South Korea. Part II. Housing

Map

April 27 — May 3, 2007

South Korean houses rarely have a fourth floor. Either it simply doesn’t exist (like in the States — after the twelfth floor it goes straight to fourteen):

Or they write the letter F instead:

They avoid the number four because when it’s written as a character you get the word “death”.

A typical South Korean concrete panel apartment building has a birdhouse growing above every entrance. None of the locals could explain what this means or where it came from. But it’s definitely not a lift motor room, nor a water tank.

I even went to the trouble of going into one of the buildings — all there is in those birdhouses is a couple of flights of stairs leading out to an observation deck.

They prefer to build houses in clusters. Each cluster bears the developer’s name and is assigned an ordinal number (the landholding number). Each house in a given cluster also gets its own number, that’s what explains the three-digit numbering. 202 — that’s the second house in the second cluster, whilst 302 is the second house in the third.

Household names (“Samsung”, “LG”, “Hyundai” et al.) are heavily involved in construction, because any large company in South Korea has to have a finger in every pie. There’s an intricate system of property purchases — you deposit funds into the property management company’s account and move in. You withdraw your deposit when you want to move out. Throughout your stay, your money is hard at work.

Each stairwell in buildings with several stairwells is divided into sections —left and right. These sections have a separate numbering system. Under no circumstances can there be a fourth section, because then the apartment number would have two fours in it, and that’s downright terrible (404 :-). One four is not that bad.

What you see in front of you are the third and fifth sections of building number four (second entrance) in the first cluster on such and such street.

Apartments have three or four-digit numbering. The first figure (or first two figures) refers to the floor number. The last two figures indicate the number of the stairwell section. It turns out that this building does have a fourth floor (it’s probably inhabited by foreigners who don’t know any better).

Standalone houses look like they’re sitting on top of one another.

Because there are actually few flat spaces in Korea.

Just like in the north, they don’t like window drapes here. Sometimes they hang up tulle curtains.

Gas meters are all lined up in a row.

Koreans traditionally sleep on the floor, so people have underfloor heating instead of wall-mounted radiators in their homes. Nonetheless, since western culture compels people to purchase stupid, uncomfortable beds, shops sell electric models with a stone slab base. This allows you to kill two birds with one stone: these beds are both practical and snug. It’s a regular bed, but it’s nice and warm just like if you were sleeping on the floor.

Koreans can’t live without kimchi — pickled and marinated cabbage, radishes, and other veggies. They eat kimchi for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, regardless of what other food is on the table. There’s no kimchi on the menu in US-style restaurants (“Fridays” and the like), but locals will say that if you ask the waiters, they’ll bring some out — a meal is not a meal without kimchi.

Kimchi is a bitch to prepare and takes ages, however, on the plus side, it ferments (turns sour) very quickly when heated. That’s why every household has a special kimchirator — that’s where they store the kimchi, which they prepare in batches big enough to last them for several months, like Russians do with homemade pelemeni.

Every home appliance store stocks kimchirators.