Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The ajumma landlady

Anyone of us spending some time teaching here in South Korea will, at some point or another, have an experience with our landlady (and I have yet to meet someone with a landlord, just in case you were wondering why that noun is so specifically gendered). The experience, in a word, will almost certainly prove to be...dynamic. For example:

Yesterday morning, I woke up, had a piece of toast-
Sorry, you don't want to hear about that part. What happened was I went into my laundry room to grab some clean clothes when I noticed there was an alarming amount of water pooled on the "floor". So I lifted the "floor" (because it is an inlaid linoleum that isn't even glued down), and I was SUPER excited to find that there was a quarter inch of water underneath my "floor"! EXACTLY HOW I WANTED TO START MY MORNING.



So my coteacher called my landlady and she said she'd be by between 5 and 7pm yesterday evening. Apparently the ajumma landladies here are in cahoots with the cable guys in America, because 7 rolled around and...nothing. Nothing at 7:30 either, and so I decided to go for my already-put-off run for the evening. I got back, and was walking up the stairs to my building when there she was! My ajumma landlady, shining in all her tiny ajumma glory (no visor, though :( ), only two hours late.

So I let her in, and she pokes around my laundry room, and through a series of wild gesticulations, she was either yelling at me to not lift the "floor" (which I did to try to prevent mold, thank you very much!), or telling me that she could not fix it tonight. Probably it was both, as she will be coming back today to (hopefully) shopvac all the water out from there and FIXITFIXITFIXIT!!! She also told me (I think) that the hose needs to be out the window to drain condensation (sorry for never having used a lame wall unit air conditioner before!) out of my househome. So.

Anyway, it will hopefully be fixed soon, and likely with lots more crazy gestures.The upshot is, it's making me clear out all the boxes I was "storing" back there. It'll be nice to have a free and clear (and dry!) laundry area again.

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