Apartment Hunting Begins and Ends

I wrote last week about getting ready to start apartment hunting. Based on stories I'd heard from other people who had gone apartment hunting, I was expecting quite the ordeal. There were several factors that gave rise to this expectation.

Most schools that hire native English teachers in Korea provide housing for their teachers. If they don't provide housing, they provide a housing subsidy for you to go find your own apartment. With this in mind, I'd been scoping out apartments in a certain price range. I started to get more details of the new contract, and I realized that this particular school doesn't provide any housing assistance. It's still a phenomenal job, there's just no housing.

The apartment I live in now is nice enough. It's safe, relatively quiet (most of the time...), modern enough, there are no mold or cockroach problems, etc. It's just really, really tiny and really, really far away from everything. I was really looking forward to moving closer to my friends and finding an apartment that was big enough to do some entertaining.

In fact, I had a whole wish list of things that would be amazing to find in an apartment. In no particular order, I wanted to have a separate bedroom and living room area, a kitchen that was big enough to actually cook in, a quiet neighborhood, a safe neighborhood, something that was accessible to public transportation, a balcony and/or rooftop access, something that came with the major appliances (not always the case in Korea...) and something that came with a bed, since my current school owns the bed I sleep in now. That was quite the list. I knew my chances of finding all of that together were pretty much zilch, but that was the wish list.

Then I found out about the lack of housing assistance, and my priority list quickly shifted to this. 1) be in a safe neighborhood and 2) be in my price range. Most of the realtors I'd been talking to were still telling me that I was starting to look too early (about 15 days before I wanted to move) so I'd started looking on the local Craigslist website. I found one apartment and it was in my price range, so I went to look at it. It was pretty terrible. I'd found another apartment that seemed a little bit nicer, but I was having a really hard time reaching the guy who had listed the place.

Finally, after four days he called me back and one of my friends and I went to see the place. I was blown away by it. Not only was it affordable and in a safe neighborhood, it had literally every single item on my first list. Two bedrooms, a huge kitchen with a pantry, a living room area that comes with some furniture that matches my decorating scheme... There's even a bed.

My friend and I went to lunch after we'd looked at the place, and on principle, I decided to wait and think for a few hours before I decided to take it. Neither of us saw anything to be really concerned about, so later that afternoon, I officially said I'd take it! I'll start moving my stuff over before I come back to America, so I can come back to the new apartment and not have to worry about moving when I get back.

So, that's how apartment hunting turned out in Korea. It was actually easier than when I've gone apartment hunting in America. I'm really thankful to have it all taken care of, and I'm especially thankful that God provided such an amazing apartment for me to move into!! I'll definitely post pictures once I get them, but it will probably be early September by the time I get back from America and get settled into it enough to make everything presentable. So stay tuned!