The days at the Munwha drifted surreally by, the change from one to the next barely noticed in my exhausted state. Getting ready at 5:30 in the morning in cold darkness was always a struggle. The night before, I could have made everything ready, but the call of a cold beer and conversation after my last class at the local hof was always stronger. The hofs kicked us out at midnight and the conversation continued in someone’s room interrupted by the Ajimah occasionally beating on the door and pleading with us to go to sleep. If we gathered in my room I got almost no sleep at all. If we gathered in someone else’s room it was difficult to make that final step of standing up, saying goodnight and going to my room. It would be dark and empty and I would be reluctant to close my eyes knowing that the next sound I’d hear would be my alarm wrenching me out of dreams and into another day.

My roommates changed constantly, David having returned to Japan and Tapio having moved on. It was usually someone just passing through, a traveller who didn’t need to get up. Some slept soundly as I quietly got ready. The more sensitive woke up with my alarm. They urged me to go ahead and turn on the light so they could better watch the show of their poor working stiff roommate getting ready for work. They’d stretch and make a great show of luxuriating in their yo and ibul muttering as if to themselves how glad they were that they didn’t have to go to work.

But usually the light remained off, and I’d try and gather my things together with the help of a flashlight. Despite the cold, I showered every morning. It was the only way I could wake up and feel fresh. The door to the room was very low, and I had to bend way over to get out. A wooden ledge about two feet wide ran along the rooms and I sat down there to slip on the rubber thongs that the Koreans called slippers. The shower was around to the right, in a large room filled with an ancient washing machine and a few tubs. Three walls were blank cement, but the fourth contained the door and a large section of glass windows through which the curious could watch if they desired. If the power was out, I showered in the dark, placing my soap, shampoo and towel carefully in the exact same spot as I imagined a blind person must. The showerhead was against the middle of one of the walls and when the light was on, I felt very vulnerable standing there in the open. It didn’t have the private sensation I was used to from small shower stalls, or curtains around a bathtub. It was like showering in a public Laundromat or in a car garage. Cold drafts blew on my wet limbs. I never could towel off enough to feel dry. I was always cold and clammy as I left the shower and went back to my room. My heels slipped off the rubber thongs and got dirty all over again.

If I was lucky, I’d taken the time the night before to lay out a clean shirt. The guidebooks said that the ondol heating system provided a convenient way to press shirts and pants by placing them between the yo and the hot floor. In theory perhaps it worked. In practice, it only managed to permanently imprint the wrinkles. I normally just hung my shirts soaking wet on hangers hooked onto whatever nails stuck out of the concrete walls of my room and hoped the wrinkles would hang out.

Doing laundry was a dark cloud in the life of every English teacher there. None of us had time during the day, so we competed for the single washing machine on Saturday and Sunday. And it wasn’t a simple matter of throwing the clothes into the machine and turning it on. The machine was a Korean product and required constant monitoring at every stage. Water had to be poured in manually from a garden hose till the infernal buzzer finally turned itself off. The machine drained directly onto the floor and filled the room to a depth of a couple of inches. The spin cycles were terrible to behold as the machine, unless perfectly balanced, crashed out of control around the room threatening to tear itself apart. There was no built-in brake and when functioning properly it took minutes for the drum to wind down from its ten thousand rpm. It was possible to slow the drum down manually, but you risked having your arm twisted right out of the socket. It was a boring and wet process that took forever. I ended up standing there for hours, waiting for the machine to fill up with water, waiting for it to drain, waiting for the spin to get up to speed and then to wind down. Those wanting to shower on laundry day had to negotiate with those doing their laundry and then had to stand ankle deep in dirty sudsy water as they showered, aware of the ten people waiting impatiently for them to finish.

Personally, I solved the laundry problem by buying new shirts whenever the one I was wearing bit the dust. I discovered the shirt-man who sold factory rejects for 5,000 won. There was nothing drastically wrong with the shirts. One sleeve might be longer than the other or the button holes might have been sewn shut or they were too ugly for someone to pay good money for but that soon stopped bothering me. What I looked like was the least of my worries. I never wore a shirt long enough for the factory fold wrinkles to disappear and soon had dozens of them hanging everywhere. I didn’t have to worry about socks, as it was the custom in Korea to give socks as presents to teachers (white of course).

If I was unlucky, I’d have to fumble around in the dark trying to find a serviceable shirt and a tie with vaguely matching colors. Whether I found a new shirt with precise folds or an old one with a jumble of ondol induced wrinkles, I still had to manage putting a tie on in the dark. There were no mirrors in the Inn Sung Do bathroom or rooms until I went out and bought a couple. I hung one in the bathroom and one in my room. With my flashlight poised on the window ledge pointing at my head giving me that B-film horror look, I’d face the mirror and fumble my tie on. It usually took three tries before I got it just the right length. I pulled on my pants, which were always an inch too short, gathered my books and tiptoed out.

I sat on the ledge and quietly pulled the door shut behind me. With legs dangling, I reached down and felt around for my brown loafers which always got kicked out of reach and slipped my feet into them.

Shoes were also a problem. Even at home, I hated shopping and in Korea I dreaded it. I brought a pair from Canada with me but those soon fell apart. But my reluctance to shop was so great that I continued wearing them. My students became obsessed with my shoes, totally unable to comprehend why I would continue to wear shoes with giant holes in them especially in a country which had founded a good chunk of its miracle economy on producing rip-off Nikes and Reeboks. I felt it was none of their business and out of sheer bloody mindedness kept wearing my holy shoes long after even I would have normally replaced them. When months later, I finally bought a new pair I drifted through an entire day of classes talking about nothing but my shoes. My students wanted to know when I bought them, why I bought them, where I bought them, and most importantly how much I paid. As became my custom, I lied about everything just for fun and made the story more and more extreme. No matter how low the price I said I paid, someone was bound to say that I had paid too much. Even when these shoes were two months old, it was a regular weekly occurrence for one of my Korean friends or students to comment on them.

After a while, the back of my new shoes were bent down and flattened like everyone else’s. You never wore your shoes into a room in Korea and during the day you’d take them off and put them back on dozens of times. With new shoes, you might undo the laces for the first two or three days, but after that you simply stepped into them like everyone else. Many Koreans never even bothered readjusting the heel. They shove their foot in, stepping on the back and walk around in an odd shuffle with their foot only half in the shoe. I always worked my foot all the way in, but to get out again I’d have to step on the back heel, which quickly pulled the heel loose from the uppers and started the comments on the state of my shoes all over again.

The Ajimah at the Inn Sung Do always locked the door at night, and I had to unlock it in the morning to get out. The Ajimah was a light sleeper and at the first rattle of the door latch, she rolled aside the wall unit of her room and popped her head out to see what was going on. I tried to convince her to leave the door unlocked, but she never would. At night it was more of a problem. We returned regularly at one or two or three in the morning and had to bang on the outside door to wake her so she could unlock the door. She never looked happy about this, but even when it became apparent that these strange foreign guests of hers were going to return in the wee hours every day, she could never overcome her fear and leave the door unlocked. An unlocked door in Korea, even if the owners of the property were at home, was an open invitation to robbery. It said to the potential thief that the people inside didn’t value their property properly and deserved to have it taken away.

I smiled at the Ajimah and she rolled her wall shut again. The door was permanently bent in its frame and made a loud shrieking sound as I slowly pulled it open. If the door was ever unlocked and already open, I knew some poor teacher had landed a job beginning at an even more uncivilized hour, or if it was possible, even further away than mine. Mr. Kim at the Munwha was correct in saying his hogwan was easily reached by subway, but he had neglected to say that it took a very long time. Luckily, the Inn Sung Do was quite close to the Kyongbokkung subway stop on the Orange line. A three or four minute walk through the awakening streets of Seoul brought me to the entrance.

 

 

 

Tags: Canada, Japan, Korea, Korea - First Days Teaching English, mine