::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.

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.

My time spent in the affluent, education focused part of the city of Daejeon, is giving me distorted views of Korea. I don’t think about it often, but yesterday I had one of “those moments” where you know people are less likely to be around foreigners.

I got off the subway at one of the outlying stops not far from where the line ends. This isn’t a rural area or anything, but compared to my part of town it is new and a little less developed. There are still parking lots in spaces where buildings have yet to go up, and every since exterior space on each building around these parking lots isn’t covered in neon signs. In time, it will become part of the overdeveloped sprawl, but it’s not quite there yet.

Anyway, as I was taking an escalator out of the subway, two people, probably brothers, were on the steps in front of me. They were standing shoulder to shoulder, so I couldn’t get by. (I hate this.) I was listening to my mp3 player, but I could see the one boy turn around to see who was getting on the escalator a few steps behind them. The boy turned around, pretended to be doing something else, and then whispered in his companion’s ear, “THERE IS A FORIENGER BEHIND US! BE COOL, DON’T LOOK.”

It’s like in Indiana Jones, when someone would have a snake right by their head, and you didn’t want to panic the person by telling them they are in great danger, so you tell them to stay very still and hope for the danger to go away. You know, like telling the kid with a bee sting allergy to be still after you accidentally hit a bee’s hive with a football. I am the bee. Try not to disturb him, and he’ll leave us alone.

This sort of reaction amuses me. I don’t consider myself enough of a spectacle that I am worth being the object of such attention. I think of all the strange stuff I see that DOESN’T get a reaction, and really feel that the bar is set much lower for foreigners. I could be alone, minding my own business and I still get people hopping away from me when I sit down on the subway. (Shrug) Any open seat is a welcome one.

To be honest, I start to stare at other foreigners now myself. The low baggy pants wearing, heavily tattooed people stick out here so much that even I fixate on them these days. It’s not that I haven’t seen any of that, but it’s just not common, and I wonder how they deal with all that attention. There used to be a time when I could pass for one of those fresh out of college, “I don’t give a damn” sort of folks, but my job, and my desire to be upwardly socially mobile in Korea has hemmed in my choices. It’s not that I miss wearing pants the don’t fit me, but eventually I stopped fighting everything around me constantly. If clothes don’t define you, then you are still the same person if you wear pants that fit, or something that doesn’t.

That still doesn’t explain why I hate wearing suits, but that’s for some other introspective blogging post. Anyway, even at my most gawking moment, I don’t turn around and do a “Don’t look, be cool, don’t look,  but LOOK at THAT FREAK” sort of thing, even with my wife who enjoys the occasional spectacle. (We honestly did this way more in America than we ever did in Korea.)

Anyway, I knew the kid was going to be turning around. I took out my ear phones with both hands, threw my hands up, and went, “Oogoogly Boogoogly! Wooooo!” I just made a buch of nonsensical sounds and tried to act as CRAZY as possible until the two boys turned back around. They shot out from the escalator and looked back over their shoulders to see if I was following them. Not the most mature thing to do. If I fueled any anti-foreigner stereotypes, at least it wasn’t in a neighborhood I teach.

I finally got to play that “Warforged” character I had made a few weeks back with a group of friends playing Dungeons and Dragons today. Since this was my first bit of role playing, I got to copy down my Internet generated character. They handed me a character sheet, as well as an entire binder of Eberron background materials.

This gave me total nostalgia flashbacks. Way back in middle school, I happened upon a copy of a D&D rule book. I used to keep my D&D character sheets and little squares of grid paper in a binder too. During study hall, I would roll characters and read up on monsters, but I never really got a chance to play with people. The books and rules are what really got me interested in gaming instead of baseball cards or something else kids around me did.

This was my first real Roleplaying experience with other like minded people. It was a lot more relaxed than I expected. It was basically a controlled story telling session, where we were the main characters directing what happened. The Dungeon Master, was basically there to suggest what we should do next, and act as a referee between the people in our party as well as the non-player characters we interacted with during the game. He also filled us in on what we could see and do at any particular time. I also go some advice on possible actions that my character could do, since I was new.

The statistics and rules that dominate the character creation process really only come up when you try to do something to affect the outcome of the story as it unfolds. Depending on what you were doing, whether attacking, or trying to lie to one of the other characters, you needed to roll dice to see how successful you were.

My character is a gigantic walking vehicle of destruction and mayhem. I’ve picked a Warforged Fighter, so I was encountering several different opponents of various sizes and shapes that I needed to bludgeon, stab, and pierce to death, for STORY reasons, of course. We were on a sort of mini-quest for a series of items that required discretion on our part, so we could leave no survivors. This suits my playstyle. Whenever I managed to score a hit, it usually did massive amounts of damage, which entertains me greatly.

We succeeded in seeking the items we needed, so we were handsomely rewarded. I even leveled up! Level 4! Two more levels and I’ll be a completely frightening bad-ass machine of death. Right now I’m sitting on a pile of gold, but I don’t know what I’m going to spend it on. I’ve even got a +1 flaming halberd I upgraded from our benefactor.

I’ve got a lot of background information to read up on now that I’ve been invited back to play the game again on Children’s Day in a week. I lucked out that playing a big fighter is usually just down to “hitting things” or “run at the next target”. The other players were on top of a lot of the terminology and choices available to them, so it was a lot easier for them to know how to react. They thought I brought something to the table, so I’ll keep playing. It seems that we’ll be drawn up into some intrigue and greater amounts of conflict starting next time. This was more of a “trial run” to see how the party would work out.

I must have ended up in the sock fetish section of the low cost accessory shop “Elves” when I took this picture.

My wife and I had the day off work today because of the local elections. A few days earlier we had made plans for today for a spring picnic in the park. We would bring out gas range, cook up some pork, and drink the day away. Then my wife tells me that it’s supposed to rain on Wednesday. We haven’t had significant amounts of precipitation in a month, yet it was going to rain on our day off? What crappy luck.

Before we had planned for the barbeque, she had promised to meet some friends at a coffee shop to chat. It was a Korean ladies thing, and I wasn’t interested in dropping by.Since it was raining today, she had no reason to cancel her promise with them, so I was left to entertain myself. She went off to vote and meet her friends.

After a long nap, I got around to the whole “doing something fun on my day off” plan. The only movies in the theaters were awful, and the Rifftrax guys latest was Spiderman 3, which I would never, ever pay any amount of money to ever see again. I had finished my 900 page book yesterday, and I wasn’t going to finish a second book I was half-way through in a hurry.

I played some Brawl and unlocked a few new levels. The Internet connection on the Wii was not being friendly today, so I didn’t get to play online for some reason. The Internet wasn’t going to entertain me long today anyway. I was feeling a little more passive than usual after my long nap, and really wanted to spend my rainy day as lazy as possible.

I decided to check out what was available on MegaTV, my IPTV service box. For some reason I had never noticed the “Singing Room” feature before. It turns out that I have access to Midi-quality music and lyrics to all the songs I like to sing in my very own apartment at any time I would like. Of course, there is no microphone, and the machine doesn’t output a score, so really you are just singing a song on a television. If you really tried hard, you could use the remote control to stand in for a mic, but really it isn’t the same without the atmosphere. For someone that only sings in singing rooms with disco lights and loud microphone feedback, sitting on a couch, sober, and trying to sing the lyrics of “Optimistic” seemed unbearably lame.

I ended up watching “Ripley’s Game“, a thriller movie I’d never heard of before. It had John Malkovich and Lena Headey (Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles Mom!). It was an average movie, but hardly much of a thriller.

Once my wife got home, we ate dinner together, and she’s back to watching her dramas. I might finish up the book I had put off earlier, or try to sleep. It hasn’t stopped raining the entire day, and I didn’t get a chance to walk Yoshi or do anything else I had planned on. Sometimes the weather is so unhelpful, but at least I got a day to relax. They don’t come often during the week these days.

There is a book mobile for the local library that drives around on a set schedule to each apartment. Once a week, for 30 minutes or so, the book mobile pulls up directly in front of our apartment. We have a schedule for when they are supposed to swing by, and my wife goes out and picks up a few books to read.

The only problem is that now her job requires her to miss the scheduled book mobile stop. She had some books she had borrowed, so I had to look out the window for the rolling library and return them. Either they didn’t come last week, or I missed them, so I was worried about returning the books this week because I thought I would have to pay a fine. The rental period is only a week.

I kept watch for the old retro-fitted bus, and when it pulled up, I grabbed my wife’s overdue books, my wallet, and headed for the door. I didn’t know the protocol, so I waited in line behind someone that got on the bus before me. The driver of the bus was sitting at a table, and there was a computer with a check out scanner entering in the books.

The woman in front of me handed him the books. The man scanned them, the results were green and cleared. She then went looking for something else to read.

I stepped up to the desk and handed over the books. The man looked at me in disbelief after a red flashing warning came up, and said, “Uh, are you [Wife's name]?”

I gave him a look like, you’ve got to me kidding right? “No, That’s my wife.” I pulled out my wallet. He got really confused then. I looked at the glowing red result and assumed I was being fined. I knew they were overdue, so I said, “How much do I owe?”

He misheard me, and thought I had said, “No, that’s my mother.”

My Korean isn’t terrible, and I know I can say this phrase correctly. No one has EVER thought that I was saying, “No, that’s my mother” before.

The man sort of waved me off, and I didn’t have to pay any money. (The library always loans out books for free. There are no fines.)

When I got off the bus, the man called back to me, “Tell your mom to return the books on time from now on, Okay?”

Sure thing.

I told my wife this story, and she thought it was hilarious. She even told it to her Mother-in-Law at dinner today, who ALSO thought it was hilarious. I’m still baffled by the entire exchange.

(From the Chosun Ilbo)

Yesterday, my wife and I were walking back from Bennigan’s, completely stuffed after a Power Lunch set. We had made a compromise. She was allowed to window shop at a department store if I was allowed to check out an electronics and appliance store on the way to the subway.

By the time we got to the electronics store, both of us had to go the bathroom to work off some of our meal. The nearest public bathroom was across the street at a large grocery store. We had to wait at a crosswalk for the lights to change. The corner we were waiting on, as well as the corner we were walking to, had a group of supporters for a local canidate.

They were all middle aged women wearing bright blue coats, gloves, and hats. When the lights would change, they’d bow to passing cars, wave, and try to get attention for their candidate’s causes. All of this was syncronized, but it wasn’t precise. It wasn’t like a cheerleading squad or a dance group. Really, it was just a bunch of women waving at cars.  Since all the candidates are given numbers and colors, getting people to look over at your supporters is enough to get people’s attention.Then, later, people check out the candidates platforms on posters placed on walls around apartment complexes around the city. This happens for a few weeks, then the election is over.

Anyway, after we were leaving the supermarket, we noticed that the group of supporters had left their corners to take a break. Some had gone into the bathroom, and others were taking a break in a van nearby. As we were walking across the crosswalk, a group of rival supporters with green sashes and hats showed up. They were stealing the same corner we had crossed to get to the supermarket!

They lined up and got ready to start waving. Same thing, different colors. The blue group came out of the van, and some came out from the supermarket to check out what was going on.

We were watching to see what would happen. Would there be a rumble for the street corner with the best hand waving potential? Were the blue group done for the day? Was this an arrangement worked out ahead of time? Did vans of supporters roll around the city trying to steal the best positions to wave to the most traffic?

So many questions! When we left, the green group was waving, and the blue group was sort of walking around listlessly.No rumble. THIS TIME. Who knows how fierce this campaign will get. If any hand waving riots break out, I’ll be the first to pass on the news.

We went to the Daejeon Citizens game today. They lost in spectacular fashion to the Jeju FC. At half time they handed out toilet paper for the fans to throw. This was to encourage the team, but it really was the best possible metaphor for their play. The best part of the game was a very enthusiastic fan in our row cheering for the game Dancing Homer style. He was really, REALLY into his cheerleading. SO much so, I recorded video on my camera. Enjoy.

Back when Cloverfield was released in January, some foreigner friends invited me over to Rodeo Town to play some Call of Duty 4. I went from being the “noob” of the group to being able to shoot and occasionally toss a grenade when I needed to on the first game day. By the second time around, I was shooting with more precision, and I learned the perks of the different classes in the game to a better degree. By the third time we played, I had found the class I liked best, and was running around holding my own for the first time, affecting the outcome.

Today, I dominated the game for the first time. We played free for all and I’d slaughter people. I was completely surprised to be getting the drop on people the first time and shooting first. We played teams and I’d have a higher kill to killed ratio. We’d play domination games where you needed to hold certain points of the map, and even short handed (2 vs 3) my team would still win. Yay! I only got shut down on the “elimination” game mode, because I tend to never pick up sniper rifles, and have problems aiming “up” while drawing a lot of fire from everyone else trying to eliminate me.

I’ve got to keep my head about myself and not get cocky. I’ve got a terrible habit of getting a big head when I think I can win. I know I don’t like playing people like that, but I always realize something I say might come off as cocky only after I’ve said it.

I’m also going to need a speedy delivery of Super Smash Brothers Brawl now that it’s been released in America. I want to host a series of games at my house, and I’ve got to get people to come over and play. Being a bad winner is never good for encouraging future gaming sessions.