Moving in Korea - Take 4

I don't know for others, but Korea for me has been a year of moving around. Thinking about it, I have moved 4 times in a year. Sometimes within the same vicinity, sometimes to change completely my surroundings. As I am not a person that like to explore on my own unless I have no obligation at all regarding time or money (if I have absolutely nothing to do on a great sunny day, enough money to pay for a cab if I am lost, a bag that is not too heavy to carry around then ok)....

Says the girl who decided to move to Korea on her own?

Yup. I love seeing myself as a person full of contradictions...

When I re-signed my contract with NGLOWkids, I was glad I wouldn't have to go through another moving spree, so I finally bought two big pieces of furniture: a bookshelf and a coat hanger with a bag compartment at the bottom. Well thet ended up being an extra thing to worry about in moving this time. People always get surprised at how much stuff I end up gathering. Thing is I am slightly OCD when it concerns my living space. It needs to be clean and neat, and practical. 

So even in the smallest apartment, I will find the perfect place to put everything to that it looks clean at all times. Moving however, puts me in the distressing situation where I have to find a new meaning and a new place for every single thing I own. I also am the kind who tries to keep a maximum of things to make crafts and stuff when I wrap gifts and write letters, so I end up with an incredible amount of what I simply call "stuff". People usually disregard "stuff" as being an insignificant detail, but I see it otherwise. When I say I have lots of stuff. I mean I have lots of stuff. When I mean that moving everything with only a SUV will require amazing Tetris skills, I mean it. People should not underestimate the amount of work it requires for me to move. Even from a tiny-ass apartment that looked perfectly clean when everything was set in place.

My ladies ready to go.

My ladies, in their temporary spot on the bookshelf

Making my place into what I want it to be will be a whole process including me buying a couple of sticky hooks to hang things around and a lot of scrubbing, but I know the place will look great eventually, as the frame of the apartment already looks quite nice.

That's a quick overview of the place with stuff less scattered over the floor than on the first day. I got a bad cold with fever on my first night in Guro, and have been pretty knocked down since, but I suppose I am lucky it's the weekend. The weather would have been great to walk around and explore the place but I will have other days...

I walk past the demon's door whenever I go in or out of my apartment. Why does this door intrigues me so? Is there a handsome demon/vampire that lives there? While I am curious, I hope I will never get to meet the owner of this place, because it is much more fun to imagine who could be there than be disappointed my reality.

My building is situated in an area that has lots of buildings giving an "industrial era" feel, with lots of red bricks and traffic. While it looks creepy at night, I like the look by day, it is full of small parks and now all the cherry trees are in bloom in most of the small streets I walked by.

Me walking around with my macbook, trying to find an open coffee shop around the area, that is open on a Sunday. I failed my mission, all that was open were chain coffee shops and I ended up entering into a "Coffee Mama" that had decent tasting coffee but nothing more. I hope I'll find nice coffee shops around, otherwise I'll be missing Dongtan's proximity to amazing small stores and coffee shops...

For those who thought Christianity was not glamour in 2014. Here is a little to ponder about in your free time...

Moving to Guro

I found a new school.

To be honest, I was hesitating between two schools that I both appreciated greatly, and whom both would have liked to have me start as soon as possible. I even had to write out positive things that could be compared from one school to another, with things that were different for both places, to set my mind up...

It was hard.

But I am greatly happy that I chose this school. Even if I am still living in the dread of the getting adjusted to the new school thing. As I am a bit of a control freak, I need to live in an environment that is 'under control' to put myself at ease to try learning things anew: I know that in this school I will have a lot to learn, and I will mostly be rushing through learning/teaching/getting adjusted in a very short period of time and have the stress of being effective and loving at the same time. 

If I want to handle this stress, where I can't control anything, as I am not used to the place and will need to learn tons, I will need a haven of peace, where I can loosen out and be at peace: home.

So I have gone to take a look at my new to-be-apartment. Ideally, just to tidy things up, but realistically, to clean it up my way before I move all my things.

Good thing I went ahead with that great idea.

The girl that lived there, did not live by the same standard of "clean" and "nice" home as I do, to say the least. Now I am not one to fret with details (well that's a lie, but wtv) but I decided to focus on what is positive for now. 

As I was scrubbing the kitchen and separating what foods were past due date and what foods were to be kept, I fell across a few bags of Quakers Oatmeal morning sets: BLISS! 

Did you have those before? I love my oatmeal in the morning but hadn't had had it in years. Trying a better diet since the new year, I had discovered the good of oatmeal for the system, and had been craving it (you see, in Korea, they generally sell oat in whole grains instead of flattened ones, so the way to cook and eat it is much more bothersome for lazy me) for weeks at that point. That discovery made my day a happy day indeed. I had been at cleaning all afternoon and felt like Snow White cleaning the dwarves' mess and finding some treasure to cook for dinner.

Found a nice red ribbon while cleaning and did it legit Snow White style.

 So I cleaned and the next morning, I had an amazing breakfast. I also found, looking quickly in the fridge (I didn't get to scrub it yet so dunno how much of what's in it is still edible, but it looked just fine except the I-need-some-cleaning part), a yogurt carton that tasted exactly like Yoplait! from my youth. Man I loved those liquid yogurt fruit drinks. It appears that Korea and Denmark have been in on this yogurt tag-team for quite a while, making the same exact drinks but in cartons, instead of the plastic bottles we had in Canada.

Because I am good on positivism, I'll add that the girl left some clothes in a basket that she did not want and I found some 10 ish pieces of clothing that I really liked in the lot: free clothes! That should help me try not to shop in the coming few weeks.

Slept with those on and wore them today, as my encouragement to my peeps back
in Quebec, that have had a never-ending winter this year.

Today I had a haircut for the first time in a year! Yay!

Actually I am growing my hair so I usually avoid hairdressers like plea, but meh... my split ends were growing so high up that they were risking to damage the good part of my hair. So I chose to cut. They look much shorter because I asked the lady to make it a straight cut, but she actually did not really cut them much. They will be in much better shape (they already are) with this and it makes me blissful. My hair was long enough so I could afford cutting it without feeling like my growing it up had been a waste. Took me a long time to grow them past "porn-star" length but what was down was so dead that it was best to cut it out. Now back to porn-star length but they will grow faster than before so I'm not too worried. 

I have been seeing so many high schoolers with their perfectly straight lines of long dark hair and I was getting jealous of their perfect lines and non-splitted ends so that's the cut I asked for. And so far I love it.

Two weeks ago - keep in mind I am leaning over
so they appear longer too. Notice how the end is
so thin that there's no thickness at the tip? All of
it was split 3, 4, 5, and sometimes 6 times for each
single strand of hair. Messy messy....

Standing straight on this picture so we see the real length,
but not that the hairdresser slightly curled the end as she
blow dried it. 

See how it now all has the same length? From now on, as it grows, the end will be thick and it'll feel longer than before even when it will reach back to the length it was before.