Out with the old, in with the slightly less old but just as broken.

Yesterday we got our "replacement" furniture from the office of education. As we've whinged about previously, almost all the furniture in our apartment was broken when we arrived. So yesterday a delivery of some new stuff arrived. New to us anyway, I'm pretty sure they just drove around and took the old stuff from one apartment to the next one and pretended it was new. In one case I had to argue with the supervisor so we could keep our table because it was less broken than the new one. Happy days.

The worst thing we got was the sofa. When we arrived there was a weird one-and-a-half-seater thing that only had an armrest on one end. Also, the vinyl stuff it was covered in came off in little flecks whenever we sat on it. It can't get worse than this, right?

The new one is made of metal. It's a metal frame with rock hard cushions. To give credit where credit's due, the metal does not come off in flecks. But it's still less than we had hoped for.

So we're furniture shopping, which like most shopping here is done online. To anyone who has heard me complaining that Korean couches are like park benches, I offer the following screen shot from the sofa section of Gmarket (a Korean online mall).

Not the general furniture section. Not even seats. Sofas.

The stuff was all moved in using this bizarre crane thing. They lean it against the wall of the apartment building and than the cage thing runs up the track to our kitchen window. Note that we are on the second floor (first floor in NZ). I think two people could've moved all the stuff by hand in less time then it took to set this up. 

Anyway, thanks to some arguing it looks like we may have a new (or at least different) apartment soon. I don't want to jinx anything but I think my co-teacher is taking us apartment hunting next weekend.