Things that we knew would be things but take some getting used to

This is one of our two rooms in the apartment. The other room is the bedroom

At home, you really take it for granted that you can use a washing machine without too much thought or read the aisle names of a grocery store and know what you’re looking at. It has become a daily part of life to google translate everything around us. The washing machine, the microwave, the rice cooker, all the public alerts that I get to my phone that seem like they might be important. I am learning hangul slowly and can sorta sound out some Korean words but that doesn’t help me when I still don’t know what any of the words mean.

We learned that the washing machine plays a little tune when it’s almost done but if you open it right away then the door is still locked and it doesn’t unlock if you try a bunch of things and accidentally restart the cycle (or just power off). I had to watch a youtube video and then use our handy dandy translation sheet to figure out how to skip to the drain cycle (the school provided us with labeled diagrams in English of the appliances).

On the microwave, I have figured out how to add 30 seconds and that’s about it. At one point Cam managed to add 91 minutes to the microwave and we were just watching it and pulling things out at the right time and never touching any settings again.

The rice cooker we bought is incredibly slow and has way too many settings. We’ve only used it twice and yeah the rice is good but it takes an hour! The air fryer is nice because it’s all symbols (fish, meat, bread) or the temperature or time display.

We quickly burned through almost all our data for the month using maps and google translate while out. So now we have stopped google translating unless it’s absolutely necessary and just started guessing or asking a staff member and communicating as best as we can with gestures. Even if we do get the words right it can be hard to communicate. When we tried to go to Ikea, we told the cab driver “ikea dongbusan” which is the same in Korean. We pronounced ikea as I-kee-ah. The cab driver didn’t understand so we repeated ourselves several times and then finally typed it on our phones and showed him. He said “oh i-kay-ah!” and we got in the cab. I am so excited to get our alien registration cards so we can finally get KakaoT (their version of uber).

And of course, we are getting used to the small living space. We are pretty much doing laundry every day because the washing machine is small and our drying rack can only hold so many items of clothing. We have to put the drying rack in the middle of the room if we want a little space to do yoga on the floor.

This is our kitchen counter space! Under the stove is the washing machine.

Cooking is its own challenge with maybe 2 square feet of counter space. We finally have a table to do chopping on so that frees up some space. But we really have to plan the order of cooking well since we only have one pot and one pan and two burners - but the stove is so small and our pan so big that you can’t fit both the pot and pan on the stove at the same time.

We have zero drawers in our kitchen but this magical cupboard attachment gives us a place for knives, chopsticks, and spoons

We keep all our appliances on top of the fridge when we aren’t using them since otherwise we would have nowhere to put the dish rack when washing the dishes. I googled inspiration for small kitchen and bathroom organization but every post I found online showed North American kitchens with tons of space in comparison. (I probably need to search in Korean to get Korean results... or maybe my phone just needs to figure out I'm in Korea. I am still getting ads for BC things). I really want some cord organizers at least.

This is directly across from the counter. We're still figuring out our organization system. Notice how the microwave has no numbers.

When we first arrived, our apartment felt tiny. But now that we have some furniture and some food, it feels more cozy. We also got the couch for free from another teacher and if our apartment is small, his is a shoebox. It's definitely an adjustment figuring out how to do a lot of simple tasks when everything is unfamiliar and in another language, but I'm sure we'll get used to everything soon.