Our Korean Apartment

We live on the "5th" floor of an apartment building located in a cluster of apartment buildings. That one with all the yellow is ours (and the window with the white box, second from the top, is ours.)

Our building has an elevator. Check out the numbers on the keypad:

Yeah. There's not a four. In Eastern Asia, 4 is their 13; their words for "four" are similar to their words for "death." It's not uncommon for hospitals, apartment buildings, and other public structures to omit number four from the floorplan. So, we live on the "5th" floor.

Here's our little foyer/entrance thing. It has a cabinet for shoes. People don't wear shoes in houses in Korea. When the cable guy came to our house to hook up the internet, he took off his shoes in the foyer. Our landlord had to come over a couple of times, and he removed his shoes, too. Two restaurants we've visited had shoe shelves at the door.

Say you're visiting someone's house with your shoes off, and you have to use the bathroom. Do you want to walk on their bathroom floor in your bare feet? EWW! NO! That's why there were already bathroom shoes in our guest bathroom when we moved in.

One of the shoeless restaurants we went to had bathroom shoes in their bathroom for people to use. I was barefoot. I didn't use the shoes. I ended up wishing I had.

We have a couple of smallish spare bedrooms, one directly across from the foyer and the other directly across from our bedroom. One's for Army stuff and the other one is for other stuff.

Here's the kitchen (and computer room, since we only have one table):

Here's the living room, right across from the kitchen:

(Our landlord was kind enough to provide us with the couch, the TV stand, and the table & chairs.) The small white boxes next to the TV stand across from the couch are electrical transformers. There's also one under our kitchen table/computer desk and one in the kitchen. Almost everything we own gets plugged into transformers because the electrical outlets here don't speak English.

The tall white thing in the corner by the couch is our air conditioner. None of the Korean buildings we've visited (except for a museum, I think, and the Crown Hotel) have had central heating/cooling. Here, if you're lucky enough to have air conditioning, it's one of these individual air conditioner things or an A/C unit sticking out of a window. In Korea, electricity can be ridiculously expensive, so you try not to use it, which means trying not to use your A/C unit, which means opening your windows and wearing as little as possible and hoping it's a breezy day.

There's another A/C unit in our bedroom. We only run it at night. It's the white thing in the upper right-hand corner:

Those things on the floor are Army kneepads. They're to hold the door open.

I can remember our dad yelling when we were growing up, if we left the back door open when we came inside from playing, "In or out! Close the door! Are you trying to air condition the whole neighborhood?" Now, at night, if Joe leaves the bedroom to go get something from somewhere else in the apartment, if he leaves the door open, I yell "Close the door! Are you trying to air condition the whole apartment?"

 

The above picture was taken from the window of the porch outside of our bedroom window. It's the garden on the roof of the building across from us. Some mornings, we see a shirtless Korean man walking around up there, smoking cigarettes and tending the plants.

In this picture, you'll see the little room between our bedroom and our bathroom. In the little room, there are two wardrobes. The wardrobes and the shoe cabinet in the foyer are the apartment's only closets. Also in this picture, next to the light switch, you'll see the panel that controls our water heater. You have to push a button when you want the water heater to come on. The water heats up fast - you can be taking a shower three to five minutes after you turn on the water heater - but the water temperature of the shower is very inconsistent. I adjust the faucet every two minutes or so to balance out the random temperature changes. This panel also controls the apartment's heating system. There's pipes or something under the floor, and heat comes from them.

That's our bathroom. The walls and floor are tiled. The ceiling - and all the bathroom ceilings I've seen here - are made of plastic panels. The showerhead is on a hose, and you can detach the showerhead from the wall, which is how they build showers here. In Korea, showerheads don't just come out of walls.

You know what else is cool about our bathroom? The floor drain where the water from the sink goes. I can hose down the walls, the toilet, the floor, everything, and it all just washes into that drain. That's even where the shower water goes.

This is a picture of the little spot of mildew in the grout over the mirror, and the medicine cabinet, and the bathroom window. When you look out of that window, you see this:

The green grassy patches aren't grassy. They're rice paddies. Here, rice paddies are as common as cornfields are in Virginia.

This is the laundry porch that runs the length of the apartment behind the kitchen and one of the spare rooms:

The washing machine is a washer/dryer combo. Because of how expensive electricity is (and because of the inefficiency of that machine,) our clothes are dried on a rack. That takes a while. I can only do a couple of loads of laundry per day.

That's the other side of the laundry porch. It's the trash side. In Korea, they recycle aluminum and plastic and other stuff, of course, but they also recycle food.

Your food goes in the green bags, your non-recyclable trash goes in the white bags, and your recyclables go in a giant pile on the floor until you get around to sorting them. The trashbags are expensive; four or five white bags and three or five green bags cost me about $8. When they're full, you put them outside and someone comes and picks them up once the stray cats are done eating out of the green ones.

This (zoomed-in) picture was taken when I was at the laundry-porch window. Mist was rising from the mountains at sunset.

I'm living in a country where air conditioners are an afterthought and I can't read the trashbags and there are mountains outside my bathroom window. Times like this, I'm pretty glad Joe joined the Army.