Friday & Saturday

Friday (technically today as I write this), I'll visit the real-estate office in my building and hammer out a rental contract. The cost ought to be W10 million down (I'll get it back when I move out) and about W700,000 a month rent, plus utilities. It occurs to me that the real-estate office will also add a W300,000 contract fee, plus I'll have to pay whatever rent hasn't been paid by the company since the end of my contract. The real-estate office might have to call my HR department to find out when the company stopped covering my rent, and since that date is probably sometime in late December,* I will initially owe January rent plus leftover December rent. So I'll be hemorrhaging a bit of money at the outset, but after January, things ought to stabilize. I've got enough money to remain in a holding pattern for a while. 

According to my boss, if and when I do make the move down to Suwon, the apartment I'll be moving into won't have nearly the same large deposit: it'll be only about a million, according to him, because he and that landlord go way back. The apartment, which I saw when I went there, is currently cluttered with a lot of shit because it's currently being used merely as a storage space for an in-law (or something like that). All of that junk will have to be cleaned out, and I may have to shell out to get a team of cleaning people into the place to clean out cobwebs, dirt, and other schmutz. But we have time: my move, if it happens, won't be for many months: I told the boss I need to stay put so as not to add address changes to my current set of document-update problems. I'll update my address after I get all my documents renewed—passport (in progress), driver's license, F4 visa, and bank card (already done, actually). The earliest I can update my F4 is sometime in late June, i.e., four months before the end of the current validity date, which is in late October.

Once I hammer out the contract, I have to drag my boxes and hand truck to the office. That'll be a Friday-afternoon thing. And while it's tempting to have a grim celebration with a cheat meal to mark this transition, I'll save that for Saturday.

On Saturday, I'll get to the office early to begin boxing all my stuff up. The boss optimistically thinks it's going to take me only an hour to box everything up, but I'm pretty sure it's going to take longer, so I want to be mostly done by the time the boss arrives to pack up his own stuff. The boss wanted to do this on Saturday for reasons of pride, I think: he says he doesn't want the other staffers to see him moving out. That may be unavoidable, though: a lot of Korean employees in our company come in to work on Saturday. Not every Saturday, but usually every other Saturday. Will this Saturday be one of those days? I don't know; it's been a while since I've been to the office at all, so I've lost track of the rhythm.

The other thing was that the boss wants to use his SUV to load up my stuff and his stuff. The last time I moved out, I had about ten boxes, which I moved all by myself at night; the boss, with his antique collection, framed paintings, and large bookshelves, will likely have more stuff than I do. I doubt we'll be able to cram both his and my possessions into his modest-sized SUV at the same time, so this'll be a two-trip deal. I don't know whether the boss will want or need my help unloading his stuff at his place in Suwon; he's got two burly sons who can help with that, and I'm a weakling these days, anyway. But we'll see. The boss might want me to come with him to Suwon just to have a final "goodbye for now" meal or something. We'll see.

The next 48 hours will be fairly busy as a result. Buckle up.

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*My contract was until December 31, but the period for which I was paid was apparently always from the 15th of the previous month to the 14th of the current month, so I might owe rent for the December 15-31 period. No matter. It's all part of the process.