::A Geek in Korea::

It didn’t take long to figure out that the new apartment is different than the last place we lived. It seems a move across the street to the other side of the block was all it took for people to change their behavior around us as a couple.

For example, I had been living in my last apartment for two years before one of the security guards realized it was my house. In our old apartment, we didn’t know any of our neighbors. We would get introduced occasionally, and in a few month’s time there would be someone new living near us. Except for the occasional drunk, no one said anything to me on the elevator, unless they were about to meet their grisly end by my 5 kg dog. We had grown used to the idea that no one was really paying attention to our comings and goings most of the time.

Now that we are remodeling our new apartment on a lower level of the building, everyone knows we are moving in soon. We’ve been working on the apartment daily since we bought it last Monday, and the past few days have had some circular saws and machinery at work remodeling the kitchen and putting up the wallpaper. If the neighbors were curious what we were up to, most of the time they could walk right in and see since we had the door open.

Today when we showed up to start cleaning the place for our eventual move, there were the two movers, as well as two strange women we had never seen before wandering around our place. At first we thought they were just part of the kitchen remodeling team, but when they figured out we were the owners they got really curious. The questions started out harmlessly enough, but soon turned ugly.

Slightly curious Woman 1: “So, how much was all of this remodeling work going to cost you?”

Us: “Uh, well, the wallpaper and flooring was X, and the lighting was Y. We painted the doors ourselves, and the kitchen was Z.”

Bolder Woman 2: “Wait, you paid all that money for everything, but painted the doors yourself to save money? How much money did you save?”

Us: “It was ten times cheaper to paint the doors ourselves. By saving that money we could partially pay to remodel the kitchen.”

A touch rude Woman 2: “You had to worry about saving money? You must have a big loan to buy this apartment, right?! You had to worry about money because it’s too expensive? Where is your husband from anyway?”

My somewhat puzzled wife: “He’s from the United States.”

Bordering on nosy Woman 2: “Where? Where is he from!”

My mildly annoyed wife: “Ohio.”

Mildly insulting Woman 2: “Oh, Ohio is a well known place. Do you teach English? Wait, can you even speak English? What college did you go to?”

My very annoyed wife: “Uh, I don’t know who you are, I don’t feel comfortable about telling you all this information. You are a total stranger who hasn’t even introduced herself. I don’t really think it’s any of your business where I went to college. Why are you asking me these questions?”

CRAZY I-can’t-believe-you-said-that Woman 2: “Oh, you must have gone to some poor college in the countryside. Some very bad place to study. You are ashamed of your college so you don’t want to tell me. That’s why you aren’t able to afford this apartment and took out a huge loan, right? Are you even really married? Maybe not.”

Us + Woman 1: (Stunned silence.)

Overjoyed Woman 2: “I’m your neighbor. I live on a different elevator line right over there. See you!”

Sorry Woman 1: “Uh, yeah, I just wanted to see the prices for remodeling. I wanted to remodel my apartment and wanted to get a quote because I liked your place… I had no idea…I’ve got to go…away…now.”

Shocked Us: “We’re going to get back to work now. Bye.”

***

We had gotten to work cleaning up different parts of the room. I returned to our old apartment to get a hose so I could start scrubbing the veranda. While I was gone, this very same nosy woman came back to the apartment and repeated her claim that we had a large loan to afford the apartment, and demanded to know exactly how much we had paid, how much debt we had, and all sorts of personal things.

She was greeted by more stunned silence by my wife. My wife was too polite to say, “Hey lady, fuck off and mind your own business, okay?” only because it was our neighbor and we’d be seeing her in the future enough that it might cause problems. We didn’t need to piss anyone off the weekend before we moved in, and pissing off a gossip is a terrible thing in Korea.

My wife told me the stuff she had started asking and I just gasped in wonder. Who comes into a stranger’s new house and accuses them of being poor, ignorant, and full of shame? We aren’t any of those things. Projecting inadequacy much? She had annoyed us enough that we closed the door and went back to work.

***

I had been put on “scrubbing the veranda clean” duty, and I was going about it like I normally did. Using the hose, I leaned out the window and squirted off the outside of the window. Then I alternated scrubbing and wiping down the dirt. I was at this for a good thirty minutes trying to clean the windows when the woman returned.

Nosy Neighbor: “Do you think that’s okay? Spraying the water like that when it’s not raining? Your downstairs neighbors will probably be complaining about that.”

Me: “If they are complaining, they haven’t said anything to me.”

We had met our downstairs neighbors earlier in the day. They had come to get the number of the last owner of the apartment. They wanted to get some compensation for water damage they claimed she had caused. They seemed nice enough. I didn’t think a little washing up would cause any harm, and if they did complain, I would wash their windows for them too.

Nosy Neighbor: “How about I make you a cup of coffee. Would that be alright? I’d bring it to your apartment…”

Me: “No! I don’t drink coffee. No, thank you! Bye!”

I found out later on that this lady was technically right, and that there was a rule about washing the outside of your windows. I then started cleaning the inside of the apartment to avoid her. This is the bad part about living on the second floor. You are in shouting distance of people walking by, and this person was persistent enough to bother us by hanging outside our place when we started locking the door. She was looking for an excuse to visit us now.

We’re two days away from moving in and we’re already annoyed by one of our neighbors? That has to be a record. I think I liked it better when everyone just ignored us.

Video with annotations

Compared to my last video of the house when it was being remodeled TWO days ago, this new video gives a feeling about how the final setup is going to be. It’s starting to look like an actual apartment instead of a disaster area. The wallpaper and molding makes a dramatic difference to how the apartment looks. Besides adding some furniture and actually moving in, this will be the most dramatic change to take place in the apartment. The lighting is almost complete, and the kitchen will be installed this weekend.

So far, it hasn’t sunk in that I’ll be living in this place in a few days time. Right now I’m still picturing it in my mind as another place I visit when I come home from work, not as a place I own. I guess when my stuff starts showing up there I’ll begin to accept that it is “mine”.

Since remodeling in Korea happens in a week, it’s a very different experience for me. My parents remodeled their house, a room at a time, for my entire childhood, and they are still changing things around every time I visit. One of the things about growing up in a very old house was the upkeep and work you needed to do live there. It was part of my childhood, working in freezing temperatures, suffering repetitive stress injuries and working as manual labor for my parents. If I hadn’t learned basic handyman skills like painting I would have had to pay even more to remodel the place. I’m just glad I had the experiences in my childhood so that I can pick my battles and know when I wouldn’t have a chance of doing some of the work properly.

My brother, after seeing the last video said he was jealous that I have two bathrooms. His new country  house has only one bathroom. Never one to admit defeat, he said, “I might have only one bathroom, but I can pee outside and no one can see me. I don’t think you do that!”

Touché sir, touché.

I’m always trying to find new and exciting ways to keep kids interested in classes. This week in particular is challenging because the students have huge tests that count for half a year of work. The students that do come to class are not in the mood for more homework or anything intensive beyond blowing spit bubbles and drooling. I’ve stumbled upon “Matchstick puzzles” that seemed like a different sort of puzzle for students to try.

Since giving students access to fire making tools is a dangerous idea I would never, ever recommend, I settled on individually wrapped tooth picks. The local delivery restaurants drop these off from time to time with menu and phone numbers on them. I pick up a box and carry it with me from class to class. When I’m done giving homework and the students are milling about, I drop a series of puzzles on them.

All of the puzzles revolve around trying to make a particular shape in a limited number of moves. For example, you might need to change the shape of a particular object to match a criteria, but have a limited number of match sticks you can move to achieve it. This requires spacial skills, planning skills, and logic skills. Watching students work out the different paths to the solution is fun. However, one in three students are total dicks that would rather ruin the fun for everyone by destroying the design than actually try to use their brain to figure anything out.

Since they are easy to carry to each class, I bring a box with enough individually wrapped toothbicks for three to four puzzles. That way teams can work together, and any loser student that doesn’t want to try can be ditched from one of the groups and ignored without giving him the satisfaction of denying the entire class the solution.

Most of the students can repeat the simpler puzzles after I show them the solution. I usually give them about five minutes, drop a few hints about where to start, and see who finishes first. If it is looking like they won’t complete the puzzle in time, I’ll walk through the solution so that no one goes home before they see the answer. I always hated when I was left hanging on a puzzle without an answer.

Work in Progress on the new Apartment.

Anyone following my tweets knows I’m currently recovering from a marathon painting session. In the past day we painted for upwards of 12 hours to try to get the apartment done. During one of the few breaks I took, I shot some video of three of the rooms of the apartment. I annotated the video.

If I can make it to the apartment each day, I’ll try to shoot video to show our progress. We’ve got the apartment painted, but nothing else finished at the moment. The new lights, kitchen, wall paper, molding, doors, and everything else has to be installed in the next week.

Today we signed for the apartment. We are now full fledge Korean home owners! We’ve got the keys and the deed to prove it, as well as a bank loan for the remainder of the apartment price looming over us for the next few years. Yay! DEBT!

We walked into the realtor’s office after cobbling all the different bank accounts we had been keeping out money in and signing lots of large bank notes. There was a lawyer there to mediate the payment, partially because the money from my last apartment’s deposit hadn’t gotten returned to us yet, and the realtor had to put up part of our cash so we could pay for the apartment. We will get the remainder of our cash in the next week, and we’ll repay the loan the realtor floated us for covering the week while we wait for the money.

We went to the apartment to check out all we needed to do. Any naive hope that we wouldn’t need to paint was quashed when we realized that the door frames and the doors were DIFFERENT COLORS. What the hell? Anyway, we also found some wet wood rot in the bathroom that will require the door frame to be replaced by the people doing some of the interior for us.

I’ve got to finish teaching classes, go home and paint, then wake up the next day, paint some more, run to class, teach, then go home to paint a second coat.

Then from there, for the rest of the week, we get the replacement work done on the damage we discovered, work on cleaning up from the mess from the wall paper and floor install, then get ready for the lighting people. Then WE move in, and spend the ENTIRE day getting moved over to the new place. No time off. No vacation days to move. Nothing but pure elbow grease, luck, and some cooperation.

The my friends arrive from the USA. I go on vacation for a week, and return when the new intensive classes are about to start. July is going to be non-stop CRAZY.

The reason I got into podcasting quickly was because I found a tool that allowed me to quickly add different show feeds quickly. I started using podcastready because it came recommended, had a Linux and Windows version, and did a pretty good job. I liked being able to plug in one version on any computer with a USB cable and sync up since the software sits on the mp3 player itself. It came in really useful in Europe when we would get access to a local computer for using the Internet.

It started behaving strangely this month. It would stop connecting to the service that checked for new shows, or it would eat my feeds. I’d only notice after a few days that my normal shows had been replaced by “ESPN DAILY” or “THE NASCAR” podcast. Those were the defaults that the program came with that I had immediately deleted when I started using the program.

Other shows I had been listening to for some time started disappearing. I was noticing less and less of my feeds appearing each time I synced. Something is afoot at the podcastready service, and I had to export my partial feed list and look for an alternative.

I had been archiving the feeds from Escape Pod, Pseudopod, Koreanclass101 on my local machine with gPodder. I hadn’t moved my other feeds over to gPodder because I hadn’t figured out how to keep a set of feeds archived while still sending over daily podcasts I like and can delete after listening to them.

It turns out there was a setting to “lock” downloaded files, and you can set which feeds are synced when you add them. There are tons of features like downloading files to different individual folders (off) or having naming rules (useful) for files so that you can better manage them in a file tree mode. I think I can comprehensively manage all my files and feeds and do everything I want with gPodder, but I’ll have to do it from home.

There are other podcast aggregators for Linux, and I could potentially use a Java based alternative to run it on any machine like jPodder or Juice too. Right now though I’ve got gPodder set up just how I want it. It had a consistent interface, and was a standalone application that did one thing very well with a GUI. This is all you can ask for in an application this specialized.

Anyway, I’ve got a twenty-two channel aggretation of podcasts at the moment, and I know a few are missing.

We had to set up our schedule for the move. In typical Korean fashion, it’s actually impossible to do anything scheduled more than a week in advance. We called places and asked them to estimate the moving cost, and no one would come over to the apartment to see how much stuff we had until it was a week before the move. This “just in time” sort of attitude is also reflected in our remodeling. If you think buying a house, moving in, and remodeling a house are stressful, imagine having to do all of it in the same week.

The people living in our new apartment move out, and a day later we’re in there painting all the doors ourselves. We hope to get that finished in a day or two, because the we need to finish before the wall paper hangers arrive. If we can paint without worrying about making a mess, we’ll have no problems. I just hope we can get it done in time. We’re saving a huge amount by painting ourselves, and since we can make a mess and get the wall paper ripped out immediately, it shouldn’t be TOO hard.

We’ve only been in our apartment twice. Once to look at it, once to bring my mother in law to check it out for final approval. We’re deciding everything we need to do to remodel it blind because we can’t set up a place to put our things after we’ve moved in. We either remodel while the house is empty or don’t do it at all. It’s kind of nuts that it has to be this way, but we’re doing the best that we can. There is just no time to get moved in and decide things slowly. It’s all or nothing, quick quick quick. It’s just the Korean way.

Picking out the wall paper was a marathon 3 hour color session. We picked colors for the “base”, then one for the “point”. The “point” is the crazy colored wall in each room that sets of each area’s colors. This is the current Korean style of designing a room’s style. For example, you put a dull wallpaper behind the television so your eyes can rest, but a “point” paper behind a couch to start conversation and make the furniture stand out. It makes no sense to me, and we’ll probably regret everything we chose in a year’s time. The walls will be silk or regular, depending on the room, and we’ve also got different rules depending on where it is in the house. We have a nice neutral color on three walls, then behind a bed or sofa an explosively colorful wall with designs and colors. It doesn’t matter if these “point” walls clash with each other.

I was very tired by the end of this whole process. Every time I made a suggestion, I got shot down by some sort of evolving rule about color combinations, styles, and “darkness and brightness”. I got one “point” wallpaper pick through for the computer room, and it might not make it through the final approval process. My wife claimed she has final right of approval, and I conceded gleefully. Do you think I want to hear about an ugly wall for the next five years that I picked out? Hell no. I only made the demand that we can’t have flowers on every wall, but she wore me down. There will be at least two walls with flowers but nothing very “Korean” that will be instant kitsch.

By comparison, the lighting, fixtures, and flooring took twenty minutes to pick out. We found a nice frosted glass, the cheapest set of light switches that worked, some mock wood floor, and told them to come the day after our wall paper was set up. The wall paper guys claimed it will only take a day to hang the entire apartment. I have no idea how they work so fast, but it must be because of the standardized layouts of apartments.

After the lighting guys are done, we’ll call the air conditioner crew. Hopefully they can set it up the day we move in. We still can’t remember the house address off the top of our heads, and yet we’re dropping several thousand dollars to remodel it.

The movers came to check out our apartment. Despite the fact we’re literally moving across the street, they’ll be costing us a good bit of money to pack everything for us and move it. We got a few different quotes, but every move we’ve had has been progressively more expensive.

Hopefully everything will go off without a hitch. We’ll both be working and trying to fit in the moving preparations into our schedule after work. Tomorrow we go to get the deposit check for the house. It will be the most money I’ll ever had in one place at one time in my pocket.

In a week, we’ll be living in our new apartment. It seems crazy to imagine. It’s been a long, stressful road to house ownership, but it’s a first step to a more secure future, so it’s something we have to do.

I was riding the subway to go downtown with my wife to look at wallpaper for the new house. While we were riding, the subway was filled to near capacity. We had to go several stops, so I wanted to sit down, listen to The Bugle, and wait until we got to our destination. I was scouting out different places that might open up at each spot. Every time there was always someone waiting to snatch the seat when someone left.

Sensing we had simple picked a bad spot to stand to wait for a seat, I went off on my own to find a seat. I was in luck, as a group of teens exited in mass, and I grabbed the last seat that wasn’t snatched up by the other riders.

I was sitting in my spot, clearly listening to my headphones, not paying attention to anyone. Then, the elderly man next to me patted my leg and said, “Hanguk mal chal haseyo?”. “Do you speak Korean well?”

This is ALWAYS a way to get on my bad side. By asking in Korean if I speak well, I can either come off as an idiot and say, “No”, or come off as an over confident person that’s going to have to answer a bunch of other annoying questions by saying, “Yes”.

The “correct” answer is always modesty (false or not). You say, “A little”, “Cho-kum?” in Korean, shrug, then wait while they compliment you. This is the routine. This is what most people do to get out of the situation. It’s a total lose-lose situation when an old guy asks you that sort of question. It’s slightly more acceptable when it’s an attractive woman, but not much.

Imagine walking up to any foreigner on the street of your home town and asking them if they speak English, or whatever the language the majority of the population might be. See, you wouldn’t because you know that makes the foreigner uncomfortable, and it makes you look like a jackass. Here, that means you are “curious” and possibly “adventurous” to talk to someone different.

I dislike being touched by strangers, and really dislike being bothered when I’m listening to something that requires me to rewind my podcast. I took one look at the guy, said, “Yes, I speak Korean well.” Before he could even say another word, I spoke to him in English while pointing to my headphones and said, “You can CLEARLY see I’m listening to something. Please, do not bother me.”

Had I said this in Korean, I probably would have been using rude language that I learned from one of my bad students. It’s probably best if the guy couldn’t understand what I said and my face got the “I’m annoyed, don’t bother me” message across.

I then turned my head to ignore the man. I waited for the next stop on the subway with great intensity. When the door opened, I left the subway, walked up the side, and re-entered the train next to my wife, careful not to turn around to see if anyone was staring at me. I ducked into the slot reserved for motorized wheel chairs so that no one that saw me speaking to the man would see I got back on the subway. I just didn’t want to be hassled again.

My wife insists I didn’t do anything rude or wrong by not indulging this man in his questions. She said I should just lie next time and say, “No.” I hate being talked down to by old strangers on the street telling me obvious things. I also really hate being corrected in Korean for speaking Korean poorly. The sheer fact that I can understand that I am being scolded should be enough effort to give me a free pass to ignore the scolding itself. I’m not going to invest in ridiculously oversized headphones just to get people to leave me alone either.

My best bet, ironically, is to just stand on the subway. Far fewer old people bother me then.

My school, like every one before it, has now instituted a “No Korean in class” policy. The difference between this and every other school I’ve ever taught is how they explained it to the students, and how it will actually be enforced this time around.

My director went into each class and said, “Your mothers and fathers paid a lot of money to send you to this school. It’s very expensive to study here. While I know it’s hard to study with foreign teachers, and you want to speak Korean to try to understand what they say, you shouldn’t. You should speak English so you can use your parents money the best you can. If you are speaking Korean in class, you aren’t practicing English. If you aren’t practicing English, you are wasting your parents money. Your parents work hard to make money so you can come to the school and study English the best you can. By speaking Korean you are wasting their money. They work so hard for you, why would you do that?”

Once she laid down the massive guilt trip on the students, she went to work explaining the policy. “You can’t speak Korean in class. You can’t speak to each other in Korean. You can’t ask questions in Korean. You can’t complain, or speak Korean at all in class. No exceptions. If you speak Korean, the teacher will give you a warning. If you speak Korean again, you’ll get a second warning. If you speak a third time, at all, in Korean, you have to stay an extra hour after school and write a punishment. If you continue, you have to speak you have to stay even longer!”

The kids had some questions about this, but the change in behavior was instantaneous. I had warned students not to speak Korean before the director came in. I started warning students and writing their name up on the board. One student had spoke Korean TEN times before the director had entered to explain what was going on. His classmates had caught on right away. This intensely dense, poor listener, instantly stopped speaking Korean after he found out he’d have to stay an hour later.

Classes that I used to have to keep quiet by repeated raising my voice were speaking entirely in English after this 10 minute speech. It was AWESOME.

The only problem with this policy is when students start ratting each other out and saying, “Oh! Oh! She spoke KOREAN! QUICK! MAKE HER STAY!” I told all my students I will not be “Korean police”. If I hear it, and I get annoyed by it, I’ll enforce the rule. If someone mixes their vocabulary up and says a word of Korean by mistake, I’m not throwing them into detention.

We’re still working out the details, but right now, it’s working really well. This is the first school where a “No Korean” policy had taken hold the first day without any shouting or anger by the students. I like watching the previously noisy students squirm as they try to explain something now. I also like the threat of throwing someone into detention.

Today I was finalizing some of the details for my friends’ visit to the Demilitarized Zone. We will be going via the USO tour, and there is a series of rules you must agree to and a procedure to follow to be allowed to go on the tour.

If you bring a Korean on the tour, like when I brought my wife a few years back, they have to get a criminal background check. This is so that they wouldn’t decide that they’d rather run to North Korean than serve time in South Korea. I guess this is a logical sort of thing to request to prevent an international incident from occurring.

When I went last time, they had made a big deal about the “Dress Code” we had to follow. Since my family was going in the dead of winter, we’d be wearing coats the entire trip. It wasn’t hard to follow a dress code, but I wanted to review the code for my friends so that they didn’t wear anything that would get them kicked off the tour.

Here is what is not allowed on the tour according to an official document. North Korea and South Korea, through the UN had to come up with the following rules about proper attire at the DMZ:

• Sleeveless shirts, exposed midriffs, tank tops.
• No shirts with insulting, provocative, profane, or demeaning representations.
• No frayed cut off shorts, gym shorts, or shorts that expose the buttocks.
• Nothing sheer.
• No sports uniforms or athletic clothing of any kind.
• No shower shoes or “flip flops. Sandals with straps on the back are fine.
• Items of military clothing not worn in a uniform.
• No over-sized “gangster” clothing. No baggy pants, oversized shirts, etc.
• No leather “biker” clothing. No leather chaps or vests.

Since I paid money to be on the tour, I’m going to follow the dress code, but I guess those North Korean guys just don’t know how to party. Banning booty shorts and leather chaps? What kind of country would have a problem with those? Any upstanding member of society should be allowed to go into military compounds in attire that exposes the buttocks. If I want to

That’s the American way!