Saturday, July 21, 2007

more apartment searching.... not fun

It is never fun to go apartment hunting. It is especially not fun when you cannot find any resources in English to help you along the way and must wander from the subway stop hoping to find a realty place that will not immediately shoo you away as soon as you walk in the door because you are a foreigner. *sigh* My job is in northern Seoul and Al's new job is in the northwest, technically outside of Seoul in the countryside (but still on the subway line). We randomly picked a few subway stops in between and started looking around. The first two stops were ok, decent city areas with lots of places to eat and shop but the next two were "countryside" stops- they basically took you back 50 years. It was the first place I've been to in Korea that reminded me of some parts of China. Just old, dirty, crumbly, and chaotic. Although the location wasn't ideal, for the reasons listed above, we still wanted to check it out- hoping we can get a bigger place for a good price. We were sidetracked by an 81 year old man (he mentioned his age repeatedly) who was thrilled we were in his part of town and wanted to buy us coffee. "No" did not seem to be an option so we hung out for a bit. His children moved to New York 30 years ago, so he was excited to talk to me about that. I notice when we interact with older Koreans as a couple that they mostly talk to him and inderectly ask me questions through him-- "Is your girlfriend also from New Zealand?" "Where does she work?" It's funny. Anyway, we finaly made it to some realtors there but found the prices to be about the same. It's just as well, we were definitely conspicuous in that area and I would prefer to live in a place where I don't receive quite so much attention.

More searching next week. Wish us luck!

Thursday, July 12, 2007

I'm tired. Very, very tired. But I won't always be this busy. I took on extra work for my school which I regretted immediately but will carry out until the end. I shouldn't have put on extra hours now when I have to look for an apartment, learn about my new job, prepare materials for whoever's going to replace me and work intensive summer classes as well! Oh well, the new job starts in September and everything will be different!

Allister helped me look for apartments last weekend since I had no idea what to do. My current apartment is provided by the school but now I have to find my own. It was fun. We took a cab to the university entrance and asked the first Korean we saw where the nearest realtor was. This guy left his food stand to walk us a couple of blocks to his friends realty place (which technically wasn't in existence as it was being remodelled). He spoke English pretty well and translated for us oer the phone while the realtor took us to a few apartments in the area, he also gave us free drinks from his food stand which was really nice. Later we were joined by their Turkish friend who speaks English and is in the neighborhood building a kebab stand. He accompanied us to a few more apartments and provided further translation. Everyone was so nice!!! Unfortunately the apartments are really expensive for their size. In Korea, you can put down really large deposits, called key money, which will greatly reduce the monthly rent. Apparently my school will put up money for these deposits so hopefully I'll be able to arrange something affordable. We'll see, more searching this weekend!

Yesterday an older woman in my neighborhood gave me homemade yogurt and kimchee. It was nice, although a little strange as we had never spoken before and she kept questioning whether or not I was really American as she had apparently thought I was Russian (is it the tattoos?) Anyway, as most of my neighbors don't talk to me it was surprising.

Okay, I have to run. Bye.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Holy Cow!

Well, believe it or not, my first year in Korea officially ends next month! I started looking for another job a month ago and am very excited to announce I will be working at Sungkyunkwan University starting in September! I'll be teaching a required freshman course on academic writing and academic presentations in English at their language institute. Yay! I'll even have a few weeks vacation this year, so I'll be able to visit home sometime this winter. The location is great; the old part of Seoul where all of the palaces, antique shops, and old tea houses are. I'm very happy about everything and can't wait to start. woohoo!

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Me!


Me!
Originally uploaded by MacKensie!.

This is the super-cool name stamp Kay had made for me! My name in Korean plus a chicken (because I'm year of the rooster) Cute!

Future Stupid


Future Stupid
Originally uploaded by MacKensie!.

Me, Kay (best friend), and Adam (coworker) at Allister's art/music show "Future Stupid".

OI


OI
Originally uploaded by MacKensie!.

This is the DJ booth at a club we go to sometimes. Our friend Ripley is up there. Fun night! The light effects were really cool.

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MacKensie's Korea Blog by MacKensie Cornelius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.