The Apartment

Hanaro Apartments

A Brief Description

Owned (or rented) by ECC, Marc and I live rent free in a beautiful apartment, exactly the same as so many other beautiful apartments in Deajon. Shown above, this seems to be the standard for middle and working class living in the city. Unimaginatively designed and constructed, with little variation, they paint them different colours, and put pictures and snazzy patterns on the sides of them to try to reduce the monotony. One of the above apartment blocks contains our apartment.

The Tour

Welcome to my home. Please come in and remove your shoes. Leave them in the Shoe Space, in a messy heap with the rest of the shoes, or put them in the special shoe cupboard that we never use. In Korea, one never wears outdoor shoes inside. If you go to the gym, you need to have trainers that have never touched the ground outside.

Our kitchen/dining space has recently been hijacked by the computer. It used to be a dining table, now it's a desk. Meaning we have nowhere to eat in a civilised manner. When we have company (Stacey and Jen in this case), we quickly hide the computer somewhere and then lay the table.

The kitchen is pretty Spartan, coming with no oven, and a two hob stove with one knob missing. Koreans seem to cook most things in pans and woks, shunning ovens completely. Not being particularly fond of Korean cake, I miss being able to bake when I get the urge. The cupboard above the sink is supposed to house the clean dishes, but they pretty much get left on the draining board. Everything to the left of the sink is clean, anything to the right is dirty. As you can see, we have more clean than dirty, so the washing up can be left for another day or two........

Coming through to the living room, with our new TV that I bought from Brett and Rachel. We seem to be the only teachers that have an apartment with a respectable amount of furniture. Hence we host poker nights every now and again. The last time I played poker I was dared to chug some nasty lemon flavoured stuff, and then lost about 6,000 won in the very next hand. I cunningly thought I could win with a pair of tens just by throwing in lots of money. I was wrong.

The balcony serves a number of purposes. It's a storage for empty bottles until I get around to recycling them (every other Thursday is recycling day). It's where we dry our clothes. It also serves as a great place to observe the chaos that is Korean traffic.

There are two other views from the balcony, one far more interesting than the other. I'll leave it up to you which you'd rather stare at for a few minutes........

And finally, the last two stops on the tour: My bedroom and the bathroom. My bedroom has a large window that must be left open during the Korean summer. As must the balcony windows. The apartments that line the main road below my window have the curious effect of channeling and amplifying the sound of any car, bus or lorry that passes below my window at night. And Korean drivers have no reservations about sounding their horns..... Many times..... At all hours of the day or night. I can't wait for winter, when I can close the many layers of double and single glazed windows between my bed and the street. Waddya wanna know about the bathroom? It's a bathroom..... It had just been made sparklingly clean by Marc.

Well, that's it, as you leave, don't forget to check out the view from the front walkway, it's more apartments!

Back