Hello friends,

We have returned from our holiday break! We were on vacation from December 23 - January 5th in that time we celebrated Christmas with our fellow teacher dormies here at DGEV, zoomed with both our families, had an incredible Nigerian dinner with friends, then jetted off to Jeju Island on the southwest coast of Korea to spend the rest of the break dog sitting for a couple on the island that went on their own vacation. 

But first, that leads me to make a plug here for Trusted Housesitters! Because our trip would not be possible if it was not for them. TH sitters is the best site for pet lovers and travelers, the website is dedicated to taking care of pets at home while the owners are away on vacation or work. As you can guess the website hosts trusted house sitters from all over the world, they apply for your stay and you get to decide who seems best for your housesit. How did I stumble across this website? All credit is to my incredible mother-in-law Kim! She’s a researcher by trade, but a researcher at heart, she can find the best jobs anywhere, find deals for traveling, airlines, information on any organization, and all kinds of amazing opportunities – it’s really quite incredible and we get to be beneficiaries of her prowess. She was the one that first introduced us to this website, we had an elderly cat named Charlie and we were looking at some vacations and wondering who we would get to watch him, he needed care and attention in his older years - she recommended Trusted Housesitters! It worked out wonderfully, I believe we had two TH sitters come sit Charlie in our apartment in Seattle. The details are: you sign up for access to the site, it is $100 a year, you set up a profile for either sitting or needing sitters, you build up recommendations and reviews as both. TH sitters also does their fair share of security for everyone using their site, you are vetted and approved with a mandatory background check, ID check, external references, and then your contact information. 

Once you are in, you will find housesits all over the world, in every city, and in every country. There is no money exchange between you and the sitter, it is just an online contract stating you will come to take care of the animals, while they are on vacation or traveling, an exchange for an exchange. You do pay for getting there but your lodging will all be free. The more positive reviews of yourself as a sitter will increase your chances of being chosen to sit again. 

We have absolutely loved it and now was our chance to be the sitters! I signed up again this year knowing if things become okay with covid-19 we might be able to find some sits in Korea. I did a bit of searching when we first moved but nothing was available and we had little vacation in our early months.

Well sure enough Kim found the perfect housesit on Jeju Island during our holiday break, I reached out to the couple, who are teachers at the International School and were looking to get away for their vacation. The problem was that their break was much longer than ours. So we were first turned down, but a few weeks went by they reached out again and let us know that they had found a sitter for the first half of their trip and were wondering if we could cover the second half - Dec 27th - Jan 5th. We secured ourselves a nice 9-day getaway taking care of two lovely pups Jasper and Bodie. 

Getting to Jeju is very easy, it’s an hour’s flight from Daegu, and downtown Daegu has an International airport 7 minutes away from our parent University campus. So we had a direct bus route from here at DGEV to our YJU bus parking lot then a short taxi ride to the airport. We decided to book a hotel in Daegu the day before to get in early and relax, then jump to the airport in the afternoon. Buying our airline tickets though, was a much bigger hurdle than we’ve ever experienced. Long and short of it: is in Korea your credit cards and debit cards are vetted in many different ways than in the United States. It’s not the simple enter-your-credit-card-information-and-pay then the banks provide the security and protection, here in Korea it is on you. so as we were checking out on the Jeju Airlines website it was asking us to download a security program which I declined, then tried using our US credit card -that was denied and said that it didn’t have enough security- at a loss, we then saw we could try using PayPal … which finally went through. Uffda. 

The plane was packed with Koreans traveling to the island, it is the most popular getaway destination in the country for Koreans and looked that way after the Christmas holiday. 

Getting to the house, we arranged with the owners to borrow their car while we were on the island, as their place is very far from the airport and would allow us to take the dogs on hikes or the beach etc while we were there. They live on the southwest corner of the island in the middle of farm country, seemingly dozens and dozens of orange groves all around them. 

We landed at 7:30pm got to their house around 8:30pm the boys were jumping up and pawing at the door, we greeted them with lots of warm pets and then quickly dumped our bags and set out in the darkness for a walk as they’d been inside for a while at that point. A bit spooky walking the dark farm roads with no idea what was around us, but it was quiet and beautiful, we saw no one or thing, and quickly got back to hit the hay, ready for the first day of our stay!

We awoke the next morning, checking out our digs, they have a beautiful house/cabin - wood walls floor to ceiling, a two-bedroom house, with a clawfoot tub! We made coffee (thank you instant Maxim coffee) then created a game plan for the day: go get breakfast, go buy groceries, come back walk the dogs, and make dinner. We picked the Tropical Hideaway brunch spot and boy did we love it, only because: we had a proper eggs benedict, our first since arriving in Korea. It was a gorgeous spot, and now looking at the website I see how spectacular the hotel and restaurant really is, the roof deck wasn’t open, it was too cold. Maybe we’ll be back.

Korean homes don’t traditionally have ovens, they don’t seem to use them, it’s not in their cooking dialect… our cabin stayed true to that rule, although the couple did own a slow cooker. So I came up with the idea of making a big batch of chili to last us quite a few days, then supplement with whatever breakfast and lunch snacks that we wanted. We gathered our groceries at a local EDU Market and went home. Eric was doing swimmingly well driving on Korean roads, not much was out of the normal in the way of standard driving, and we use the KakoTalk Maps app which is the best mapping app for Korea - Google does not work here. 

That’s the beginning of the trip!

We made chili, it lasted us 5 days for two people, was delicious, and then we just settled into a routine of getting the boys walked 2-3 times daily. The house was pretty cold because it was an older home, seemed to just seep heat, but it had Korean ondul floor heating, unfortunately, that was gas-powered so we tried to use it sparingly. The great thing was that the couple had these two big snuggies that were just the best and warmest things we’ve ever worn. She sent us the info to buy them if we wanted, it is a local Korean lady on the island that makes them! We made coffee each morning, sat around in our snuggies until we were warm and fed, took the dogs on a walk, lunch, and whatever else we wanted to do. Which ended up being various projects we intended to work on during this free time. 

Eric was working on a new Kickstarter project he’s got up his sleeve, writing a story for that project, finished reading two books, and other random projects he’s got going. 

Me, I was taking pictures with my Mamiya C220 I brought, planning for DGEV’s adult classes that we’ll be teaching in January, reading for my book club, I got a haircut finally, as well as finished two other books: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami then picked up a book from the house The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin.

We explored Secret Beach with the dogs, but it wasn’t really relaxing. Korea isn’t big “dog people” so to have two dogs with us we were looked at and I felt a little odd, it was a nice beach, I don’t know if I would go often if I lived there. If the dogs knew me and I knew they had good recall it might be a different story, though. 

Our teacher friend Kevin visited the island for 4 days, we met him in Seogwipo the south-central side of the island, and a bigger tourist city. We got dinner with him at a burger spot called 88버거 (beogeo) burger, which was delicious. 

Highlights: 

The dogs, of course, really grew on us, as they usually do. They were so friendly, not needy, relaxed when at home, but energized on every walk. Bodie liked being outside, to a detriment actually, he wouldn’t come in even if you asked, even with treats or trying to swindle him any other way, he knew what you were getting at. We’d just go out and grab him when we were ready for a walk which he then totally submitted to, then we’d just drag him in after. 

The place. The house was cozy, all wood walls, cute, efficient kitchen. 

Being in farm country, exploring the farm roads around us. I wished we would have done more. 

Exploring Jeju.

Watching Station Eleven

Lightlights:

Trying to take warm showers (also powered by gas)

Bodie breaking* out of the yard. *we had the gas replaced and the back gate was left open. Thank god he wasn’t far, we found him at the neighbors. 

Hanging laundry on their laundry line outside - everything smelling fresh. 

Lowlights:

Interacting with other dogs on our walks, we usually came across other dogs chained up or in kennels. We never had good interactions with these, it was always jumping and barking. I also worried about the other dogs’ lives, I hope they get to roam free or go on a walk at some point. 

Windy, cold island - made for some cold walks.