In line with my New Year's resolution to tell you more about Korea and the things that happen to me here, I've got some news for you.
I might as well start with the building I'm living in. You caught a brief glimpse of it a year ago when I arrived here, in this post (the tall one on the left).
But the surface of a building, as with most other objects, only tells part of the story. In the year that's passed since I first came to this city and started living in this Estima Officetel, I've gotten to know it rather well, and I'd like to describe it here.
First of all, I should explain what an officetel is. Like the Wikipedia article sez, it's a multi-purpose building. It has both commercial and residential space available for rent. People like to have business in officetels because they're cheaper to rent out (I think) than a spot in a purely commercial building. The tradeoff is that their business is not very visible.
Up until a few months ago, the utility bills in officetels were calculated using a system of averages. Instead of each apartment paying for what it used in heating and electricity, the utility use for every apartment on a particular floor was averaged out, and each person on that floor paid the average. This wasn't exactly fair, as you've probably already realized. I hardly use any heat in winter, though other people run it 'round the clock. Conversely, I run my A/C all the time in summer, where other folks hardly use it at all. Fortunately that law was recently changed, and now people who live (or work) in officetels pay their for their own.
Okay, enough of the boring stuff. Let's talk about the building. Then I'll talk about the people in it, which is where it gets really interesting.
Estima has 15 floors above ground, four parking floors below, and an open rooftop common area. The view's pretty good all around. Something like this:
My apartment was meant for a couple to inhabit, and is palatially spacious compared to the tiny studio apartment I was living in down on the islands in 2008:
Now, I mentioned that this is an officetel, which means that commercial space rubs elbows with private residences. On the second floor there's a brand-new home furnishings store, mostly sofas and coffee tables and stuff. It's pretty sparkly and tastefully appointed, but otherwise nondescript. Putting a shiny store like that in a beat-up old building like this is like hanging a pearl earring from a swine's ear, anyway.
There's some more scattered businesses on the other floors. I think there's a music instructor over on the north side of the ninth floor (mine). And just down the hall from me is something called "Georgia Immigration Services." It's run by a young woman and I never see anyone going in or out. There's a few other business on the third floor (which is where Avalon's lunchroom is, also) but I don't know what they do, since the signs are all in Korean.
On the first floor are the usual corridors, lobby, mailboxes, and elevators (three of them). The hallways are frigid. For some reason the Koreans decided it was a good idea not to heat the lobbies or entry spaces of their buildings (at least not the cheap-ass officetels, anyway). There are three entrances on the north, south, and west sides of the building, each defended by a double pair of slender glass doors. Those are the interior's sole protection against the elements. The tile floors are perfectly flush and become treacherously slick when wet—which, in wintertime, they always are. Mats are sometimes laid down, but sometimes not. Your only chance of warming up is when you finally walk over your own threshold and into your warm apartment.
There are seven businesses on the first floor of Estima. On the south side (the main entrance, off Gilju Street) there's BHC Chicken and some fancy-pants bike shop that sells ridiculously overpriced mountain bikes to windburned fitness freaks in skintight polyester. (Seriously, they're like $5,000 apiece.)
BHC Chicken is just one of a dozen national fried chicken franchises. Koreans are nuts for fried chicken. You can find a chicken joint on every corner. They usually deliver, too. You'll see the suicidal delivery boys (usually young guys working their way through college) swooping through traffic on their scooters, blowing red lights and mounting sidewalks, the little red cargo box riding high on the seat behind them.
Over on the north side of the building, at the back entrance to the building (across from the police station, on a quiet little side-street) are some more businesses. Embedded within the northern exit corridor, right across from each other, are a convenience store and a Chinese apothecary. The convenience store is called Good Mart, and it's open 24/7, which is handy for us apartment-dwellers if we get the midnight munchies. Though small, it's got everything: six-packs, Q-tips, lighter fluid, ice cream, chewing gum, canned tuna, and a bazillion different kinds of ramen...not to mention a few small bottles of blended Scotch.
The Chinese apothecary really defines the first floor, though. That's not because it has an imposing façade, though. It's mostly just because it smells funny. The thirtysomething woman who owns it is always brewing up some foul-smelling medicine in there, often inundating the entire ground floor with noxious odors. Sometimes I'll see the proprietress sitting in the waiting room with her friends, space heaters cranked up and glowing red, chatting and drinking tea as something that looks eerily like witch's brew simmers away in a stainless steel pot over a blue flame. Behind the counter are dozens of wooden drawers excitingly labeled with mysterious Chinese characters. It doesn't matter to me what they mean. They could read "gout" and "pox" and "boils" and "chlamydia" for all I care. They still look cool.
Down at the end of the northern corridor lie an octopus restaurant, a twigim shop, and a gimbap joint. I've never been to this particular octopus restaurant, though I probably should. I love molluscs and I love the way Koreans prepare 'em even better. Twigim is sort of like Korean fast food: various bits and bobs deep-fried in oil and covered in a delicious greasy crust. I've only eaten at this shop once, and that was with my predecessor, whom I loathed so much that I swore off everything that she professed to like.
The gimbap joint is called Sumirak, and it makes the best stuff in town, in my opinion. Gimbap is sort of like Korean sushi, but you won't find a hint of raw fish in it. Mostly it's got ham (more like Spam), imitation crab, pickled radish, and slivers of cucumber and carrot, all wrapped up in rice with a seaweed wrapper. This is formed into a roll and then cut into slices, just like roll sushi. Sumirak is owned by a middle-aged woman who has aged as gracefully as Helen Mirren or Julie Andrews. Her face is lined, but in that endearing careworn way we all imagine when we think of our beloved grandmothers or great-aunts. She does not stoop or hobble, but stands tall and proud (at sixty-five inches). She rolls gimbap at lightning speed, sets it down in front of you with a smile, and says 맛있게 드세요 (masissge deuseyo—"enjoy your meal").
Maybe I'll put up pictures, and maybe I won't. Maybe I'll just do like Hemingway would have and let you imagine all this stuff for yourselves.
Now you know a little bit more about my bailiwick. Next up: some of the people who inhabit this place. And maybe a bit more about Jung-dong in general.
Goodness, ten days into 2013 and I haven't posted yet? Let's rectify this, shall we?
I'd like to say a few more words about my last post before we begin. I declared my intention to eschew any further references to airplanes, booze or literature in my blog and focus solely on travel, but due to popular outcry I am hereby rescinding that declaration. Thanks to you and your wonderful comments, I've decided to keep on writing about the things that interest me (alcohol, flying, good books and travel being the most prominent). If people would like to get more specialized information, they can click on the lower right of this main page, among the swarm of yellow keywords with which I've seeded my posts, and narrow the topics down that way. So there. The Vaunter abides. Thank you for your support, y'all.
Speaking of support, I have only 80 official followers but my page views are skyrocketing. I cracked 100,000 in late 2012 and am already well on my way to 150,000. I've noticed, thanks to the crisp and clear statistical analysis which Blogger provides, that some of my posts appear to have been backlinked. I'm writing like I have a clue what "backlinked" means, but in reality I don't. I think it means that somebody posted links to my blog in high-traffic areas of the web, and they're getting clicked on a lot, thus driving up my page view count. Also, I have taken advantage of the "post-tagging" function that Blogger offers, and have made my posts highly searchable. (I believe the cyber-gods call this SEO, or "search engine optimization.") So there ya go. Hopefully someone in power will notice me and start paying me to write this blithe and mellifluous blog.
Anyway, on to the heart of the matter: Ernest Hemingway.
I don't think I ever truly realized in high school exactly what Hemingway's books were about. The Old Man and the Sea was thankfully self-explanatory, but For Whom the Bell Tolls sounded like it was about somebody's funeral and A Farewell to Arms made me think of a wood-chipper. A Moveable Feast was no different. I thought it was a buffet on wheels.
Then, on a whim, I looked the book up. To my surprise, it was a kind of memoir, posthumously compiled from Hemingway's notes and manuscripts, recording his time as a young writer in Paris in the 1920s, and his encounters with other famous expatriates. The story behind it was quite charming, really: during his time in the French capital (working as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star), and beginning to spread his novelist wings, Hemingway bumped into a lot of luminaries: Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, among others. He took copious notes about his time in Paris, the things he saw and did, and the places where he and the other expats habitually hung out: restaurants, bars, seedy cafés and whatnot. In 1928 he stashed these notes in two small trunks in the basement of the Ritz Hotel. He retrieved them again in 1956, had them transcribed and was in the process of collating them into a memoir when, well...
Yeah. You know what happened. The dude offed himself. The editing process was finished by his fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, and published by Scribner's.
This information has seized my imagination with incandescent fingers. I now have yet another book I need to read, another chance to expand my Hemingway collection. It also made me see that I have something in common with Ernest, as well as Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Crane and Willa Cather: I worked as a journalist before becoming a writer.
(Okay, I didn't work as a journalist very long, and I'm not a published writer yet; but I will be, dang it. I have some exciting news to tell you on the journalism front, so hang tight for that this weekend.)
But apart from the superficial facts, there's another thing that I realized. All the notes I've made about Korea—all my thoughts on this nation's complexities, dualities, dichotomies and idiosyncrasies—are digital. They're floating around in cyberspace, either on this blog or in various e-zines. I've got a few tiny Mead composition books filled with bus fares, random scribblings in Hangeul, the translated names of exotic dishes, half-finished itineraries and disjointed snatches of poetic prose, but that's it. It's hardly enough to fill a pair of steamer trunks.
This saddens me somewhat.
Part of me feels like walking down to Homeplus (similar to Tesco, and owned by them) and buying up every spiral notebook and composition pad in sight. I'll spend the rest of this year (and the next, if I choose to stay in Korea longer) filling them with every conceivable thought that comes into my head. The loud drone of cicadas in summer. The autumn trees' fireworks display. The children squealing as they escape their last hagwon of the day and sprint for the buses, or the old housewives chattering as they maneuver through the aisles of the supermarket. That annoying little whine that only young Korean women are capable of infusing into the final syllable of their sentences. The Koreans' dislike of China and absolute hatred of Japan. The wailing invasion sirens, tested every six months. Typhoons, cloudbursts and fog-banks. The Han River, lazy and green in summer and frozen solid in winter. The sandy beaches of Busan, the humid heat of the midlands, the fading grandeur at Gyeongju, the tropical paradise of Jeju Island. Kimchi, squid-rice, bulgogi soup and fried sweet potatoes. The cloud factory behind my apartment.
Yeah. That sounds like a plan. Something for future generations to mull over. In print. This URL might not last forever, you know. But maybe a manuscript hidden in a chest in the attic for 200 years will.
Even if I don't go through with it, and those notebooks are never bought and filled with exciting scribbles, I am going to make a determined effort to write more on this blog about Korea. In addition to my travel writing (which I need to do some more of), and in addition to being more assiduous in my reporting (bus fares, travel times, ports of call), I shall simply give you more info about my bailiwick, and paint a more vivid picture of my life in East Asia.
Sound like a deal?
