Monday, January 26, 2015

change of plan

There's very likely going to be a change of plan. This mostly affects my designs on the boxing gym up the street, but it's a big change all the same: I might pack up in the next couple of weeks and move out to Ilsan for the semester.

I visited Dongguk's Ilsan campus today. It's little more than a humble cluster of structures, dominated by the Dongguk University Hospital. I found the building where I'll be teaching my classes; it was very large and very clean—dare I say, surgically clean. The classrooms themselves appear to be capacious and echo-y; I walked around inside one of them to get a feel for the environment and wondered just how large my classes would be. After visiting two different departmental offices in the building, I finally found people who could give me some Wi-Fi passwords, but these staffers only had the passwords for the building's first and second floors: apparently, there's no all-campus Wi-Fi at Dongguk's Ilsan branch: each academic department has passwords for the Wi-Fi within its purview.

I walked around the campus's immediate neighborhood and saw right away that there were plenty of studio apartments there. Moving into one of them might be more expensive, rent-wise, than what I'm paying now, but I'd be willing to take the hit for just a few months before moving definitively over to the Golden Goose in the summer. This would alter my budget, but only slightly, and only by a few months. The benefit of such a move is that I'd be a two-minute walk from the building I'll be teaching in. The commute down south to Daechi-dong to work at the Golden Goose will be a pain in the ass, in terms of time, but I'll be working there only once or twice a week, and because the Ilsan campus is at the extreme end of Line 3 (Madu Station), I'll be able to get a seat on the train whether going north or going south.

So a move may be in my very near future. I'm still weighing the pros and cons, but I'm going to head back to Ilsan tomorrow specifically to check further on the housing situation. If housing is a bit cheaper out there, in Seoul's periphery, then all the better.


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2 comments:

John (I'm not a robot) said...

When I first heard you'd be doing the vast majority of your work in Ilsan, I wondered if you'd considering moving there. Makes sense to me. Why spend two or more hours of your life every day commuting?

Kevin Kim said...

John,

Am talking this over with my brother David right now. I wouldn't mind paying a little extra per month to stay in a studio apartment in Ilsan until July, but much depends on whether the apartment is unfurnished. If I have to buy a bed, plus bedding, that's going to knock a huge chunk out of my budget, and that'd be a real shame, after having already saved $3000.

Another possibility would be to shack up in a local yeogwan since that, at least, would be furnished. It'd simply be a continuation of the life I'm currently living, which is cramped but not hellish: I can stand these living conditions for another several months.

Definitely leaning toward moving to Ilsan.