Third Times A Charm (Part One)

I've been meaning to sit down and write about our move for a while, but moving is hard and then unpacking is hard and then we had a party and then we went to Jeonju so I put off writing about anything but snacks for a bit. But we moved. 

I'm just going to put in a few pics of the hovel before I get to the move itself, because I talked to a some people who couldn't really understand why we wanted to move. There's Korea Take Two and Hovel Tour Take Two you can look at to refresh your memory, but here's some things you might have missed:

We had two of those random ceiling boxes in our house, the other was in the living room and the same size. We didn't have anything in our apartment which would have cause similar boxes in the apartment below us. The mystery ceiling boxes meant we couldn't keep my wardrobe directly in the corner, also WHY?

This cool thing is our upstairs neighbours' drainage pipe, which ran through our kitchen. We hoped it wasn't for sewage, but flushing sounds would loudly emit from the pipe more frequently that could be expected for a kitchen sink. With gritted teeth, we called this our 'water feature.'

We moved on a Saturday, and spent the week preceeding shoving everything we owned into boxes we'd stolen from various supermarkets. We also raided the cardboard disposal bin in our apartment complex - fortunately it's kimchi season at the moment so there were a ton of kimchi boxes we could use.

Pack all the things and leave all the things all over the house.

After frantic packing and opting out of an evening on the town so we could be bright and fresh for the movers on Saturday morning, we got a call at 9am telling us they wouldn't arrive until 'the afternoon.' Woes. While we waited, we had the most awkward visit from our landlady/slumlord who asked why we were leaving. I could have spewed hatred at her but instead I opted to say that the new place was closer to our schools and that Tom couldn't fit in the bathroom. Tom didn't say anything, which was probably for the best.

At 1pm the same crane/truck (cruck? trune?) which had delivered our 'new' furniture turned up. Both of our co-teachers were conveniently out of town so we just gestured wildly and managed to get everything out of the apartment and onto the truck in one piece. One bonus about moving house in Korea is that you don't have to clean your apartment! It's a double edged sword as our blood-stained walls can attest to.

The new place is on a busy one-way street directly opposite the city's bus terminal. It proved to be a bit of a logistical nightmare for the movers who parked on the side of the road for a good twenty minutes looking bewildered.

Eventually they realised they could move one of the bollards from the pavement in front of our building and they parked up and got to work. The crane usually leans against the building which gives it a bit of an anchor, but due to the narrowness of the street and frequent buses, the truck couldn't be parked far enough away to get it's lean on. This meant it was just sticking up in the air and it was absolutely terrifying. 

The wardrobes were the last to be moved, and the worst. The platform is relatively small (maybe 2 by 2 metres) so there wasn't really room for the wardrobes and the mover on the same platform. Watching him jump over the furniture and push it in through our windows gave me such bad heebie-jeebies that I'm getting them right now, as I type, three weeks later. Ughh.

After an hour of lifting and pushing and pulling we were all moved and we spent the day unpacking. I'll give you the tour in our next post.