The apartment I live in is fairly small. While huge for a single person living in Korea year to year, as a couple who has accumulated some things with semi-long term plans on staying in the country, it’s rather tiny. Serviceable, functional, but not exactly large. If we were to be given a piece of furniture, say, a couch, the only place we could put it would be on the veranda. The reason for this cramped space is the fact that while we only have three total rooms in our apartment, we have two beds, but we try to put them to good use when we can.
The first twin sized bed was given by the school, as I didn’t have my own apartment, I also had no need for my own bed. We purchased our own queen sized bed a few weeks before the wedding because we’d drive ourselves mad trying to sleep on a bed that small together every night. We now have a second bedroom that no one sleeps in, and a bed taking up a lot of space.
One thing my wife is very specific about is her sense of cleanliness. Anything on the larger bed that isn’t pajama or bed related is not really "allowed". She gives me a glare if I set my bag down to pack, or if I happen to wear pants and sit on the sheets as I watch the news. It’s not that I’m an obscenely dirty fellow, it’s just that we do have nice sheets, and if they require washing, she’ll probably be the one to do it. Things as large as sheets get washed by hand, as keeping to her upbringing where her mother worked cleaning and scrubbing the household all day. Hand washing thick sheets is really hard work, and she wants to avoid it. I want to avoid making her work hard, so we have established the large bed as a sort of undeclared "clean zone". Despite the fact that the large bed is in a prime lounging location in our living room, we don’t crawl inside it if we are wearing our "day clothes".
These clean rules are less strictly followed in our second bedroom. For example, if you wanted to study, read, or play a game without bothering the other person, you could head to the second bedroom, drop onto the twin bed, and just relax. It’s rather nice to have the second bed, as it functions as a sort of resting area in place of a couch. It’s plenty large enough for one person, and you don’t have to change out of your clothes. We dress in the second bedroom, so there might be an article of clothing from the previous night laying on the matress depending on how busy we were the previous day. Despite the fact that our queen size bed is more comfortable we do rest on the twin bed from time to time.
Today, we went to see Crash. After the film, we were both exhausted, so we came back to the apartment to take a rest. We got as far as taking off our coats before we both ended up napping on the twin bed for two and a half hours. It was a nice, solid nap, where you wake up not knowing where you were, what time it is, or how long you were sleeping until you find a clock. I find the best naps, sleep wise, are the ones where you don’t even manage to get out of your clothes before you reach a deep slumber. I’m not sure why we didn’t just go to our normal sleeping bed for the space, as we were both tired, but the nap was very nice.
Have a favorite place for a nap? Leave a comment.
