Apartment
Sorry, I finally figured out how to manage pictures on the 'blogeasy' site. To put the pictures from my apartment back though I had to recreate the article which of course puts things a little out of sequence. This was originally written Dec. 22, 2005.
Three weeks ago, on Dec. 19th I moved into my apartment....#107 at the Dae-ryung Apartments. It has a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and a living room It also has small laundry room and another room with no furniture in it that I'm using to store things I don't need on a daily basis, i.e. empty luggage, vacuum, empty boxes etc. The place is pretty sparse at the moment.
There's a small table in the kitchen with two chairs, a small fridge that of course has all my fridge magnets and a picture of Rocky on it. Inside the fridge? Not too much yet. Yesterday the head cook at the school's restaurant gave me two jars full of a couple of my favourite Korean delicacies....kimchi, and some other fermented spicy vegetable that I really like. What a sweety!!
The Kitchen
Continuing with our tour of the kitchen...as you can see from the pictures there isn't much counter space at all. Small appliance wise I have a rice cooker, a toaster, a kettle, a microwave and a gas range. I usually keep the toaster up in the cupboard when I'm not using it. The kettle of course gets a lot of use from me, so it stays out. I used the rice cooker for the first time today and it was amazingly easy thanks to Cyprian's easy 1-2-3 directions. He however forgot to add one step...make sure that there's no plastic lining the inside of the rice cooker before you use it. What possible side effects are there to eating a bowlful of rice that's been coated with melted plastic film? I thought the rice was supposed to look like that...hmmm. What's the worst that could happen, eh?
On the upside, I haven't blown myself up yet with the gas range. Could be because I haven't used it yet. It's a largish portable thing with two burners and it's connected to the gas line. I have to turn the gas on for the range and must remember to turn it off when I'm done. The heat for the apartment, my hot water comes from gas boilers. In Korea the heat comes from lines in the floor. I'm going to miss the heated floor thing when I go back home. I don't pay rent here, but I have to pay for the utilities....water, electiricty, and gas. The water costs $50/month. The cost of the other things will vary I imagine with use.
Because of the lack of counter space I put the microwave at one end of the living room, the end that borders the kitchen. That'll get some use...noodles, popcorn and maybe some other stuff. Other than the microwave in the living room I have a 4 seat sofa, a little table that the manager of the apartment lent me, a tv on a stand. I was told that I'd only have three or four channels on tv, but I have quite a few including the channel that has "The $6,000,000 Man", "Cosby", "The A-Team" and some others from the 70s. There's also a couple of stations that have some pretty good movies in English. This morning I woke up to watch a bit of the movie with Woody Harleson where he portrays Hustler magazine founder, Larry Flynt. That was pretty good! Courtney Love was surprisingly good as Flynt's wife! I guess I must have some basic cable or something.
My guitar sits in its case across from the microwave.
The bedroom...well, it's got a wardrobe, a queen size bed, and a desk. I haven't used the bed yet. I fell asleep on the couch last night. I won't do that again though...my neck won't take it.
Bedroom
Desk
My Christmas vacation started today after lunch, but I'm going to the school tomorrow to finish up the booklet for the English Camp that starts next week.
I don't have much in the way of pictures on the wall. I have some postcards from Nova Scotia, pictures of my sons, Cyprian (from his wedding) and Ryan, a picture of my favourite horse, Tequila, and of course my favourite dogs in the world, Rockie and Shep.
What do I need? I think I'd like a table or something for the microwave which now just sits on the floor. I'd like to get a few paintings or something for the walls. The living room could stand another chair.
Today I ventured out for some groceries and a few other things:
- ginseng tea
- honey (made from acacia)
- noodles
- ritz cracker sandwiches (peanut butter)
- microwave
- orange juice
- popcorn
- green tea
- a toilet brush and cleaner
- dish towels
- plastic wrap
I don't have a phone now in the apartment, but the school may pay for me to have a cell phone. That's weird! In Canada I swore I'd never own a goddamn cell phone, and here I am about to get one (well, maybe - it's not for sure yet). Back home I was just so annoyed by people yaking on the bloody things and talking about stuff I just didn't want to hear, and then I simply don't want to be that accessible. When I'm in transit for instance, I mostly don't want to talk, I want to read and listen to music. I know people say you can just turn off the cell phone, but in my case it would be off more than on and most times I'd forget to carry it with me. Hell, I hate to wear a watch! I'm a technocrat, a formerly rabid technophile who uses technology only as much as he has to.
The Living Room
I was thinking of getting a high speed internet connection in my apartment, but have since reconsidered. This evening I went to a "PC Bang" (pronounced "Bong" and it means "room"). Like its name suggests it's a room full of PCs that all have high speed internet access. These are mostly frequented by young people who go to surf the web and to play games against one another. I spent an hour answering a couple of emails and it only cost me $1.00. Between the PC Bang and the internet access I have at school, I don't really need it at the apartment. The only thing I really needed it for is to upload pictures to my blogsite, but I think I can just put resized pictures on my flash USB drive, bring it to school and use the connection there to upload them. I'll save myself $30/month.
Tomorrow I'll buy myself a good Korean-English dictionary. I'll be a more effective teacher if I can express myself better in Korean. I have a co-teacher that comes into the class with me sometimes, but quite often she's too busy with other things to do that and I have to do the class on my own. The first time she did that, and that was on my very first day, it scared the bejeezus out of me. I think that's when I thought of playing "Hangman". They enjoy that. At first everyone would just shout out letters, but gradually I'm getting them to raise their hands and be acknowledged before I indicate whether the letter is in the word in question.
Well, that was my day in Korea. Take care everybody
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