Settling Down and Settle Down on Saturday

If I thought upon arriving here that ordering dinner was going to be difficult, imagine the challenge of finding housing. Language barrier aside, Tyler and I had to barter with local real estate agents while having no idea of the property value in the prospective area (Itaewon). The only solution: hit several real estate agents, compare offers, and try to drop down your favourite place. That was last weekend, and now Tyler and I are proud owners of a 3 bedroom flat in a district that is noted for its attractiveness to foreginers.

After a week of work, including closing the house deal, working many overtime hours, and getting a health check at the hospital for my immigration process, we were ready to move on to phase two: furnishing the house. I don't just mean furniture here. I mean, fridges, stoves, and washing machines are not included. Never mind a few beds, closets (they don't have permanent closets so you have to buy movable units), a table, desks, chairs, a tv, a couch, a coffee table, and whateverelse we'll need. Again we encountered the bartering dilemna. For the furniture and appliances we thought it necessary to look at a few secondhand places. But how do we find out where they are if we don't have an English Yellow Pages. Well, you ask random people who know broken English and walk and walk and walk around looking for places. Once we rounded up enough stuff from a couple locations we realized that we didn't have enough cash to pay for everything (they wouldn't except credit cards). So we ran around looking for banks that would allow us to take out cash from our credit cards. This story goes on but I'll stop here. Sound exhausting? Sound stressful? It was. And that was just before supper.

The evening was spent traveling an hour to Costco and finding out that you can only pay with cash (again!!!) or samsung-mastercards.... we were sooooo frusterated at that point. We decided to at least look around. Imagine what you, as a Canadian, would think a packed and busy night at Costco would be like. Now multiply that by 3 (probably more), and factor in that half of them were completely oblivious to where they were pushing their cart. It is no exaggeration that at least 15 times that evening people stopped in the middle of an isle, stayed there doing nothing in particular, and refused to accept the reality that several other people were staring at them waiting to move forward. After all we had been through that day, we were ready to go back to our appartment with still only one mattress to share between the two of us.