We've got it Maid

Hello All,
I just sent out the link for the blog about our trip to the States, so whoever visits the site is going to get two for the price of one! I'm trying to turn over a new leaf and blog more frequently. We'll see how it goes. : )
What's new with the Purkeys... Well, we now have a housekeeper. She comes in once a week for eight hours. Did we REALLY need her? ...no, but it sure is nice. Cliff is still doing the laundry even though she said she would do it, but we are leaving her to do the ironing. She'll practically pay for herself right there with all the money we'll save that we were spending on getting our work clothes laundered and pressed.
I decided to try my hand at making Sam Gae Tang which is a chicken ginseng soup. Basically it is small, whole chicken in broth stuffed with rice and ginseng and some other things. It's really good. We went to e-mart to get the ingredients because I knew I wouldn't be able to get some of them at the Commissary. I did a search on the internet for a recipe (gotta love Google) and made a list of the things I would need. Then, I googled language translator and came up with a site by Altavista called Babel Fish (from the Tower of Babel story, I assume). Anyway, this site lets you choose your to and from languages and then it will translate whatever word you type in. If the language you are translating into does not use Roman characters, you do have to at least know the alphabet because it appears in that language's characters. I guess you could always just copy it down and show it to whomever you are trying to communicate with. It seems to be a very useful tool, but in this case it was all for naught because we found prepackaged kits for sam gae tang which had everything we needed in packets stuffed into the body cavity of the chicken. So, we put all of the other stuff we had collected up to that point back and bought those. It turned out pretty well although there are a couple of things I will do differently the next time. I definitely want to go back to e-mart and look around some more. I did notice that their chicken is much fresher and less expensive than the commissary. Their produce is definitely fresher. It's close to work for me so I can stop there on the way home. There is a parking garage and up to two hours is free. One think I really like about Korean parking garages is that you take a ticket upon entry and there are machines that you insert youor ticket into when you are ready to leave. It will calculate how much you owe and you feed it into the machine. It will encode your ticket and give it back to you. You then have a set amount of time (usually about 20 minutes, I think) to exit the parking garage. There's a machine on the way out that you put your ticket into and then the arm will raise and let you drive out. It saves so much time when you're leaving because there is not an attendant you have to pay and who has to make change for you. Which probably isn't so bad when there are only a few cars exiting, but could create quite a delay if there are 10 or so cars trying to leave at the same time.
Well, I guess that's about all for now. Here is a photo I took near Namdaemun market a while back. I really like this photo because of the juxtaposition of the historical building and the tall, modern buildings. I wish you could see the carvings under the eaves better though. It's really quite nice.