::A Geek in Korea::

We moved into our apartment a few weeks ago. We probably haven’t been the best neighbors in the mean time. We started by remodeling the house until late into the morning. We’ve had a house warming party with a large number of people. I’ve invited people over multiple days to hang out, and frequently have guests visiting and leaving. We have a noisy dog that yips a few times the door to our apartment is opened. All in all, we’re not the quietest neighbors someone might have.

All of this means that the neighbors below, above, and across from our apartment needed to be given a gift. This is a typical Korean custom when you move into a new apartment. You are supposed to appease neighbors with high quality rice cakes, known as “ddok“, but we aren’t going out of our way to find an upscale place in our neighborhood. We wanted to get it done today, when everyone was probably at home.

My wife called her mother, who told us that if we wanted to give a gift of some kiwi fruit sets that would also be acceptable. I was sent out to collect the kiwi sets, and we got enough for all the neighbors we share a wall, ceiling, or floor with. Thankfully we didn’t have to deal with any of our crazy nosier neighbors.

The upstairs neighbors are an elderly couple. They came to our apartment today because something that the Internet guy did to the wiring messed up their cable reception. They had a cable guy visit our apartment to fix whatever was wrong with their cable. Oops. They earned their kiwi by being unable to watch television clearly for a few weeks because of us, on top of all the remodeling noise we subjected them to. We had no idea about the television reception, of course, so when we gave them the kiwi to apologize, they were surprised. They weren’t expecting a gift from us.  We warned them that we might make noise in the future, so please don’t be upset. They seemed nice.

The downstairs neighbor family is moving soon. We met them on the day we moved in because the previous owner needed to fix some water damaged caused by the laundry room floor. We had to survey the damage to their apartment, and they mentioned that they’d be moving in the next few months. We went down to hand them their kiwi and their 20-30 something year old daughter answered the door. She said they were moving in a month, and would pass on the whole, “Upstairs apologizes if they are noisy” warning to the new owners.

The next door neighbors have two kids. They were more curious about us as a couple, and me as a foreigner, than what we had done to our apartment. Their kids were poking their heads out to look at their new English speaking neighbors. The lady was asking if we were newlyweds, and where I was from, where I was working, etc. We said we had been inviting people over fairly often in the past few weeks, so we didn’t want her to be annoyed from the traffic visiting our floor. She said it wasn’t a problem that she noticed, and that she was glad to finally meet us.

This is more to meet the people living around us than what we did living in the previous two apartments. I’ve actually run into a set of twins I had as students at a previous school that live in the same apartment elevator line a few floors above our apartment. They were as shocked to see me leaving my apartment as I was to see them walking into the building.

“Uh, Hello girls.”

“Teacher, what are you doing here? This is our apartment building!”

“Yeah, I live here too now.” (pointing) “Yeah, I bought that apartment right there. Seeya!”

“Waah?! Shingihada! (Surprising! I can’t believe it!)”

I guess as I meet more people I’ll get that reaction for a while. Eventually they’ll get used to living with a foreigner in the building…. right?