Trip to Korea - second day

Last night we had fast food at "Mom's Burgers." For American-style fast food, it wasn't bad. I had a choice between chicken, beef, or a "salad", aka bowl of iceberg lettuce. Since I hate paying money for a tasteless salad, I went ahead and ordered the the chicken with french fries and ate half of it. If I have to do this sort of thing very often, I'm fully expecting my innards to react, negatively. How do people survive without beans, squash, and cabbage?  Without real food?

Today (Saturday) turned out not so great. I was cranky. There were a couple of real button-pushers that made me bite my lips and clench my jaw, and I went to bed at about nine. It appears that alcohol is not only my remedy for stress but also my first line of defense against boredom. It will be better in a day or two. Tomorrow I'll go jogging and be tired physically if not mentally.

It was still raining in the morning, up until noon. It was a hard rain with shifting winds, the kind no one ventures out into without good reason.  When it finally let up I went for a short walk around the complex of about fifteen tall apartment buildings, all more-or-less identical.  And I got lost.

 

Okay, not exactly lost, I just couldn't figure out which building was home. Our windows face on a courtyard with of exercise equipment,

 

so I went to the building that our windows looked out from and tried the key card. Didn't work. Went across the courtyard and tried it--didn't work. Panic'ed and thought I must have been mistaken--maybe we didn't face them but were really just around the corner from them--so I walked around all of the nearby building and tried it a few more times, wondering if all the bad readings had caused the system to disable the card.


By then I was noticing that each building had two entrances, one marked 1.2 and the other, 3.4.5. Maybe those were keyed separately?  I walked around looking at plants and terrain until I was sure I was back at the building I'd started from, then tried both entrances. Got it.







(Magpie cheering me on)



 
After all that walking I decided to postpone the jogging. Off we went to the army base in search of a gate that would let my son bring visitors on. It proved surprisingly difficult. In true Army fashion, they'd closed the usual visitor's gate and notified no one. Eventually we ended up driving pretty much around the entire base only to end up back at his regular gate, the closest one.  There was a building--unmarked, of course--where they were signing in visitors.

There we shopped at the PX, ate lunch (Arby's for them, a Chinese fast-food place for me) and went to the on-base grocery. The Chinese food was even worse than Panda Express, if you can imagine it. And the on-base grocery? Horrid. Okay, yes, they had a great deal of variety and we found almost everything we needed in order to train our son to cook some of our old-time standbys that he'd been missing.  Basic, boring food like seafood linguini with cheese, pot roast, Swiss steak and sauteed salmon. The grocery's--correction, commissary's--staples were okay, but the fresh ingredients all appeared to be outsourced from California and the quality was exactly the same as we'd get at home. How good can a bell pepper taste if it's been bred for the ability to travel halfway and around the world without blemishes?

The other shoppers were mostly servicemen and women. I could imagine for them it was an important link to home, to be able to choose the same products and cook at home just like Mom used to.  But it made me sad all the same.