jirisan, one of Korea's largest mountains. Unfortunately, we never found a house we liked. The negatives always outweighed the positives. The driveway's too steep. Poor maintenance. Our furniture won't fit. The inside is tiny and looks nothing like the video. Months passed this way and soon 2020 was just two weeks away. One day, Samchun, Mom and Dad went to see a house in Yeongdong, located close to Daejeon. Once again, they left disappointed, but on their way to check out the action in downtown Yeongdong they passed a new housing development and stopped in. They returned home excited at the potential, and we made a plan for everybody to visit. A few days later, back in Yeongdong and armed with a tape measure, we found our new house and signed a purchase contract! No YouTube required, just planning, perseverance, and good luck. 🎲
A picture of my Yeongdong house on the home page of this site. Bet you never expected to see a house like that, designed in a European style, in Korea. As Slide 3 shows, it's larger than our Jeonju house and reversed the declining trend a bit. But talk about adding complexity! Now I had to protect two houses. Challenges are good, Dad reminds me, and it was a challenge I was willing to take on. My new house had a see-through fence instead of a wall, a rock mountain protected my rear flank, and there was plenty of grass. The scenery was nicer, too. Yeongdong is famous for orchard fruit, peaches, plums, grapes, persimmons, apples. Birds fly the sky (and annoy me😡). Mountains are everywhere. As a 2nd house, it was hard to top. We'd visit once or twice a month, before or after taking Cha-cha to her doctor. We'd have barbeques with Mom's oldest brother's family there, enjoy the slower pace in the countryside and...
Then the Corona (aka COVID) pandemic struck Korea in February 2020.
As a result, our trips to Yeongdong became more frequent. Corona wasn't as prevalent there, and it seemed like a good idea to stay away from large groups of people. We made the most of a bad situation, going for walks, holding dinners for our new neighbors, and touring local spots. The well-tended main park in downtown Yeongdong sits atop a small rock mountain. During the spring, the flowers and cherry blossoms are wonderful. One day we visited No Gun Ri, a small village in northern Yeongdong. During the Korean War, a large group of war refugees were killed by US soldiers there during a confusing incident. Even today, you can see the bullet holes marking the wall of a railroad trestle that was at the center of the event.
By far the best thing about Yeongdong was my house. Mom and Dad hired a local company to build a sunroom on the front and an enclosure on the back. Talk about command posts! Now I had a thirty-foot indoor platform to use to watch for the monsters. Ddori didn't like the sunroom as much as me, but Cha-cha often joined me there. You can see the two of us in the fourth slide from the bottom, in comfort but on duty.
And so time passed by. Corona wasn't going away. Masks were required everywhere. Socializing was frowned upon, and the government disallowed gatherings larger than 6 people. You know this because you lived through it, too. But, as you also know, life goes on. Kind people don't stop being kind, and occasionally they stopped by with bags of red peppers for Mom and Auntie. After cleaning the peppers, they set them out to dry in the hot Yeongdong sun. If, when I lived in Dublin, Ohio, you told me that one day I'd be a sentinel for sun-drying red peppers, I would've looked at you like Third World Skeptical Kid (that's a world-famous meme which I repurposed for you in the third slide from the bottom). But there I was, doing exactly that and loving it.
I hope you enjoyed this Tale. More coming soon. Until then, thanks for visiting my site.
Tango 🐾
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