This is where I live! Home sweet tiny dorm room, where I sit right now crunching on Korean cookies (yum). Near the top there (unless it changes my meticulously planned picture order when it publishes this post, which it's been known to do) are pictures of my room the night I moved in. You can see in the first one that I have not finished unpacking my things yet, with the suitcase all over the bed. My roommate isn't here yet in that picture. I have the bed, desk, and closet closest to the back of the room, under the window. Next is my neatly organized closet, with everything carefully piled in stacks, trying to avoid wrinkles. Then you have a picture of my quaint little bed. The top of the two-inch mattress sits about a foot from the floor; the beds are very low here. You can see that my bed is not terribly sophisticated-looking; this is because I had to be creative with making it up. They promised to provide us linens and pillow, and they did this. However, this turned out to mean exactly one flat sheet, neither the sheet nor the blanket was big enough to actually cover the bed, the blanket is too heavy to use in the non-airconditioned dorm, and the pillow is apparently a small inflatable plastic pool toy. So I put the heavy blanket over the bottom half of my bed, the sheet over the top half, and spread the blanket I took from the airplane over top. My wonderful mother provided me with a blanket for the trip, and I have used it some nights when it's been cooler here, but I use the airplane blanket on the hotter nights, and just sleep on top of the whole mess on the hottest nights. I coveredthe plastic pillow with a sweatshirt for the first two or three nights, then went out and bought a real pillow as soon as I could.
After that are a couple of pictures of the room after it's been lived in a little bit. It is a bit messier as far as disorganization of stuff goes, but mostly the difference is that every possible surface in the room has clothes draped over it. Why is that? Because I did laundry. There are washing and drying machines in the basement of one of the other dorms, and I used them both. The driers, unfortunately, simply gave me slightly warmer damp clothes. So I had to hang them all over the place in here. That was most of a week ago, and some things are still hanging because the humidity is so thick here that, despite the heat, things won't dry. My hair won't dry when I sleep on it, my washcloth won't dry after I wash my face in the morning, et cetera.
The room is long and narrow, with all the furniture on either wall, and there is an aisle just big enough to walk through down the middle if all the closet doors are closed and Brittany's (roommate) desk chair is pushed in, but since we need the closets open for our clothes that are drying and she is often sitting in her chair, my moving from my end of the room to the door usually involves acrobatics of some sort. Also, the outlets in the room are on the bed-side wall, and the internet outlets are on the bed side only at my end, so we have a number of wires strung behind the beds and across the floor to get to our desks. Moving around is, then, rather a chore. Because of the ISEP agreement under which I came here, I was assigned to a two-person room. Many of the people here are staying in four-person rooms, because it is about a hundred dollars cheaper, and their rooms are a good bit bigger. I don't know which I'd rather have had if I'd had much of a choice. Two more personalities in the room would be two more people I'd have to deal with, and a lot of the people in those rooms have two or three roommates that don't speak any english, and that would be a chore, but it sure might be nice to be able to turn in a circle...
The green picture is a nice sidewalk leading to the cafeteria on campus, which I thought was pretty nice, and then you have a picture of what cafeteria meals look like here. The koreans say that the cafeteria food is not always very good, but I can't much tell the difference about it, so I eat lunch there most days. This is a beef and green stuff stew. It also comes with a bowl of chicken broth, and everything here comes with a bowl of rice. You get a spoon and chopsticks. I am trying valiantly to use the chopsticks sometimes, but I use the spoon a lot so that I won't starve. They use metal chopsticks in Korea, which is different from China and Japan, where I guess they're wooden. Meals in Korea always come with a variety of side dishes, and at the cafeteria you usually get three choices of sides of which you can pick one, two, or all. Kimchee is always an option, and the others vary. The one pictured is some sort of cucumber dish.
After that is one picture of Suwon, the city where Ajou University is located. Suwon is a small town with one million residents, and everything is super crowded. The bright colored signs all over everything are typical of Korean cities in every place I've been. It was actually really disorienting at first, to have so much visual stuff flung at me all the time everywhere I looked. I think I told about getting visually worn out at the markets in Seoul, and this is sort of the same thing. I'm getting pretty used to the storefronts now, but the crowding of traffic still bothers me just a little. I think it is going to be weird, after getting used to looking at so much, to go back to Johnson City and let my eyes relax.
Last is a picture I just thought was interesting of the refrigerator in the kitchen on our floor. I took the picture because its contents are a bit of culture shock just for existing. If you walk into a hall kitchen at my ETSU dorm and open the fridge, it contains at most a few two-liters for the thursday night activity and an abandoned ice tray. Everyone in the dorms at home has their own small fridge in their room, so nobody uses the hall fridges at all. Here, as you can see in the room pictures, there isn't room for a personal fridge, plus lots of people cook, so the hall fridge is big business. People actually compete for space and put up angry signs on the walls if their things get moved.
I must off now, as I am going to Seoul this evening with Debra to meet her friend that lives there. I'm going to spend this weekend at a mud festival, so more stories and pictures should be forthcoming, maybe monday.
