Our Apartment

On this rainy Saturday afternoon I am going to give you a tour of our apartment.  The whole apartment is a long rectangle about 3 meters by 7 meters.  When you come in the front door you are faced with a little tile floor before the floor suddenly rises about 4 inches.  This is very common in Korean apartments and restaurants.  This is where you take off your shoes.  Its to keep the floor clean enough to sit on.  Our apartment even came with a cabinet specifically for storing shoes.

A Drawing of our appartment.  Look at our web album for actual pictures.  Heated floor space is colored brown.  Note: The floor is the heat.  (Click it to see a bigger version)

Once you are on the main floor, our bathroom door is to the right.  The bathroom is lower than the main floor, but level with the entry way, and it is tile.  Another reason the floor is raised is to allow the pipes for heated water to go everywhere.  This means the bathroom floor will not be heated in winter.  burr!  Our bathroom is normalish.  It has a towel rack, a toilet with a cushy pink seat, a large medicine cabinet, and a sink.  There is a drain in the middle of the floor.  The main oddity is that the shower is just one of those handheld ones in a holder on the wall over the sink.  It is connected via tube to the sink and you turn a handle to switch from sink to shower.  It sounds weird, but its really easy to use.  The water isn't sprayed hard enough to reach our towel in the opposite corner.  The only downside is forgetting to turn the handle after your shower the night before.  Then you get a nice unexpected morning shower.  The big medicine cabinet is to store everything you don't want to get wet, and even the toilet paper holder always comes with a metal flap to keep the water off. 

Past the bathroom door is our kitchen!  We have a mid-sized refrigerator, somewhere between a mini and a small full sized.  We also have a 3 burner stove, a tiny oven that is really just a broiler/toaster, a drainboard/counter, and a sink.  We do have a lot of cabinet space, but this may be because we don't have enough stuff to fill it up.  We do only have one drawer.  Thats our kitchen, we have finally accumulated enough pots and pans to cook our dinners here.  We've been eating a lot of rice here...

Then you go through a door into our main room.  Its the biggest room in our apartment being about 3x3.5 meters.  We have a twin bed (we've been offered a double, but I'm not sure how it would fit), a tiny desk, and our new addition, a table!  Of course, the desk and table are about a foot off the ground, but that's what the floor is for!  Our bed doubles as a couch and we are still living out of our suitcases until we find/buy a chest of drawers.  Apparently, Koreans as a society do not generally have thrift shops due to the belief that used items take in some part of the owner and have a lingering spirit.  Therefore, people just put out old furniture on the street for the trashman and foreigners who don't mind lingering spirits!

Last but not least, through a double sliding door (one clear, one opaque) we have a little low tile room.  Its about one meter wide and holds our hot water heater, air conditioner condenser, washing machine, and dry rack.  Its sort of like having a back porch because most of the back wall is a window.  We can't sit out there though.  We do have our sliding doors open a lot.  Our view isn't very inspiring.  We are only on the second floor, and we live in a restaurant district.  So all we can see is the roof of our neighboring restaurant and into a restaurant on the second floor of another building.  We do have lots of nightlights, but we can close the sliding doors and lower a screen to keep out most of the light and the partying people who go to the pubs around our neighborhood.  Its a good neighborhood, there isn't any crime or violence, but its the nearest set of restaurants and pub to the KAIST dorms. 

So that is our tiny apartment!  We are enjoying it a lot.  It feels right to have a tiny apartment with few possessions after just getting married.  Now we have stories about how we flooded our back porch and how we keep forgetting to turn on the hot water before getting into the shower.  The biggest plus is that we only spend 300,000 Korean Won ($300) a month on rent!!!  That's amazing for an urban area.