examining properties

I trained all the way out to Suwon, a large satellite of Seoul (many who work in Seoul live in places like Suwon, Suji, etc. to the south; the commute is crowded but easy enough). My boss lives out there, and he'd recently asked whether I'd care to accompany him and his sons to examine a possible place both for a new office—if our team gets ejected from the Golden Goose—and a new residence for me, right there in the same building.

The first thing I learned was that the boss had picked Suwon City Hall Station's Exit 9 for me to meet him, and Exit 9 turned out to be one of the only exits without its own escalator. Here's a shot down the stairs I'd just climbed up:

at least six flights of stairs, 16 steps each, done without stopping

The boss mockingly said, "I thought you liked stairs," to which I retorted, "I don't like being ambushed by them." It was a slog to go up them, but I did so without stopping (just some breathlessness at the top—no angina). The boss had brought his fraternal-twin sons along; they were at that stage where they were quiet and awkward around strange adults; my Korean also wasn't good enough to engage teens in animated conversation, and their English wasn't good enough to say anything meaningful to me, so it was a bit of an uncomfortable evening. My introversion certainly didn't help matters; I'm the type of person who's perfectly comfortable with silence; I never feel compelled to fill it with jokes or small talk or other nonsense chatter. That discomfits some people—the kind of people who need noise around them to feel secure. But with two quiet teens for company, I at least didn't have to worry about discomfiting anyone. And the two brothers talked to each other, as brothers often do. The bickering and fighting didn't happen between them until the evening was almost over, while my boss was driving me back to the subway station.

We started in what appeared to be a trendy part of downtown Suwon, walking down the street to where the boss had parked his SUV. I took a picture of some bulky-lady sculptures that reminded me of sculptures I'd seen elsewhere in Seoul, not to mention those old R. Crumb cartoons of thicc women. 

This part of Suwon could as easily have been the western part of Seoul (Gangseo-gu, the Gayang Bridge area), or maybe Hayang, east of Seoul, where I'll be walking in a few minutes. We drove to a much older part of town in the boss's Chevy SUV, passing the spot where the boss says he'd met his wife. The local mountain dominating our destination (more like a tall hill) was called Paldal-san, Eight Achievements (or "Eight Masteries") Mountain, a term from Buddhism describing eight significant events in the Buddha's life that I apparently had never studied. Paldal-sa, a temple in the Daehan Jogye sect, is on the mountain's flank, along with a library and a few old neighborhoods. We drove up steep streets on the mountain's side to one of those neighborhoods; the boss used his cell phone to ask a Canadian friend who lives in the building we were to look at whether he could open the garage for us; the friend did so.

The property (I regret that I took few to no pics of the interior) is a single, large house converted into several apartments and offices, all with separate keys and entrances. The landlord lives elsewhere, but when we went to look at what could be my new residence, the boss told me the landlord was currently using that space for storage, so there was a chance he might not even want to rent that apartment out to me. If he did rent it out, however, the boss said I might get it for a standard down payment and only W500,000 a month for the base rent (not including utilities). That's cheap, and as I saw when I inspected the place, I'd have several rooms, including a very large bedroom plus one or two other rooms that could be turned into guests rooms, a gym, or storage areas. There was a full-on kitchen, too, fit for a large apartment, with a huge and modern-looking fridge in it. The place was also blessed with large windows, including one curved corner window that was almost grandly panoramic. Still, the place was old and musty overall, and it felt like a bit of a fixer-upper. This wouldn't be a place I could just move into: there'd have to be some extensive cleaning and disposal of all the random shit currently being stored there. I wonder whether the fridge would stay if I did move in. If not, I'd be happy just using my own fridge. And as for those windows' views: there was, in fact, very little to see aside from other nearby buildings and run-down streets. Where I am now, by contrast, affords me some amazing views, especially toward the east.

We all then went up one floor to the space the boss was looking at to be a potential office, assuming we ended up forming our own company. This was a large space for a small team of three people, also divided into several rooms (this whole building had started out as a large house, remember). I could easily imagine which of the rooms would be the boss's private office; I could also see which which room might be the one for me and my Korean coworker. It was harder to imagine how we'd dealing with computers, printers, photocopiers, and even fax machines (Koreans, at least, still fax each other things... do they still use faxes in the US?). The space was ample, and it looked as though it had potential.

There was nothing final or inevitable about the properties. We don't even know, yet, whether the Golden Goose will, in fact, be dissolving our team. The boss says he'll do his best to keep that from happening, but despite the yearly threat of dissolution (budget is usually the reason cited), this is the first time I've ever accompanied the boss on a property-inspecting trip. I'm wondering whether things might be getting serious this time.

I regret not taking pics of the insides of these places, but here are two shots from the roof, where the Canadian friend had invited over some other expats for dinner and drinks and card games. Behold the old neighborhood:

Here's a look from a different angle (I deliberately avoided photographing the houseguests):

We left soon after to stroll through the neighborhood and get some dinner. Here's a shot of the former house from outside of its gate:

Out in the distance was a church that reminded me a lot of a smaller, simpler version of the Mormon Tabernacle:

Here's the boss, up ahead in his hanbok (traditional Korean clothing), his two sons trailing:

looking for food

We descended the steep hill on foot, which made me wince as I anticipated the walk back up to where the boss had parked his SUV. When we got to a street filled with restaurants, we turned left and followed the blessedly level thoroughfare.

Along the way, I saw these plastic roses:

Here's the main gate of Paldal Temple:

A shot from just inside the gate:

The kids were hungry, so I didn't want to hold everybody up by shutterbugging the entire temple. That can happen another time. I did, however, see something humorous:

the BS music-practice room

Here's what's pretty obviously part of a fortress wall:

The area is steeped in history. We settled on an Italian restaurant that ended up serving decent—if not great—food. I asked my boss whether the menu had any insalata (salads); he handed the menu over while he and his boys ordered a pizza and several pasta dishes.

Salmon salad (insalata mista con salmone)... looks more American than Italian, but it was good.

The boss and one of his boys:

I never remember which is which, even though they're fraternal twins who look nothing alike.

I did end up accepting a slice of a multi-cheese pizza: mozz, Gorg, burrata. There was a honey dip, too, but I ate mine straight. One slice was fine; enough carbs for the evening.

A four-person band had been warming up; they began performing at 7 p.m.:

After that, there was little to do but to drive me back to the subway station. The walk back up the hill proved not to be as bad as I'd thought it would be. No stopping, no angina. I sat in the SUV's front while the twins fought in the back and my boss yelled in Korean for them both to either shut up or walk home. I was reminded that, despite how quiet the boys had been, they were still kids, and we'd spent enough time together to get used to each other, thus allowing some of their rambunctiousness to peek out. In short time, we were at the subway station, and I made the 70-some-minute trip back to my place.

I still need to think about everything I've seen, and the boss says he's planning to look at other properties, but overall, my initial impression is that, despite some of the obvious perks of being somewhere that is both larger and cheaper, I think I'd rather stay in the neighborhood I've been in for years—since 2015. With a huge restaurant-and-night-club district just down the hill from the property in Suwon, and with a popular local mountain looming over us (Paldal-san), the neighborhood had struck me as way noisier than where I currently live. Also, with such a steep hill to climb every time I went shopping, I'd be worried about what that might mean in the winter. The property has an old, dilapidated feel to it, as does the surrounding residential neighborhood. (The boss used the adjective gentrified to describe the trendier, restaurant-and-club-heavy areas.) This would almost feel like moving to a place to gather moss and die. I'm leaning pretty heavily towards a no right now, but I have more thinking to do, and there will be other properties to consider. If nothing else, I can talk again to the ladies in my building's rental office about establishing a rental contract right here, where I currently live. I could also explore the possibility of moving to a bigger apartment in my building (which would mean more of a deposit, of course, and more of a monthly rent). 

Anyway, I have a lot to think about. Time to walk.