more small discoveries

My studio is divided into several subsections. The anteroom, which barely qualifies as an anteroom, is about four square feet, and is defined by the apartment's front door and the apartment's inner door (my last line of defense in case of siege: breach the inner door and you take the castle). The main living area is a shoebox-sized, multifunctional combination of living room, dining room, and bedroom. I'd say this space is about ten feet by ten feet. There's the kitchenette, which is about 3 feet by 8 feet; the bathroom, which is about three feet by six feet; and what Koreans call, with a straight face, a "veranda," which is a utility space about two feet by eight feet (you'll see pics of all this soon enough).

What I've learned, after a few days of living in this studio, is that it's not proof against insects. Gnats bumble in, one by one, like dwarves coming home from a hard day's work, and last night I even had that most unwelcome of house guests: a fly. God knows how the hell that little bastard got in. I gunned it down with some Windex. So I've discovered that I need to add "F Killer" to my shopping list. F Killer is, hands down, one of the most effective insecticide sprays I've ever used in the US, Europe, or Korea. The merest contact with a cloud of F Killer is enough to instantly paralyze most flying insects. I'll probably buy a can for each room so that I don't have to run across the studio to grab a weapon, thereby losing the opportunity for a shot.

My second small discovery is somewhat related to the first, in that both have to do with how perfect or imperfect my door seals are. While the door seals aren't hermetic enough to keep out marauding arthropods, they are tight enough to cause humidity issues should I close a given room off. I noticed this a couple days ago, after I had closed both my kitchen and my veranda. When I reopened the sliding door that leads to the kitchen, I stepped into a thick wall of humidity. When I reopened my veranda, I noticed that, despite several hours, my hanging clothes were still damp. So, with my air conditioner running pretty much constantly, I now know it's better simply to leave the veranda and kitchen and bathroom doors open so as to give the air a chance to circulate, and the humidity a chance to dissipate.

Those are my two latest discoveries about my new place. I've tried to be optimistic, in previous blog entries, about the advantages of living in a super-cheap space, but at this point I think it's only common sense to note that another cosmic law obtains here, as it does everywhere else on Earth: You get what you pay for.



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