au lit!

The bed finally arrived. The ajeossi who drove the bed to me also got out and put the bed together, insisting the entire time that he needed absolutely no help from me. Having nothing to do, I stood off to the side and snapped some surreptitious shots of the old guy at work, coughing loudly to cover the clicking noise my phone's camera made with each shot.

In the pic below, you see the driver putting together the bed's completely unnecessary frame. Bed design in Korea is a bit strange: the frame—at least for small, cheap beds—is mere ornamentation, not an integral part of the bed's structure. The bed can stand alone just fine without all that wood. This new bed has, in fact, some features in common with the very hard bed I'd slept on in my studio in Hayang, the unnecessary frame foremost among them.

One major difference, though, is that this new bed's mattress is only about two inches thick whereas the bed in Hayang had an actual mattress. I asked the delivery driver whether I was looking at a box spring; he laughed and said, "No, this is it! This is the mattress!" I told him that I'd seen a mattress in his truck. He smiled and replied that that mattress was for a different household. So there we are.


Next, here's a shot of the completed bed being popped into place. The mattress portion of the bed needed to have seven fat plastic legs screwed into the bottom: six along the edges and one leg in the very center to prevent sagging. With those in place, the last step in the bed's assembly was simply to pop the bed inside the ridiculously thin wooden frame. Not that I was expecting heavy-duty wood for a bed that cost only $100, US.


Below, a pic of my satisfaction. I've had a chance to lie on the bed, now, and it's a thousand times better than lying on the floor. I might take the step of buying a memory-foam pad to augment the bed's thickness later on, but for now, this is quite comfortable compared to what I've been doing for nearly a month. So, yeah—I'm very happy to rejoin the civilized world. Monasticism is not for me.


And here, below, is a shot of the bed with all its linens and pillows in place. I have a big, fat head (like in that Peter Gabriel song, "Big Time"), so I need a lot of pillows to support it, mainly because I tend to sleep on my side. The other nice thing is that, because I no longer have to use my blankets as a makeshift mattress, I can shut off my ondol floor heater at night and just cover myself up. That saves a ton of cash. My first month's heating bill is going to be outrageous, but from here on in, I'll be very stingy about using gas, which will just be for hot water from now on.


And there we are. I'm a much, much happier camper now that I have a bed to sleep on, and you, Dear Reader, can be spared more of my old man's bellyaching.


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