As I start to write this post, I realize this story is going to be fairly lengthy – so I’m breaking it up to make it more manageable. 

Like many things in the Army…insanity is everywhere, Korea included. And for this post,

Insanity, thy name is SOFA.

SOFA - Status of Forces Agreement: When there are US military troops stationed in a foreign country the two governments get together & decide how to play nice together. They make up a bunch of seemingly aribtrary rules for both sides to follow & that’s where our story begins…

Korea is not a “normalized” base. Meaning if a soldier gets orders to go to Korea, he’s not allowed to bring his family or his car.

But Eric & I applied for and received Command Sponsorship – allowing me to travel to Korea to be stationed with him. The good news is that we’re then authorized to ship one vehicle to Korea. However, the downside is that it extends his tour from one year to two…but we’re together.

So before I could fly out to Korea, I had to ship our car & Eric had to find a place for us to live. I got the easier end of the deal, while Eric had to deal with base housing. 

Housing would not let us live on base because they considered Maggie, a Bullmastiff, an aggressive breed (which, if you know anything about the breed just doesn’t make sense). But even if we didn’t have her, we’d be number 40 on the list. So that meant finding a place off-post – which is how we met Janice.

But the bigger issue was figuring out how Eric (without a car or bike) would get to work everyday from a good 25 minutes away (by car) while we waited the 60 days for our’s to arrive.

Biking wasn’t going to cut it & the bus system wasn’t flexible enough for those late nights at work, so we dropped $500 on a “hooptie”, a 1993 Hyundai Exel, to serve as a temporary car until our’s arrived.

Problem solved…so it seemed.

(Read part 2)