Bringing Up The Rear - (Korea) Day 148

The hike down from Seoul Tower this time of year is not too bad...lots of trees
in bloom. (Our KATUSA, our sergeant, SPC Mick, and the LT leading the way)

We had to meet for PT this morning at 0535 in front of the office. As my little sister would say…"That is the butt crack of dawn". We had to wear our full body armor with plates as well as an assault pack which I had packed with 4 liters of water. We headed off to Seoul Tower once again with the normal crew from our office as well as an LT from some other office…I'm not sure where. The pace was much quicker than previous hikes and we soon started to break into two different groups with me and my sergeant bringing up the rear. We made it to the top and rested a bit, then proceeded to head back down. Keeping up with everyone on the trip down was no problem…lol. It was a great workout, I could feel every muscle in my body all worn out. In fact my legs felt like jello pretty much the rest of the day.

At the end of the hike our sergeant bought everyone breakfast at a local Korean store. We all had "kimbop". It's a popular Korean food made from steamed white rice and various other ingredients such as meat & radish all rolled up in seaweed. It is then cut up into bite size pieces. We each received two of them. Since we had a meeting, we took them to go and headed off to shower and get ready for work. We setup a meeting in our conference room and then I had a chance to sit down and eat my breakfast. It may sound a little strange, but it's actually pretty good.

I spent the rest of the morning working on SkillPorts and then headed out for lunch in my room. I was able to video chat with my wife for a bit before heading back to work to do some more SkillPorts. We then setup for a ceremony which is usually a pretty easy thing, but this time it turned into a mess. An air force general was the host and we didn't have a flag for him…or at least we didn't have one on a pole ready to go. We contacted the honor guard to have them get one for us and they were taking forever. The brass started to get nervous and freak out a bit. I had to go check with the honor guard once again to get the status on the flag, CPT Hooah! got on the phone and used his rank to try and persuade them to move faster. All this time the deadline of the meeting is getting closer and closer. The air force brass at this point are sweating bullets wondering what's going to happen without their general's flag in the front. During all of this Special K was in the back with some duct tape and the flag we did have. He was able to rig up the flag redneck style and it worked. We got it up with about 5 or 10 minutes to spare. Then came the honor guard a couple of minutes before the general was about to walk in with the flag. After all the harassing they got about getting it, they were then told we don't need it anymore. LOL. I know that corporal was pissed, but they were just too slow.

We then were told that the company decided to move the PT test to tomorrow instead of Thursday. Since we just did the big hike today, our sergeant said we will not be doing it. We'll now be doing it sometime in May. I later told him that I'm trying to go home and I need to get this done. He said he would try and get a special PT test so we can do it a bit earlier. We'll see how that goes.

We then cleaned up and left the office. I headed over to the PX to get some supplies for my TV (cable and a power strip). I then headed to the food court for dinner and some downloading. As I was sitting there a guy in my barracks sat down and started talking with me. He's leaving at the start of June and is starting to wrap things up here. He was actually SPC Short's roommate when he first arrived here in Korea. Turns out he has a German wife and he knows a bit of German. So we had a little conversation in German. We then headed back to the barracks and he let me go through his DVD collection to borrow before he leaves.

When I got back to my room I tried to hook up my TV, but to my despair I found out that the TV was purchased here in Korea. They use a different plug in here in Korea (except on post of course), so I was unable to get it all hooked up. I now have to see if it's worth getting the necessary equipment to make this work. Grrrr.

Overheard Quote: "I tell my wife I don't mind if her ass knocks the lamp of the table" (SPC Short's old roommate stated this after talking about how he doesn't care if his wife gets big and fat)

A photo of my Kimbap, I ate two of these logs for breakfast today.
Good stuff...and healthy too!

SPC Mick doing some push-ups because a letter he received had
stickers all over it. (I may have mentioned that we had to do
a number of push-ups in basic for every sticker that was on a piece of mail...lol)