Woldeu Bil

My living situation this time around in Seoul is not nearly as luxurious as it was in the fall, when Erma and I were living in a fancy officetel. This time I'm living in an off-campus student dorm. But I'm pretty comfortable here. One reason is that I still have many of the useful objects Erma and I accumulated over the course of the autumn. Some of those were given by relatives, some were loaned from Erma's parents, and some we purchased. These things range from pots and pans to power strips to bedding to toiletries. We were able to store all of these things at Erma's parents' place over the winter, and they very kindly drove them up to Seoul when I arrived. Erma's mother also provided me with banchan (side dishes, described here) like kimchi and myeolchi (멸치, little anchovies) and some other basic foodstuffs.

But I get ahead of myself.

I arrived at Incheon Airport on February 25, too late at night to get into the city and move into my dorm room, so I spent the night at an airport hotel. The next morning I took a bus into the city. The airport bus system here is really good. There are numerous "limousine" bus lines that connect the airport with different locations in and around Seoul. They run frequently, are very comfortable, and don't cost too much -- under $10. One of them (the number 603, if you're curious) goes straight to SNU. This is what it looked like from my seat in the back row:


The TV at the front was receiving satellite broadcasts.

I got off the bus and took a short cab ride to my dorm building, which is called World Ville (월드빌 Woldeu Bil). I had an address, but as you know from this earlier post, an address isn't much use. Fortunately, I had prepared for the cab ride by printing out a map showing the location of the building. The cab driver studied it for a while and then got me there with little difficulty.

It was a little after noon. I had two heavy suitcases and a backpack, and I was standing in front of this building:

See the little set of glass doors on the left? Outside the doors there was an intercom. One button showed a stylized image of a man's head wearing an official-looking cap, labeled gyeongbi 경비, which means guard. At the old officetel, there was a guard on duty 24 hours a day. I figured I'd buzz this guy, he'd let me in, look up my name on a list of new students moving in, and give me keys.

But every time I tried the button, the little LED screen said "EROR", which I took to mean "error". I spent about ten minutes trying this, pushing different combinations of buttons, and then trying again, even though it never worked. I peered in through the glass doors, and there was nothing to see but a narrow stairway and an elevator. I looked in the first-floor windows to the right of the door, but the room didn't look like an office, and it was dark and apparently unoccupied.

So, I thought for a minute about what I should do. The SNU language school had told me what room number I was in. Then I had told them what day I was moving in, and they had acknowledged that information. They hadn't said anything about HOW I should move in, and I had just assumed that there would be an official person on site when I arrived.

It seemed that the next thing I should do is call the language school office. But I wasn't sure I had the number. I had carefully printed up sheets with all the information I thought I would need when I arrived in Korea: the airport hotel phone number and location, the World Ville location, instructions for how to take a local bus to campus, etc. But I didn't have the language school phone number. Probably, though, it was somewhere on my computer, maybe in the signature of the emails that I'd received from the school.

I was just about to take out my computer when a young woman approached the door with a card key. She looked like a student; I asked her in Korean if there was a guard somewhere. She didn't understand at first, but seeing my suitcases, she asked if I was a new student. I said I was, and I was moving in. "You don't have keys?" she asked, surprised. I said I didn't. Did I need to go to campus to get them? "No," she said. She told me to wait and she'd get help. Then she went inside.

A few minutes later she came back out with another student, a friend of hers. Both of them were Japanese, and their Korean was not much better than mine. The second student gave me the phone number of a person to call. I tried it, but there was no answer. They decided I'd best come inside -- it was cold out, snow on the ground -- and then we'd figure out what to do. So I took my luggage in and got invited to one of their rooms. The first student I'd met was named M-, and the second R-. R- found the phone number of the school, and I called. They said they would get in touch with the person who had the keys, and would get back to me. A few minutes later they called back to say that the person with the keys would come by at 2:00. I looked at my watch: 12:45. "It's okay," said the students, "we have nothing to do today. You can wait here until 2:00."

So we spent an hour chatting in Korean in M-'s place. I thought: this is great. I'm already making friends in the dorm. When I asked how living here was, I got two warnings from the students: one, that their rooms had been filthy when they'd moved in; two, that the guy coming with my keys, who was sort of the resident proctor, wasn't very responsive and that it was hard to get problems in the dorm addressed in a timely fashion. Moreover, none of the dorm rules were actually enforced.

When 2:00 came around, I went downstairs to wait, and a few minutes later a young guy showed up. He apologized that my room hadn't been cleaned yet. We went in together, and he spent a short time sweeping the floor and scrubbing at the kitchen counter. That's when Erma's parents showed up with all the stuff they had driven up from their home, and the guy who had been cleaning my apartment disappeared when I went down to greet the in-laws.

After we moved everything into the apartment, Erma's parents took me on a quick tour of campus, which was a mob scene -- it was graduation day. Students in graduation robes were posing with their parents, holding flowers. The campus roads were jammed solid. We crawled through campus, locating my language school building. Then they dropped me back off at the dorm so I could work on getting settled.

Indeed, as I'd been warned, the place was filthy. I probably spent a total of 15 hours cleaning. The previous inhabitant had left a number of things behind, a few of them useful (like laundry detergent) and most of them not (like bathroom slippers, lots of notes written in Russian, and plastic silverware).

The most surprising thing I found when cleaning was under the bed. I don't think anyone had cleaned under there in 5 years. I was poking under there with a swiffer, bringing out huge clods of dust, when I hit something big. If I had been fishing I would have been excited. I leaned over and looked down, but I couldn't make out what it was until I'd slid it out into the center of the room.


A tire! A tire! I still don't understand how there could be a tire under the bed.

The biggest problem was the bathroom. The floor was covered in a disgusting, thick oily layer of scum, hair, and god-knows what else. Like all Korean bathrooms, there was a drain in the middle of the floor, but it was almost completely clogged. Similarly, I discovered that the bathroom sink drain was almost completely clogged. Without a working drain, I couldn't clean in there.

Fortunately, the next day I left with Erma's parents for their home in the south. While I was there I sent a series of text messages to the guy who had let me in, and he managed to get the drains unclogged, so that when I returned I was finally able to scrub the bathroom clean.

I waited to take pictures of the place until it was clean and all my belongings were unpacked and put away.

This is what the staircase and elevator look like. It looks pretty fancy, no? Marble walls and all.


This is my door: Room 404. The hallway continues around to the left, where there are three more apartments. That's a total of five per floor. I think there are 25 residents.


When you open the door, this is what you see. There's no place to store my suitcase, so it just has to sit there. I put up a decoration to relieve the monotony of the white walls. That metal thing is a rack for drying clothes. Note too the small space in the entryway for leaving shoes. One reason the floor is elevated is to make room for the pipes that circulate hot water for heat.


Turning to the right once inside the door, you can basically see the whole place:


The fanciness of the hallway is not carried through to the inside. The floor looks like wood. But it's not. It's not even fake plastic wood. It's a wood-colored vinyl lining. And it's buckling up in places.

Looking back from the other direction:


This seems pretty neat until you look down. I've got the second suitcase and the laundry basket, as well as trash and recycling, behind the headboard of the bed.


Here's my desk and bookshelf. That's a big map of Seoul on the wall.


The space is small, so it's not surprising that there isn't much storage, but it's still amazing how inefficiently laid out and furnished the place is. For example, there are no drawers in the entire place. Not in the desk, not in the kitchen counter, not in the closet. That thing that looks like a drawer is in fact ... well, I'm not sure what it is. But I decided to put my computer on it, since the desk is too high for comfortable typing. That works pretty well, since it keeps the desk clear for books and such. The disadvantage is that when I move the chair behind the computer, it bangs into the box that I'm using as a nightstand.


The closet works fine as long as you can hang most of your clothes. I've stored boxes above the closet.

My underwear and socks are underneath the television.

The kitchen has a single electric rangetop. There's a clothes-washing machine underneath it. This area is also terribly designed. There are no drawers for silverware, knives, spatulas, etc. The cabinets are arranged in such a way that when the cabinet door is open, it's in the way of where you need to stand--right in front of the sink--in order to reach into the cabinet.


There's no place for a refrigerator, so the small fridge they supplied sits awkwardly between the kitchen and the living area. You can see it in the first picture of the room above, with the microwave on top of it. It was originally facing the bed, which seemed really silly, so I rotated it to make it more accessible from the kitchen.

Here's the bathroom:

Those things on top of the toilet tank were left by the previous resident. Since there is conditioner and moisturizing body wash, I'm assuming it was a woman.

The biggest surprise is that there is no separate shower stall. The showerhead is attached to the sink, and the entire bathroom is the stall. I've seen lots of bathrooms like this in China, and I suppose they are probably not that uncommon in small apartments in Korea.

It's a slight hassle, but not too bad. Mostly it's a matter of training myself with a few simple habits. Before showering, take the towel and the bathmat out of the bathroom. After showering, don't forget to change the diverter so the water comes back out the sink faucet. (I have twice now, after showering, dressed and gone back in to brush my teeth, only to give myself a second shower.)


There isn't much room in the bathroom. The door swings in, with about an 8-inch clearance in front of the sink and a 4-inch clearance in front of the toilet. This means to open or close the door while in the bathroom, you either have to smush one skinny thigh up against the sink and scrape the door past it, or straddle the toilet.

The toilet itself is set right up against this corner jutting out from the wall.

Basically, it prevents your left leg from going where it would normally go when sitting on the toilet. So you have to sit side-saddle.

My suspicion is that this whole building was once as fancy as the halls, with big rooms, and that at some point those rooms got divided up. The light in the bathroom gets its power through the shared wall with the kitchen, suggesting that the bathroom was divided off some time after the building was constructed.

I still don't understand why there aren't more windows. The window over the sink looks out over the street, though you can't actually see out of it. Then there is a tiny window in the bathroom, which is too high to see out of. I would have thought there would also be a big window over the desk, where I've got the map of Seoul. That's an outside wall.

So I went out to look. The arrow points to the bathroom window of my room on the fourth floor.

Quite odd! There is a large window on the third floor, but on my floor there is just a wall, and a mysterious railing, as if there were a balcony there.

I don't mean to complain too much about the place. It's reasonably comfortable, and certainly acceptable for a three-month stay. The oddities and annoyances can be worked around, and I'm able to study effectively.

My main disappointment is that it seems really hard to meet people here. One reason I wanted to live in the dorm was to have a social experience with other international students. But the place is structured in such a way as to prevent that from happening. There are no common spaces at all, and the hallways are so narrow that you can't leave a door open with blocking access. That means that when residents are at home, their doors are closed. Occasionally I meet someone going in or out, but there's no place to stop and chat.

Well, it's still early -- I've only been here a bit more than a week. We'll see how things play out.

By the way -- for those who have been waiting with baited breath for the explanation of the mystery photos I put up a few posts ago, I've now posted it in the comments section.