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=0=| This is the view of Ap San (or south mountain), but most Westerners call it Apsan Mountain (which is realy south mountain mountain and a little redundant). We would have a nice view of Ap San each morning as we ate breakfast. |
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| The interior of the living room had some quite incredible wood paneling and such. This is the door to the spare bedroom. As labor was so cheap they could do some really fantastic things with the wood like the little inset carved wood panels in the door. The ceiling was quite beautiful and the floor was parquet wood. |
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| This is the interior of the spare bedroom. It had rice paper floor (cement floor underneath, of course, and laquer on top) and wall paper on the walls and ceiling. |
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| The bathroom was too small to get Barbara in for perspective, so, while the fixture look quite ordinary, they are all just a little too small so that you were leaning over a little too far for the sink and I couldn't quite comfortably get my shoulders into the bathtub (Barbara was fine). There was a shower head, but there was an extension of the faucet so taht you could rinse whatever you needed to. Also, the lid to toilet seat really wasn't strong enough to sit on comfortably. It would bend and give cracking noises, but it didn't break, so maybe it was strong enough for the job, just not comforting. |
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| This is a view in our bedroom. The box to the right is a shipping crate (thick cardboard box, actually) that our stuff arrived in. I cut holes in it and ran boards to make closests which is what we used for the year that we were there. The red cushions were a popular Korean style of bed, a little smaller than double bed size, that could be folded various ways to be a low sofa sort of thing (leaning against the wall) or a bed. |
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| Just to the left of the last picture was a storage area in the wall which is shown here. The right is pretty ordinary shelves, which were useful. On the right is an air conditioner enclosure. Window air conditioners were pretty scarce in Korean and quite a black market item. As such, you wouldn't want to have your air conditioner just sitting out the window for anyone to take, so this enclosure had an opening large enough for the air conditioner to vent outside, but not wide enough to allow you to remove it from the enclosure. To actually steal the air conditioner you had to come inside the room, which was much bolder and less of a problem. It seems that in the U.S, they started installing window air conditioner enclosures in the 80's (and perhaps even before that) but that was the first I had seen of such a thing. |
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| This is the yoh we slept on. The other (shown previously) we used for reading and watching T.V.. The comforter was quite inexpensive, only $12. One side had a plain color and the top (shown) was shiny with embroidery. Embroidery was quite inexpensive in Korea with their low labor costs. |
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| This is a close up of the embroidery on the comforter. |
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| Here is a not very good picture of how you would use the sitting yoh. I think it was also the end of the roll and so a section got extra light. Our bedroom wasn't as nicely finished as the living room, but was nicer than the spare bedroom. The floor was linoleum (nicer than rice paper, but not as nice as the parquet wood floors of the living room. The walls had wall paper. |
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| This is the ceiling of our bedroom. It was quite impressive. |
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| After about three months we moved to another house that was only about a block away so we moved our stuff in a hand pulled cart which we borrowed. This is Debbie, half of the couple we stayed with, pulling the cart up the hill. These carts were very common on the streets of Korea and had a bar that you could get inside of so that you could push the carts with your hips (not how Debbie is using it). The road is unpaved, just gravel and dirt. |
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This page was last updated on August 28, 2005.
