::A Geek in Korea::

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.

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 had promised my friends a game of Magic the Gathering today because a friend was leaving for a job in China soon. I needed to run out and buy some index cards to substitute for real cards. I had to run out to two different shops to find the index study cards I needed. When I was returning home, I rode up in the elevator with one of the new security guards.

The guy looked at me suspiciously. That’s the job of security guards, but the other parts of their jobs involve doing nothing, watching television, and sleeping. This is the first time any security guard paid any attention to me after two years of living here.

“You live here? What floor,” he asked.

“Uh, yeah, I’ve got my keys right here.”

He gave a sort of shrug and a, “Huh”, as if he didn’t have a clue about me living here. Whatever, I’ll be living at the apartment across the street in a month’s time anyway, and I had been there longer.

*      *       *

I was walking Yoshi on our route around the apartment when I spotted a fire. The apartment complex I live in had a large brush pile secured behind a gate. This is from all the trimmings around the apartment. I thought that they were doing a controlled burn to dispose of the brush. I wouldn’t past the elderly security guards to burn trash despite the pollution, but it seemed odd that the fire would be that big. I could feel the heat and had to leave the walking trail for fear of being burned.

It’s only when I got closer that I realized that there were spectators, the fire was large, and it was feeding on the wind and catching nearby trees on fire. This was NOT a controlled burn. I called my friend that I was going to meet after the walk, then completed my lap around the apartment. I expected it to be out before I returned, but secretly wanted to catch what was going on.

When I arrived behind my apartment, the fire was still out of control. It was two stories tall, and there was a small hose from one of the apartments trying to contain the fire.

There was a crowd gathering, and I was late to meet my friends due to all the picture snapping, so I decided to head up to my apartment for a better view. When I was leaving, a firefighter hopped a fence in dramatic fashion and started battling the blaze close range with a hose.

I got this shot right before I went into my apartment of fire fighters on the small building’s room fighting the fire. It was easily under control at this point.

When I returned home from playing cards with my friends, this was what was left of the fire.

I’m just waiting for a “wanted” picture with my picture on it to start circling around. “Suspicious foreigner sighted in neighborhood for the first time on the same day as the fire. Claims to live in building, never seen before. Possible arsonist.”

My wife teaches storybooks and songs to students at elementary schools around the city. She had a contract with the school and visits the same to elementary schools. She works in this program as an alternative to the private academy system I work in. These cheaper after school public programs were supposed to replace the expensive English education programs that are a huge part of the private education system in Korea, but like most things in Korea, they were set up with little foresight or planning.

The classes are for students that need a little help, or want to try English before investing fully in a private academy. Students that don’t want extra pressure studying, or that can’t afford more classes also enroll. It has a very different feel than the classes I teach that are all about results on tests. This is more of a “feel comfortable in an English speaking environment” sort of attitude.

I accidentally called during a meeting my wife had set up with a parent that wanted to enroll their children. I later heard about the story.

A woman with kids wanted to enroll her kids into the program. The women’s children can’t speak ANY Korean, as they were raised in the United States. She lives in South Carolina, but they are in Korea for summer vacation living with family. The parents were planning to move back to Korea in a few years, and they were worried that their children couldn’t make any friends since they don’t know any Korean. The kids were born in the United States, and are American citizens.

My wife said, “Yeah, sure, add them to my class. No problem. We can read some stories together, they can meet students in my class, and we can have some fun. It will be good for them to make some friends and be comfortable around Korean speakers.” Ironic, as that’s the opposite of the class was designed to do.

The woman was greatly relieved. She said that she had tried to enroll her children into the proper all day Korean classroom for two months while they were in Korea, but the school principal and the head English teacher had denied her children enrollment. She was really worried she was going to be denied by this after school program too. They had brought the children back to Korea so they could enroll in Korean school and the kids were just sitting around all day bored for the past two weeks.

Why would the teachers tell two students that they couldn’t come to class?

The students are completely fluent in English. They know their names in Korean, and nothing else. The head English teacher had denied them access to the rest of classes because there was a fear that having these students in the class would make the Korean teachers that taught English would be embarrassed.

Korean elementary school teachers don’t do a good job teaching English (which explains the private academy and after school programs). Imagine if these two students came to class and spoke better English than their TEACHERS! This would be a “face losing” gesture, and would make the teacher feel ashamed. This is one of the worst things you can do in Korean culture, and is inexcusable. 50% of work decisions in Korea are lying or trying to avoid embarrassing coworkers. No head teacher would allow their teachers to be put in such a position.

My wife shares the class with the new students. She called the other teacher to explain the situation. The other teacher was shocked that she would agree. My wife isn’t embarrased about talking to the kids. She thinks it’s cool to meet kids that can speak English well, and she wants them to have a good time. She’s comfortable to be around native speakers because of me and my friends. It’s great to see her take on challenges because of her confidence in English.

I was hanging out with some foreigners that had been there for a few years. None of them are snobbish, or elitist, but they were discussing coworkers they know that have been here multiple years but have limited Korean skills. Everyone around the table had their limits on what they could and could not do that they fessed up to. Most could read Korean, but couldn’t write well. Everyone at the table can speak functional “getting around town” Korean though, and considered it a necessity to survive.

One person mentioned a guy with six years experience in Korea that can’t read Korean. This is pretty bad, since Korean is pretty easy to learn the basics of on your own, and it increases your lifestyle so rapidly if you live here multiple years. It takes a month to get the basics down, and after that your illiteracy would seem like a huge joke.

This was topped by a guy that’s been in Korea for seven years that can’t read or speak ANY Korean. He wasn’t able to even say “Thank you,” which seems incredible. I couldn’t imagine being in a social situation where I would never make an attempt to communicate with someone on even a basic level. I can’t imagine what sort of bubble a person would have to ensconce themselves in to not know how to say the simple expressions you hear every day after years.

To go seven years and not learn something means there is something very strange going on. Going from no Korean to “A few words” is so trivially easy that you’d have to actively try to not learn parts of a language after a few years of living here. Trying to imagine living in a foreign culture only being able to react with fellow foreigners seems so incredibly limiting.

Even my parents and relatives that were here for 10 days made an effort to learn a few words to be polite. I’ve adopted Korean words into my vocabulary to the point that it’s only when I’m around foreigners that don’t many words that I get self-conscious about it.

I even fessed up to my own little embarrassing Korean skill while we went around the table. I never learned how to type Korean on a phone in Korea until my wife showed me how this year. I wanted to send her some message, and I realized I didn’t know how to do this on any of my phones. No one had ever shown me, and until you are given a hit about how to do it, the layout on the keyboard was no help whatsoever.

You have to “build” the characters in Korean.

For example, typing “. . |” will make a “ㅕ” character, which is made up of two dots on the left, then a bar. A “ㅑ” would be made by typing “| . .”. Characters like “ㅜㅠㅛㅗ” are all made the same way, varying the dots and bars to “draw” the character. More complex consonants are present on the keypad already, and you can hit them twice to “double” them up. It’s a pretty ingenious way to have all the different characters availble of a small keypad.

It’s MUCH easier for me to use a Korean phone to construct Korean words than it is for me to hunt and peck a Korean keyboard. I didn’t know how to do this until LAST YEAR because I always phoneticized my words into English from the Korean sounds. While I still needed to be able to read Korean to change it to English letters, phoneticizing words is an less efficient per byte of information. I pride myself in squeezing in my perfect message into 140 characters whenever possible without using slang.

Since everyone else I was talking to knew this skill before I did, I guess I could be on that “exasperatingly ignorant foreigner” list too, but in a much more niche sense. I’m on the top of the “Has been here forever, yet knows nearly no foreign people” list. I guess everyone has their failings, but some seem worse than others.

The apartment we currently live in, and the apartment across the street we are moving to are currently next in the city to be scheduled to have their building wide heating system converted into an individual apartment controlled heating system.

Right now, when it’s cold, the boiler down in the basement of the apartment kicks on, and everyone has a warm apartment. While that’s nice, it’s hardly fair. If we’re gone during the day, I don’t want to pay heating expenses to keep some housewife toasty.

Our last apartment in a more popular, richer part of town had an individually controlled boiler system, which meant that every apartment could control the temperature of their own rooms. These were individually billed, so if we liked to keep our apartment warmer, we could, but no one else had to pay for us to stay toasty. If we left for a vacation, we didn’t need to pay for heat. This is cheaper, but requires the apartment owners to know how to use, and pay to install, boilers.

Right now, the apartments in this neighborhood aren’t set up this way. Their is an apartment wide vote on the issue. If enough people want to switch over, there will be some construction work, some installation work, minor parking disruptions, and increased apartment fees. There is a ballot box outside the apartment security guard room. You drop off your ballot and register the vote. They take care of the tallying and notifying the apartments of the proceedings.

The only problem with all of this is the time when they choose to tell us about what’s going on. 8:00 am! We get woken up every morning by some boring security guard talking about the various issues with the boiler once or twice a week on our security announcement speaker. He talks in a loud voice for 5 minutes. The worst part is then he says, “Okay, to repeat…” then repeats what he said ONE MORE TIME for another five minues.

I can NEVER get back to sleep after this interruption. I don’t know WHY there has to be this sort of announcement at this hour. Perhaps parents are most likely to be home at this time, but they can’t just put up a note in the elevator and be done with it? Do I really have to hear this a few times a week?

We’re moving in 2 months, so we don’t really care what they do about the issue. Our new apartment will also have to convert over to this new system. We’ll have to listen to these messages all over again.

A dog is a pretty close companion. Yoshi spends a lot of time with me and knows my quirks pretty well. In fact, he’s learned to do a few things I didn’t even need to teach him to do simply out of routine. Here are a few examples:

When I get up in the morning, I usually turn on the computer as surf the web for an hour before my wife gets up. She prepares something for breakfast. I get up earlier for some alone time, and usually I’m not that hungry. Yoshi just sits on my lap as I read the news. When my wife wakes up, I turn my office chair to face into the kitchen area to greet her. Yoshi knows this is going to happen, so he doesn’t jump off my lap unless she goes to feed him. However, if I turn the chair as he hears the shutdown music of the computer, he automatically jumps off my lap.

Usually when we let Yoshi off the veranda, he hops up on the couch for a nap. If we talk about food, or mention Yoshi, his ears will perk up. If we say, “ma ma“, which is a Korean baby word for food, he’ll jump right down and follow us around till he gets something to eat. He’ll do a little dance and follow us out to his dish.

When I take Yoshi for a walk, he’ll stand in one spot while I put the harness leash on him. Then, if I head towards the door and pause, he knows to sit in front of the computer while I unmount my mp3 player for podcasts on the walk. He also will wait at the elevator in the same place going up or down. When Yoshi and I walk, we take one of three courses. My watching my feet as we walk past different parts of the neighborhood, he knows if we are walking one place or another for the day.

When we return from the walk, he holds up each paw to be cleaned before returning to his dish for some water. He also knows to avoid the shoe area so he doesn’t get dirty. I’m not responsible for this bit, this is all my wife. She accuses me of having socks dirtier than Yoshi at times.

Yoshi knows the words “Up” “Down” in English, and “go get your ball” in Korean. He’s got a favorite toy, which is a noisy green alligator. When we say “Noisy!” in Korean, he usually doesn’t stop making it squeak. He’s not a perfect dog.

When I snap my fingers and point to the veranda, Yoshi stops what he is doing and goes outside. I can also snap and nod my head, and if it is night he’ll go out too. Only my wife can get him to follow the “come here” command however. She also gets him to shake hands more frequently.

Occasionally, when my wife gets ready for bed, he’ll just go out and sleep on his blanket without us even having to say anything. Other times he curls up on the couch and needs to be reminded to go out on the veranda to his pillow.

It’s pretty cool when a pet figures out something on it’s own. Most of the things he knows because we have a repetitive sort of lifestyle that doesn’t change.

Both my wife and I have downtime in the evening at the same time. I get back from classes later than she does, but her dramas are on television during the evening. This means that she uses the television most nights to watch her two television shows. This is the only television she watches. They are intolerably boring Korean dramas that I do not enjoy. One is a historical drama, while the other is a Korean family drama about people who eat, talk, and whine every episode.

I come back home from work and turn on the computer. This is because my “blog time” is an hour of time I dedicate to writing in the evening. My wife knows that I like to just write about my day, and gives me free reign to do this. Blogging in the evening lets me pound some keyboard and get my stress out so that I can unwind before I go to bed. It is also the time when my friends in the United States are occasionally online to chat with. She started watching television dramas around the same time I do my blog posting to keep out of my hair. She’s got something going on, and I’ve got something going on.

She can’t time compress her television viewing, but I can write as little or as much as I want. Very often, I’ll finish off my blog post in 30 minutes or less, and then have nothing of purpose to do on the computer. This would be when I would play Wii. However, since she’s using the television, I’m back to the computer to kill some time. She doesn’t bother me for blogging, and I don’t bother her during her Korean dramas. It’s a pact we’ve worked out over two years of marriage.

If this was the United States, I’d pick up a book and read for a bit, but since books are harder to come by, and I’m to lazy to do anything productive after work, I’m stuck. It’s not a huge deal to not have a second television. I’ve got other hobbies, and it reminds me I could do something productive and study, but I never do.

Our mornings suffer no conflicts of television usage. I get up late, sync my podcasts walk the dog, and then check the news on the Internet. She gets up, talks with friends, maybe watches the news, and helps cook lunch. She heads to work after we eat lunch together. She doesn’t watch much television in the mornings, so I could play video games if I was in the mood. If she needs to use the computer, this is when she does it. If we had a second television I’d never use it for actual television watching. I do all of that on the computer.

We’ve got our little system worked out, and it’s pretty good. However, I wish her dramas were on an hour early so I could get the occasional game of Wii in before I went to bed without staying up super later.

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.