::A Geek in Korea::

The long slog threw one apartment after another, weighing the potential upsides and downsides of every single aspect of a house is finally over. We bought a house! This is one of those tremendously important things that happen in someone’s life, but the ramifications of this purchase have yet to sink in because until I step foot in a bare apartment and place my stuff there for the first time, it won’t feel like it’s ours. Right now, it’s just a very expensive dream that I’ll be forced to pay for over an extended period of time.

This is partly because while we put down money for a down payment, and we have a moving date, we still aren’t any closer to really living in the apartment than we were when we signed the contract. There are still loan negotiations and the process of actually moving in that sort of hamper any sense of accomplishment gained by signing and stamping a paper to agree to buy an apartment. Sure, the apartment is eventually going to be ours, but it’s not like I can kick my feet up and play some Wii at the new place now is it? Until we move in and figure out where we are financially, all other plans are sort of on hold.

The place we ended up purchasing is literally ACROSS THE STREET from our current apartment block. We’re moving MAYBE 300-500 meters (I suck at long distance metric units), yet now we have a debt to worry about, logistics of a move, and the responsibilities and worries of people that now own a small piece of real estate. To be fair, 90% of the burden of all the work falls to my wife since she handles most of the Korean language work. I’ll pack boxes and carry the entirety of the apartment over on my back if it would make it easier for her though. This is work I want everyone to consider a success.

All of this worry for an apartment to call our own. There are definite upsides to knowing you own a place, but I haven’t really wrapped my head around those yet either.

There are certain milestones in my life that I never expected to happen while I was in Korea. Getting married? Getting a dog? Buying a house? The longer I stay here, the list of things I’ve done in Korea keeps growing. I’m tremendously happy that we can accomplish our goals to improve our lives, and that we were successful in finding a home almost in our price range where we wanted to live.

Once we move in and start paying off the loan, there will be this huge sense of relief that we accomplished our goal for this year. Sure, being in serious debt for the first time in my life will probably be a new experience that I won’t enjoy, but risk versus reward, you know?

Plus, my friends visit Korea the week after we move into the apartment. That’ll be one hell of a housewarming party.

(xkcd is brilliant.)

My faith in humanity has been restored. There is now a Firefox plugin called Youtube Comment Snob that filters Youtube comments based on the following critera:

• The number of spelling mistakes.
• lack of capital letters to begin a sentence.
• ALL CAPS.
• Excessive punctuation!!!????

This will basically remove 99% of all comments from Youtube. While it might not sort the remaining comments for actual interesting comments, at least I don’t have to bother myself reading all the dumb ones anymore.

Making a test for students can be a hit or miss performance. I had to make several tests today, and I went about making them in a different way than I had before. It worked out pretty well.

In my lowest class, I set up a modified multiple choice test. The twist was that the multiple choices were definitions of different words. The listening part of the test was me saying the word that they had the definition for. The students copied it down for each number as a spelling test on top of choosing the definition. This has several advantages over a standard multiple choice test.

First of all, none of the students could go faster than I let them, so I could give all the students time to look over their answers and try to find the correct response. It also tests multiple skills at the same time. Listening, reading, spelling, and comprehension. Even if students couldn’t spell the word, they had enough time to pick the correct definition.

Also, because of me being the only person knowing the answers before I started the test, I could control the difficulty of the exam as it progressed, question by question. Since I pulled all the definitions from their books, I knew all the answers were valid. Some words are much harder to spell than others, and some have much harder definitions. By manipulating the difficulty from question to question, I made sure every student was being challenged without frustrating anyone or causing them to quit.

The downside was that I had to make the key as I was announcing the words for each question. When you make the test yourself this isn’t so difficult, but I also loaned my test to my coworker, who might have a harder time figuring out which hints correspond to the student’s vocabulary in the book.

In my other classes, I used a repeating table structure that modeled one whole question and answer before I left gaps that the students had to fill by modifying their patterns. This helps remind students what I am looking for them to do.

Just to see if the example made a big difference, I left one table in the test without a set of examples, and gave it more complete directions with English and Korean. Students had more trouble with the section with Korean directions and no examples than the sections with English directions and simple examples. This is because they don’t READ directions, but DO use the examples. In the future, I’ll include examples if suitable for the questions and levels.

I had a frantic day of testing, then grading in the next class. I handed tests back to the students as they headed out the door to give them homework. They had to get their tests signed. There was a very typical spread for all my classes, but there were less people completely bombing out, so I think my tests were better explained this time around.

To disclose something up front, I’ve never bought a house before. This means that I’m actually more familiar with the Korean process of looking for homes than I am in the American system. In Korea, there are realtor offices basically every block. In the small grocery store in our apartment has at LEAST two on the first floor, and there might even be more on the second floor if we ever went up there to explore. They are everywhere. Any closet space big enough for a map of the neighborhood has a realor infesting it. Along with kimbap restaurants and mobile phone salesmen, there are so many realtors that it’s hard to believe they all have something to do.

There isn’t even very much LAND in Korea. How do they keep busy? People swap apartments much more easily than Americans swap houses. Apartment prices rise and fall on a whim here. It’s insane. Prices can fluctuate 20%+ from year to year in just this city.

When development is hot in a neighborhood, people are fiercely competitive about grabbing up and inflating the land prices. The prices of apartments also connect to politics, social expectations, education, and anything else that moves house prices in other countries. It just is accelerated here.

What do people look for in an apartment? A general rule is to treat an apartment like a bunker during a war. The closer you are to the center, the less damage you are going to recieve. Here are some of the rationale I’ve heard from different people in the past week about what makes for a good apartment:

• The difference in price between an apartment on the first floor, and an apartment on the second floor can be 20%. An apartment on a “Royal” floor (in the middle of the apartment building) is sometimes 30% higher than the bottom floor. Everyone also avoids the top floor because of the heating costs.
• You could buy a lower floor apartment, but never a first floor apartment, if you want to have many visitors. If too many people come to your apartment in an elevator, the people on the elevator “line” will complain you are using a disproportionate amount of electic and will demand gifts. (SERIOUSLY).
• If you have an apartment near a road, your plants will die on your veranda. Getting somethng in the middle of the block is better because less pollution is around.
• If you don’t buy a new apartment, you’ll almost always be expected to pay for new wall paper and floors. Also, all remodelling is done BEFORE you move in. No one remodels an apartment by themselves.
• The difference between a 26 pyeong and a 25 pyeong apartment being livable for a couple always comes down to how intelligently it was designed. A badly designed apartment with a front approach to all apartments on a floor will lose you space in the apartment. An elevator shaft approach with 2 apartments on each side will gain you space.

Here are some tips that I’d pass on for anyone getting involved in this process (ZenKimchi, looking in your direction.)

Tips:

Despite the government’s insistence that things be measured in square meters, everyone uses pyeong, the traditional Korean measurement of area. Get to know it and use it comfortably before you go looking at ANYTHING with a realtor. Find out what your current apartment is measured in. Ask people to size things in pyeong when you go somewhere. Learn this measurement. (1 pyeong is 3.3 meters squared) (1 pyeong is 35.58 square feet for metric neophytes)

Before ever talking to a realtor, make it a habit to stop outside their offices. The words 매매 “Mae Mae” in Korean mean “Apartment for sale”. When you look at a listing, note the apartment location and block, the size, the floor, and the price. That is the rubric to which apartments are compared. The price is always listed on the sheets hanging out in front of a realtor. That is th asking price. Depending on the situation you can usually knock off a few million won from that price.

Once you narrow it down between, say, two or three apartments of the same size, in a close proximitry to where you want to live, that are roughly the same price, contact the realtor to see the apartments themselves. Then you can decide if you need to remodel before moving in, or if the design of the place is suitable.

We can arrange most viewings in little more than a few hours. We can call ahead if we need to see it at a specific time, or even drop into a realtor’s office, ask to see any of the places listed outside, and see them withing an hour. We have viewed three or more houses in under an hour. Be warned that an apartment you looked at on Monday MIGHT be closed and gone on Tuesday if someone saw it and made a better deal.

There are bank repossesion auctions online that can let you save a lot of money, but the houses that come up for bid are distributed almost by random chance, and it would be a miracle to find something that met all your criteria for finding a place that also happened to be going cheaply.

You can go to a bank and find out how much the average apartment in a complex is worth, how much the max loan a bank will give for any given apartment block, and if the apartments are tending to rise or lower in price. They update this weekly, but you only get this kind of information if you tell them you are looking at a place and need to know how much you need to get a loan. I doubt they’d tell you unless you hinted you were about to buy an apartment and wanted to know how high the asking price was from the median price of the apartments in the area.

Once you find an apartment, stike hard and fast, and push any grandmothers out of the way that might be on their way to the realtor’s office to steal your dream apartment. This is just a rough guide in my experience, but I am not dealing with any of the financial or legal headaches involved in the process. My lovely wife has all the stress, and I just come along for the ride.

There is one key piece of software each my wife and I both need that we can’t use in Linux. While we can use Linux to great success 99% o the time, she needs to access her work documents saved in a proprietary format, and to use Internet Explorer for terribly designed Korean websites (aka, all of them requiring IE). I need to run the proprietary Nintendo Wifi connection program for my wifi USB adapter to work. They don’t work in Linux.

Before, I was running Virtualbox. It is completely awesome, and solved my need to access Windows XP applications while also keeping my computer free of viruses and the actual hassle of managing Windows. However, since I upgraded to Hardy Heron, the new version of VirtualBox 1.6 is broken. I can no longer set up my machine to use the virtualization software. Whenever I try to use Virtualbox now, it locks up the machine completely and I have to restart.

Until I can get the Virtualbox program to work, I can’t connect the Wii to the Internet. I really would LIKE to do this, because Nintendo is launching the “Nintendo Channel” in the USA, and I can now download game demos to my Nintendo DS. FREE GAME DEMOS! However, due to this problem, I’m sitting here with nothing. Not only that, but the Wii Ware channel with tons of interesting games will be released this month, and I really want to get a piece that action.

I could install the “Virtualbox Open Source Edition” so that my wife can do her work, but once the fix is released for the binary version, I’d have to reinstall the closed source version, since it is the only one to support USB. It is either that, or break down and by a proper wireless router and figure out how to connect all my machines to this. This is what I should have done from the start, but now I’m invested with the Nintendo USB adapter and hate to buy something twice for the same features, even if it would work better.

Today, my wife and I were on our second round of searching for an apartment. The previous attempt led us to investigate a house around our neighborhood. This time, we were traveling several subway stops down the line to try to find a cheaper place we had been alerted to by a friend. We contacted the realtor and told her to meet us at the apartment.

We arrived to see the apartment. We got into the elevator with our realtor and then met the housing realtor. The apartment was open, so we walked around. While we were viewing the apartment, an old grandmother, wrinkled and hunched over on a cane, walked into the apartment and sat down.

She didn’t live there. She didn’t have an appointment. She was just some random old woman that came in while this apartment was open to a public viewing. She was sitting on the floor asking questions about who we were, and why we were there. She didn’t look like she was on top of her senses. She reminded me of my grandfather who couldn’t remember much when he got older, and she had wandered into our housing deal.

Why WE were there? Why was this random person there? WE had made the arrangements to see the apartment in the first place! She said she liked the house. She didn’t walk around to examine it, or see anything. She just sat on the floor and kept eying me.

Everyone in the room was thinking she was a senile old woman. She kept trying to stay in the apartment while we were leaving, and had to be shown out of the apartment by the realtors. Every time they went to get her to leave, she kept on talking about random stuff and told them she could stay in the house. They were confused about why she was there, but didn’t really want to toss her out since she might not have know what was going on. Since you have to be kind to elderly people who aren’t in the best state of health, they said, “If you like the apartment, here is our card. Bring money to the office and you can buy it.”

We dismissed the old lady after the elevator let us down to the ground floor. We had two more apartments to see. We looked at another apartment in a different complex, then came around to see an apartment nearby the first one. We had to get to work, so we didn’t spend much time at any one place.

After seeing the third apartment that had been remodeled (we had considered this option), we had settled on buying the first apartment. It was in our price range, the location was good, it was near to most things we needed. We didn’t have financing worked out yet, but we were planning on going to the bank to get our loan this week to sort out the details.

The realtor joked, “Please, decide quickly. Maybe that old lady might buy that apartment. Who knows you might have competition?” This is a standard tactic. The first house we saw INSTANTLY had a second bidder an hour after we had visited the place, despite being on the open market for months. No one falls for this sort of thing, and besides, the lady couldn’t walk without a cane, and didn’t even know what was going on.

We were talking about how much we liked our apartment choice, and how nice it will be to live there as we rode back on the subway. Then we get a message.

The old woman had gone straight to the realtor’s office when we had been walking around seeing the other apartments over the course of thirty minutes. She bought the thing out from under us. We won’t get the apartment, she will. She hadn’t made an appointment, didn’t check out the place, didn’t have anyone helping her, was hunched over, and didn’t even look like she could have MADE it to the realtor’s office in 30 minutes by herself, but she was quicker on the turn around than we were.

The old freaking crazy lady stole our apartment. Now we have to go out looking for a new place to look AGAIN. What the hell, Grandma?

A couple was celebrating their anniversary, and asked us to come along on a train/bus tour of the southern region of Korea, specifically Jeollanamdo, an area I’ve never been to before due to it’s remote nature. We got in on the tour, and set off early Saturday for our adventure.

We went to an AMAZING Green Tea Farm. Bosung is the home to the most famous Korean green tea, and it happens to be my favorite strong green tea. My wife and I had been planning for YEARS to try to see this place, but due to it’s remote location and poor transportation access, couldn’t go before this trip. It was really pretty. Good enough that I’ll even forgive them for this:

Green tea ice cream soft serve.

The tour itinerary stated, “You’ll never forget the first time you taste green tea ice cream.” It’s not nasty, but it’s not really very good. Green tea really doesn’t need it’s own flavor of ice cream, but it exists, and I’ve now eaten it.

This was the best time to go to this region of Korea. The flowers and trees were in bloom, and it was CRAWLING with tourists. Everywhere we went there was an insane crush of people and it wasn’t easy getting around. Our bus was a modified mini academy school bus, so the seats were not designed for long haul travel. It was extremely uncomfortable to ride around it from location to location.

We ended the first night at Jiri Mountain, which was two hours out of our way, at least. There was a mediocre hot spring resort that had the standard “Hot Water, Cold Water, Hot Room, Hotter room” nude bathing only sort of set up. It was okay, but there are probably better resorts in Daejeon to try if I was really into the nude bathing thing.

After the sauna, we headed back to our hotel for dinner. We ate as a group. They served fish with a lot of different side dishes. There was a lot to eat, but our group tried to finish off everything we could. We actually ate more than the rest of the Korean groups on our tour, but not out of any effort to try to show people up. One of the people on the group thanked us for eating all the Korean food, as if this was a new experience. The two foreigners I was traveling with have also been here for a while, so we take new foods in stride without even considering it special anymore.

The room in the hotel was “Korean style”, which means no bed, only a series of thick matresses on a floor. Since there was no bed, our friends took a blanket out to a pagoda that was a block away near a parking lot. We had late evening picnic with wine and snacks. They slept out on the pagoda, while we returned to the hotel. The wake up call for the next day was 3 AM! We didn’t have long to sleep before we started out on the next leg of the trip.

Check out the pictures in the newly added Flickr group!

I’m on vacation at the moment in the southern areas and islands of Korea. We’re part of a tour with some foreign friends who are celebrating their wedding anniversary. We get our first chance to see Bosung, the capital of the green tea industry in Korea. We’ll also go to a sauna, as well as go to a few islands that have extensive gardens. There is a three day weekend, so we’ll be able to head out and see the sights with a day to recover on Monday.

We don’t know the makeup of the rest of the tour, but there is a high chance it consists of nothing but really old Korean people, since no one else would go on a bus tour if they could drive. I’m a little worried about the makeup of our tour, because if there is a karaoke machine on the bus, all of this will end in headaches and tragedy. A chance to sing on a bus tour is like crack for old Korean people, and they have no concept of “volume control” on any bus rocking down the highway.

In addition, there is always the potential embarrassment of nude saunas, as well as everything else multi-cultural that could end up blowing up in our face that we have yet to realize. Excitement! Intrigue! Tone Deaf Elderly People!

Will I survive? Only time will tell! Return in a few days to see the results of the tour after these canned posts are finished to see.

Add Glitter to Pictures

Blingee is possibly the largest collection of tools to add moronic, terrible stamps to pictures. Now you too can have a website with HORRIBLE animations. Once completed, you can share these abominations with the world. For example, this seizure inducing picture of jon Stewart was completed in ONLY 5 minutes!

Please, go to Blingee with a picture of your choosing and “bling” it in the most ridiculous manner possible. Post the results in the thread so that it may live on in infamy for the Internet at large to admire. (SFW images only, LINK to NSFW in the thread please.)