The Penthouse

By popular demand here is a blog about our new apartment. Most of you seem to be very curious about this and on our first day we were just as curious because we had no idea what to expect. Our teaching partner, Brian, picked us up at the bus station and drove us to the apartment and the way he put it was "You're moving into the penthouse." We were sceptical, but it is on the top floor of a 6-floor building, so maybe he was serious. We're not sure yet, although we are told that ours is the nicest in the building - Koreans will say anything to foreigners. The picture on the left is our apartment complex as we approach it from the road. Our building is number 203 and is much shorter, nestled in amongst the giant buildings.
You enter the front door into the largest room in the house which is a combination kitchen, dining room, and living room. This is the room where we have started our wall of pictures to brighten up the place. So far we have plenty of Liam and Evelyn and Audrey. One of: Chad & Carrie, Sarah, Cory. And for some reason a picture of Megan with a very large fly swatter. (Send pictures, people!)
We have a master bedroom which is quite spacious, mostly because a double bed and a night stand don't take up much space. There is no extraneous furniture.
We don't have any closets to hang our clothes, so our spare bedroom has become our changing room/walk-in closet. This room has a hanging rack and a dresser for our clothes. And a single bed. Michelle and Paul be forewarned that if you visit us, you will either (a) sleep crammed together on a small bed, (b) sleep separately with one on the bed and one on the couch, or (c) do it Korean style with a blanket on the fake laminate hardwood floor. This room also has a TV which we have been ignoring; we do have cable but the English stations are apparently through a different cable provider which isn't hooked up to our apartment building. We'll see if that changes.
We have a laundry room that doesn't have a dryer, so our balcony is where we hang clothes to dry. It's a very thin balcony and not much good for anything except hanging clothes and storing umbrellas. It does have a huge sliding screen door to let in plenty of sunshine and fresh air. Our bathroom is, well, a bathroom. A very small bathroom with no shower rod or curtain. For the most part the apartment is nice, but could be nicer if we wanted to spend the money only to leave it behind. There are certain things wrong with it, the types of things that crop up in any rental unit that is leased out to countless tenants over the years. These are the types of things that can be easily fixed or that just as easily can be overlooked because it is only a temporary home. Things such as a dripping faucet, a smelly kitchen cupboard, flickering lightbulbs, a hole in the washing machine hose, an ant infestation problem (seems to be under control now). Nothing worse than the mice we left behind in our apartment in Windsor.