lugging

When I boxed up everything from my office work station, I ended up with ten items to take home. The original plan was that my boss and I would come to the office on Saturday and load everything into his SUV, taking one or two trips to transfer everything to my apartment. I quietly decided, however, to begin taking stuff home Thursday evening. I knew it would be a long, laborious process, but I managed three trips, taking all three of my small bookshelves, two cardboard boxes, and a huge package of toilet paper (for nose-blowing and ass-wiping: our restrooms only occasionally have toilet paper). Out of shape as I am, I was exhausted by the end of all that shuttling back and forth. For my final trip back to the apartment, I flagged down a cab. Before that, I used the subway, which meant walking down two flights of stairs in my office building, then three long flights of stairs at the subway-station entrance, then another flight once underground, then another two flights before reaching the station's escalator; I then used the subway to get to my stop, walked up two medium flights of stairs to reach the B1 level of my building, walked the length of the building to reach the elevators, went up, then walked the final 80 or so meters from the 14th-floor elevator stop to my apartment. Try doing that three times while holding bulky objects that block your vision as you're trying to walk downstairs—bulky objects that only get heavier the longer you walk. Traditional Koreans have a rig called a jige (지게), a sort of A-frame that you wear like a backpack. You can put some pretty massive loads on it, and as long as you walk carefully and stay balanced with your back more or less straight, you're okay. An online search shows that modern versions of this A-frame exist. Maybe I'll buy one.

So there are now only four items left to take back to my place. These items are all heavy; I have a hand truck with a single bungee cord for stabilizing packages, and it's got that funky three-wheel configuration that's supposed to allow you to negotiate steps, so I might try taking a final load or two of boxes to my place via subway on Friday. We'll see.