Tag Archives: Beommul-dong flat

Another washing machine in another shower …

Admin, Daegu, ,

I am not a fan of moving house. Some people find the change exciting and enjoy the packing and the unpacking. I’m not one of those. I don’t mind unpacking as much – creating order out of chaos appeals to my OCD side – but it takes ages for me to settle and I really, really hate packing. Moving house in a foreign country is a whole new level of misery.

The question of me moving has been discussed on and off for months. When I first moved here, I was told I would be living within walking distance from the school. Then that changed and I was told it would be a few months before I could move. Then, in November, I was told I’d be moving soon. Then I was told I’d move at the end of January. And so on and so on. So, you can imagine my dismay when I discovered on Tuesday that they wanted me to move now, only to a place not anywhere near being within walking distance of the school. In fact, when they first mentioned it, they referred to an area that isn’t even on a bus route. I was, I think understandably, unimpressed. After explaining repeatedly, to people who only use private cars, that a place not on any bus route may as well be in Siberia in terms of convenience, they finally got around to explaining where the place actually is, at which point I – being the only person familiar with the bus routes – figured out that there would be a bus. After a lot of stress I really didn’t need.

Then I discovered, on Thursday evening, that I would be moving on Sunday. The practice of only informing people of things three minutes before they happen seems to be a Korean ‘thing’. Several of my friends have also commented on it. Perhaps there is something cultural that de-prioritizes proper advanced planning. It bothers me. A lot. Particularly in a case like this, where the short notice meant that all the work of sorting and packing, along with all the emotional ups and downs of moving, has to be squeezed into three days. I asked how the move would happen. They said they’d organise movers to come in and move the furniture. I also got to pop into the new place so that I’d know what I needed to bring with me. Armed with this information, I started packing on Friday. This largely involved taking everything out of cupboards and all the pictures off walls and putting them in piles.

On Saturday I was woken early by worries about moving. I spent the morning sorting through things and then made a couple of trips to the new flat with a backpack full of things like books and plates and frying pans. I would have continued during the afternoon but I had plans to meet a friend downtown, a friend who is leaving shortly and whose company was infinitely preferable to the packing.

As happens when the company is congenial and there is ice-cream and strawberry dessert, the time just flew by and before we knew it, it was evening and we decided to grab some dinner before heading home. The ice-cream and strawberry creation, accompanied by miniature bottles of Rose, was at Café Lucid, which I hadn’t discovered before but which was lovely and quirky and the perfect place for sitting and chatting for hours. For dinner we ended up, after walking in a large circle, at Gulliver’s Travels – an ‘antique restaurant’. An antique restaurant is not, for the record, a place that cooks and serves up antiques, as the name may suggest. Rather, it is decorated with an eclectic collection of antique bits and pieces, paired with old record covers, big wooden tables and comfy chairs. The food was pretty good and the atmosphere lovely so we, not surprisingly, lost track of time all over again and before we knew it, it was nearly 10pm.

Sunday was far, far less fun. I woke up early so that I could get everything done. The movers were coming at 2pm so I had time to finish packing once I actually managed to drag my exhausted body out of bed. I packed up another backpack full of stuff, as well as a grocery bag (think Woolworth’s canvas bags) full of tins and dry pasta, and headed to the new flat. At the new flat, I unpacked the bags and put stuff in cupboards and drawers and then headed back to the old place to get the next load. These trips involved me walking down the hill to the bus stop (5 to 10 minutes), waiting for the bus (10 to 15 minutes), taking the bus the 10 or 15 minutes to the area of my new flat, unpacking (15 minutes), and taking the same bus back and walking back up the hill (20 minutes). I managed two more trips across to the new place before 1pm, taking everything I wanted from the kitchen.

The person from my school who was organising things phoned me at 2pm to tell me that he wasn’t able to be there just yet but that the movers had arrived. I let them in and watched in frustration as they packed everything in the house into the same crates to move them, as if they were all going to the same place. They spoke no English and my very few words of Korean had deserted me, so we were entirely unable to communicate. I was moving from a two-bedroom apartment to a one-room flat. The new place is just a bit bigger than a university res room. There was no way all this stuff would fit. The Beommul-dong flat is also the place where a series of foreign teachers have lived over several years, many of whom have left things behind: basketballs, weights, a large table, books and videos in which I have no interest, a huge hi-fi system with speakers and radio and tape deck, a pressure cooker. None of these are things I wanted, especially in my tiny new flat. I watched with growing impotent panic as they packed them all up.

Just then, to make things worse, the landlord’s wife came in and started talking at me in Korean. I couldn’t understand her. And I was already miserable and stressed and tired. I tried to explain that I didn’t understand. She just kept on and on talking at me in Korean, getting louder and more and more annoyed. By the time my boss arrived, ages and ages after he was supposed to be there, I was close to tears. He proceeded to have long conversations with various people before we could finally leave. I suspect that the problem was that the landlord and his wife – neither of whom I had actually seen much of at all before this horrible day – had not been informed that I’d be moving out. Either way, it was not a fun few hours.

We arrived at the new place and I had another struggle to convince the movers and the person from my school that they could not just dump all the stuff at my new place. I stood my ground fiercely and eventually got just the few things I wanted moved in. They left and I went upstairs and collapsed on my couch and stared at the the things I needed to unpack.

The silver lining of the whole experience is that I quite like the new place. It really is tiny, one room which includes sleeping area, sitting area and cooking area – picture a bedroom closet next to a refrigerator and the sink and cooker, just a couple of feet from the edge of the bed and the couch – plus a little bathroom. But it on the second floor on the top of a hill and the windows that look out across the top of buildings towards tree-covered hills and, most importantly, I can see the sky. Blue sky and clouds and stars and everything. Just up the road is a large art gallery and theatre (Suseong Artpia) with another small tree-covered hill. Nearby (probably within 10 or 15 minutes walking distance) is Suseong Lake. The hill I have to climb to get home is much, much gentler than the one I used to walk up from the bus stop and also shorter. There are better and closer little shops. At the end of the road, literally 10 minutes walk away (I timed it) is The Hut where we generally gather on a Friday night to drink dongdongju and eat kimchi pancakes. Almost all my friends live in the area. There is a range of little restaurants and take away places within a couple of blocks. A lot of the top fancy restaurants in town are nearby. Inside, the flat is done in a colour scheme of back and white, instead of the sickly, faded pink and green which was starting to drive me mad. And there is far more light and air because the windows aren’t shaded by other buildings.

So the destination isn’t all bad, but I think I’ll try and avoid the experience of moving house in a foreign country again, at least unless I can be absolutely sure that the people involved all speak English and I have a little more time and a little more control. Oh, and just for the record, there is a washing machine in my new shower, too. Only in Korea…

There’s a washing machine in my shower

Daegu

So, I have a new flat in a new city, half a world away from the country where I’ve lived all my life – and which I love very dearly. It is not a tiny flat. It’s smaller than the places I lived in Rondebosch but I think it’s probably roughly the same size as the flat where on Katherine street in Sandton.

The Katherine Street flat, however, was modern and western and super-secure. This is not. I knew before I left home that I would be in a fairly student-y flat. Given that I’m doing what for many people is a student-type, just-post-varsity, almost-backpacker-nomad thing, it really is to be expected. That doesn’t stop me being sad that my flat is not pretty. My life for the last few years has been a succession of pretty homes which I have generally chosen myself (or which were my parents’) and which required very little effort to make them comfortable and homely.  Even my res room didn’t take much to make pretty. Apart from the ages spent in hotels over the past 10 years, this is the first time I’m in a place that I haven’t chosen myself and which is likely to require quite a lot of effort to get it looking the way I’d like. Or perhaps it really won’t and I’m just feeling a little intimidated by the idea of being so far from home and am taking it out on the poor apartment.

The flat has 4 rooms. The main bedroom is big enough to fit, with reasonable comfort, a double bed and cupboard. It also contains a modem – which I’m hoping means that I will shortly be able to set up internet at home – which would add greatly to the flat’s appeal. The bed is reasonably comfortable even if it does creak. It appears to be one of those that you put together yourself from a kit, but which hasn’t been put together particularly well. The cupboard is fine, if rather plastic and even comes with coat-hangers – a huge relief given that I left mine at home as part of an effort to stay within weight limitations. The particularly interesting feature in this room is the window. Or rather the window covering. Most of the windows in the flat have 2 sliding layers on the inside-side of the burglar bars (if this country really has no crime, why are their burglar bars?). The layer just inside the bars is a fly-screen. Or rather a mosquito screen. This makes me super-happy – mozzies and other summer-heat-related bugs are my nemesis. The next layer is a clear sliding window (side-to-side, not sash). The final layer is smoky, patterned glass which, I’m guessing, is intended to replace curtains. In the main bedroom this is supplemented by a layer of thick and violently blue plastic. I initially thought that this was because there were no windows. Further investigation, however, suggests that it is probably just there to keep out the sun in the mornings. I feel that I may well remove it sometime soon. Especially because the noise from the middle-school across the road will probably be more of a wake-up call than the light.

Not that there is much natural light that will reach the windows anyway. This area of Daegu is fairly built-up. Actually, it appears that every area of Daegu is fairly built up. The view from the kitchen/dining-room, which is also where I have my computer set up, is of the next building’s stairs and front doors. Sigh. The kitchen/dining-room itself has some of the necessities of life. It has a cooker-thing (although I haven’t yet tried it), a lovely fridge, a microwave which is not plugged in – which may indicate that it does not work – and a semi-functional air-conditioner which is situated over the table and no longer has a remote, so that you have to stand on a chair and balance precariously in order to make it work. It also smells a bit mouldy.

The kitchen also has a typical student-digs collection of plates, cups, glasses and cutlery. I’m currently drinking espresso out of a tin (with ice) from a wine glass because there aren’t really any ‘normal’ glasses. The kitchen does have a table, which although not all that stable (I wouldn’t try sitting on it for example), is very convenient and would even mean that I could probably invite people to dinner if I had any people to invite. Or something to feed them. Apart from Spam. Why is it that in every digs you will invariably find some weird thing left by the former tenants? In this case that includes a large cardboard box – sort of a gift or presentation pack – of Spam. I’m thinking that perhaps the former tenant was American. Tenants, sorry. Apparently the previous person to live here had a wife. Not entirely sure how she coped. They have also left behind one egg, some store-bought ice – which is super given that the water here is apparently not great for drinking – and, oddly, a pack of cigarettes in the freezer. This last mystery I intend to explore further. Does everyone in Korea keep their cigarettes in the freezer? Does it keep them fresh? Were they hiding them from someone?

The kitchen is missing a kettle, which makes me quite sad. Once I have finished the tinned espresso my recruiter (who picked me up at the airport and brought me here last night) was kind enough to buy for me (along with some orange juice, some bottled water and some tomatoes), I will boil a pot of water on the stove to make coffee. Or tea, even. I wonder how anyone in a tea-addicted nation manages without a kettle? The kitchen/dining-room/now-study area also has space for sitting and to put stuff on the walls. So I will be putting up some lions and African-people-pictures just as soon as I can find some prestic-like-substance. Or perhaps drawing pins.

The second-bedroom-come-lounge contains one times single bed (cream), one times 3-seater couch (brown ‘leather’), one times big TV on stand (brown and with possible cable decoder) and one times fancy-ass Hi-Fi – that I’ll probably never be able to figure out – (in brown stand). And a coffee table. Everything in the room is brown or cream. If I end up spending a whole year here, I will most definitely be opting for a slightly less res-common-room circa 1970s (without the psychadelica) feel.

Which leaves the final room in the house and definitely the most interesting. And disconcerting. The whole place is a little bit like a cross between a Mozambican backpackers (mostly because it needs a good clean and the furniture looks like something someone else threw out) and a dodgy Grahamstown student digs of the sort that has been a digs for a very, very long time – and still has the original not-expensive furniture and obligatory  bottle-opener. The one thing every digs and backpackers has, however, is at least one bath and/or shower. This flat doesn’t. Or at least, it doesn’t in the traditional west-European (and, let’s be frank, urban African) sense. It has what is known in some places (Turkey, possibly?) as a Wet-room. What this means is that the toilet and, in this case, washing machine sit in a tiled room, which has a drain in the centre and a tap and shower-head on the wall. In order to have a shower, you simple close the door and stand in the middle of the room and turn on the shower. I have already discovered one of the major drawbacks of this system – which is damp toilet paper. I also feel that it, surely, cannot be good for the washing machine to sit in a wet room and get showered on every day. Given that it’s a Korean-made washing machine, that this type of bathroom is apparently normal in this country and that washing machines apparently always live in bathrooms here, it’s probably fine. It just feels odd. Although, come to think of it, perhaps this is why washing machines, which used to be metal and occasionally rusted, suddenly started to be made of plastic at about the same time as the economic miracle in this part of the world. Food for thought. In the meantime, I’m going to have to used to a very different kind of shower-experience. And a perpetually damp bathroom floor.

But as much as I may bitch about it, there is a certain charm and sense of potential to a student-like place and I’m sure I’ll be able to make something of it for as long as I’m here. The only thing that concerns me a bit is security. There is only one door without any security gate and only one lock, for example. Not even a bolt. This is within courtyard reached by a locked gate. But the gate could be easily climbed over. According to the guidebook to Korea and all of the many forums (fora?) on-line, this shouldn’t be a problem. There is supposed to be a distinct lack of crime in this country. So even walking up a not-particularly-well-lit alley-like road, to a dark and not very well lit locked gate, through a courtyard and up the stairs, after a bus trip back from the school, should be fine. I am meeting my director shortly and hope to be able to confirm this with him. I’m guessing – given that the last two teachers who did my job lived here quite happily – that it is true. Which is going to require me to overcome all of the instincts which make my hairs stand on end and my shoulder muscles tense immediately at the very idea of walking anywhere alone at night. You can take the girl out of South Africa but it’s a whole lot harder (especially because the trip was hassle-free) to take the South African vreemdeling-vrees out of the girl. I anticipate a series of rapid, slightly terrified runs up the hill before I settle in. And that it’ll take time for me to get used to sleeping soundly with only one locked door and one locked gate as security.

It’s possible I may be moving at some point to a place within walking distance of the school. This would be preferable purely for convenience. But for now, this is home – many, many miles and a world of difference away from a small town in the Eastern Cape where I grew up.

3 July, 14:00 – PS Internet now set up in flat. Appeal greatly increased.