August Rush: A New Home and a Financial Setback

Since I last wrote I feel as though I’ve lived another lifetime and I’ll forever call it August 2011. It’s hard for me to explain recent events in my life in a short narrative so over the next few days I’ll post a series of entries under the theme of my ‘August Rush’.

My wife and I decided to buy an apartment. Since we returned to Korea we’ve lived with her mother, and that had both its emotional and logical reasons, but it changed the nature of our relationship and not for the better. Summer tends to be the slow season for apartment hunting in Korea, for the very good reason that people don’t want to hike around in the unbearable heat as I have just spent the last month doing, and with prices of apartments in Busan rising at a bubble-like pace, we were watching our relocation options dwindle by the month. We had to take advantage of any lull there was.

I became a full-time financial trader in December 2004, and I was quite successful for a few years, but since my wife stopped working alongside me last year - providing an all-important extra set of eyes and second opinion - my profitability just ebbed away and my heart wasn’t quite in it any more. I sat alone in my office trading London hours into the early hours of the Korean mornings, I wasn’t getting out of the apartment much at all, so I was failing to learn the Korean language. And the relentlessly negative financial macroeconomic environment of the last few years began to take its toll on me, because in the end I found it doesn’t matter whether you’re winning in the market if the constantly depressing news environment just wears you down. I started doing a weekly radio segment on Busan e-FM during trading hours just to get away from things, an unthinkable move during more motivated times.

But the end of my career as a trader in August came quickly. I have a rule that if the running annual total of my profits falls sufficiently below the level I could earn from a normal salaried position, then I have to accept that I’m in the wrong job. When you’re ‘in the zone’ in trading, as we call it, you feel untouchable, but when you’re not it’s easy to see extended runs of losses, because this is an activity where studies have suggest 90% of participants consistently lose money. When you find yourself in that 90%, when general market conditions seem no longer aligned with your trading style, you have to find something else to do with your life. And while it would make for a great narrative if could say I’d suffered a major financial blow-up, really it’s been more of a setback, albeit a significant one.

The culmination of my minor financial crisis was connected with the search for an apartment. I’d done a radio segment about ‘the gravitational pull of Haeundae’, and like a lot of Koreans in Busan I felt like I had to be there, but not just out of the need to climb the property and perceived social ladder; the two prominent foreign schools - Busan Foreign School and Busan International Foreign School - are both in the area, and with the prospect that this is where my son needed to go one day, we were planning ahead. But Haeundae is expensive, and it seemed like we had a choice – buy a nice apartment in a good area, or a bad apartment in a good area. We started looking around and it only seemed to make that choice seem even more stark.

I’d seen some nice apartments in Centum City, but they were out of our price range, and yet tantalisingly close enough that if I pushed hard with my trading accounts living there might be possible. So I did something I hadn’t done in a long time – broke my risk management rules, ignored the warnings I’d built into my systems, and went for it. If I failed at least I could say that I met my undoing out there on the ragged edge which so often defines who you are as a person. In earlier and more reckless times as a trader I’d done the same thing, and I’d always come out of it on top, but not this time. My decision came just days before the market entered a particularly high period of volatility, and in trading parlance, I was long when I should have been short and short when I should have been long. By the time it was over, I’d lost quite a lot of money and Centum City was no longer tantalisingly close but instead an even remoter dream.

You live by the sword and die by the sword as a trader. I knew what I was doing, I let frustration and impatience get the better of me, and now I have to pay the price. That was my first financial disaster. My second may be buying the apartment itself, because I’m convinced that Busan is in the midst of an unsustainable property bubble that could entirely conceivably implode in on itself at any moment. But we urgently needed a place to live, and rather presciently as it turned out, while watching what was happening in the international financial markets and the Korean construction sector, I predicted that Korean banks might stop lending, as banks in the UK had a few years earlier, excluding a generation from the dream of home ownership.

In fact when we were arranging our loan, in a remarkable and frightening admission the bank manager told us that he couldn’t guarantee the bank would still be willing to honour it at the end of September when it was supposed to be released. Despite this, it wasn’t certain then that the turmoil in the financial markets would translate into real-world actions, but just days after we arranged to buy our new apartment, the Korean banks made their move as I’d believed they would, but much sooner than I expected.

The Honey Pot

In my mind the angry husband eventually accused his wife of caring more about her plants than she did about him, and this is the reason he chose to start dropping them, one by one, out of the window into the car park ten floors below.

As heavy ceramic pots of the sort favoured for Korean balconies, complete with large exotic plants, surreally dropped down the side of our apartment building, the ageing building janitor was called in to negotiate for the safety of the remaining foliage, even if the marriage at this point was beyond saving.

It’s not always a given that people are going to listen to their elders in this country any more, but thirty minutes later, the man was sheepishly picking up shattered ceramic fragments and traumatised plants amongst the thin layer of earth that now covered part of our apartment block's car park.

Stress is a huge problem in Korea.

Busan e-FM Week 11: Apartment Experiences

About 'Open Mike in Busan'

Introduction

For this week on Inside Out Busan, I thought I’d talk about something that’s quite significant in this country, which is where you live, and I’ll also talk about some of my Korean property experiences.

The differences between Korea and England

The types of properties are generally different in England to those you find in Korea. In England we tend to live in houses rather than apartments – that’s the first major difference. The second is that English cities tend to have a ‘city centre’, and then we have vast areas of suburbs, which we sometimes call ‘suburbia’, where there really aren’t a lot of shops and it’s just street after street of residential housing. Of course in Korea, most people live in cities, and many people in the cities live in apartment blocks rather than houses.

Generally English people prefer living in houses to apartment blocks, and I think there’s a bit of history to this. During the Second World War some of the houses in the English cities had been destroyed by bombing, and even those that hadn’t were very old, and there were many so-called slums. So after the war people really wanted social changes, they voted out the right-wing Winston Churchill and elected the first left-wing Labour Party government. The new government wanted to build new homes for poor people, so they planned large numbers of apartment buildings called tower blocks, but they were a disaster. The building quality was really bad, so before long even poor people didn’t want to live there. They ended up being called ‘high-rise slums’, there was a lot of crime in them, and about 25 years later they pulled most of them down and built houses again instead. The other thing is, I think English people really like having their own gardens, and that’s not really possible in an apartment.

About 15 years ago after people’s memories had faded a little, a city living trend began, where middle-class people bought expensive apartments in city centres – and these apartments were nice – but they were generally aimed at young professionals, so you couldn’t easily live there if you had children because the apartments were too small. It’s quite different from Korea.

Korean apartment living

Now I’m in Korea, I live in an apartment. At first I lived in a small ‘one-room’ with my wife, which was directly above a mart. I used to be woken up early in the morning by them opening the store shutters, and generally from the noise in the street – beeping horns and salt-sellers yelling through the loudspeakers on their vans at 5.30am in the morning. The apartment would flash yellow on and off at night because we had one of those traffic lights outside. My wife said that the place was really basic, but I really loved it – I felt it was a very Korean experience.

Actually the reason why we lived there is because of a big difference between England and Korea – the 전세 [jeonse] system; we didn’t a large amount of cash for a deposit so we paid a monthly rent.

I didn’t know about the 전세 system before I came to Korea, and I just could not understand it at first. Or rather, I understood the principle of it, but it didn’t make any logical sense to me at all. It seemed immediately obvious that this could only work in a rising property or investment market, so I thought it sounded like a disaster waiting to happen. And the idea of sometimes giving almost the whole value of a property – maybe $200,000 – to someone and hoping you’ll get it back at the end of the contract... well I couldn’t understand that either. I mean, why not just buy a place with the same money? Really, I found the whole thing completely mind-blowing. I still think it’s madness. That’s why we had the one-room place – it was 월세 [weolse – monthly rent based].

Property ladders and bubbles

If I get my own place again, I’d like to buy it; prices just seem to keep rising all the time, so I feel that paying 전세 means that by the time I get the deposit back, the type of place I will be able to buy with the money will be even more basic. So I feel I have to be on the property ladder – as we call it in English. If you’re not on the property ladder, you’re just going to get left behind. But I still feel it’s all going to end badly with these rising property prices.

One of the reasons I can’t understand it is that I keep reading in the news that property prices in Korea are constantly going up [recently, this began to reverse], but the low birth rate means that the population in Korea will peak in 2025 – 14 years from now – and then start to decline rapidly. I read that Busan’s population is already falling, and yet everywhere I look there seem to be new apartment blocks being built here, even though there already seem to be plenty. Like in the U.S., we had a massive property bubble in England during the last ten years – the value of my house doubled in the six years before I sold it – but a lot of people who bought when prices are high, are now stuck where they are. They can’t sell because their mortgages are much higher than the value of their houses, and they would end up owing lots of money to the bank. So I’m very worried that I’ll buy a place in Korea and then watch it plunge in value, and be stuck in it.

But I still want to buy my own place. The problem with the ‘property ladder’ is how long do you wait because you think prices will fall, and how far do they rise in the meantime? My mother-in-law bought an apartment last year and apparently it’s increased by 10% in value since then, even though the place is a bit of a disaster.

Building quality

My mother-in-law’s apartment block was only built in 2003, but shortly after we moved in there was an announcement on the apartment speaker. It said that all the apartment owners participating in the lawsuit against the construction company should prepare their paperwork by the end of the week. So it turned out that the building had lots of problems and they were suing the construction company. I have to admit, the outside of the building looked terrible; all the paint and plaster was coming off so it looked like something out of Beirut in the 1980s – bomb damaged. There were lots of other problems inside as well.

They won the lawsuit, so workers have been fixing the problems this summer, although most of that seemed to involve painting the outside of the building, and I’m not sure how long that’s going to last. I have to admit, I’m a bit dubious about construction standards here, especially after the fire at the Golden Suites apartments in Haeundae last year. In my mother-in-law’s previous apartment, a large part of the plastering over the entrance came away, and guess what was underneath it? Well it looked like foam packaging material - it was just getting blown away by the wind. So I really wonder – if I finally get my own place [there was a song link here but the station didn’t have it] – what problems will it have? Anyway, despite that we might be buying somewhere this year.

Centum City

So the question is whether to stay in the same area or move somewhere else. As much as I enjoy my view of the mountains on the western edge of Busan, I keep hearing that Centum City is the new multicultural heart of Busan [or so Busan e-FM’s new slogan kept repeating after they moved there], so maybe I’ll give up living where I am and finally make the move to the Haeundae area... while I can still afford it.

Links
Busan e-FM
Inside Out Busan

Air date: 2011-01-05 @ ~19:30

Abandon Ship

The first thing you think about when the screech of the alarm first reaches you, is that 9.30pm on a Sunday evening is not a likely time to be running a drill. The automated spoken warning that it drowned out may have been meaningless to a non-Korean speaker, but there are times when no translation is necessary to understand the words "Fire. Evacuate. Fire. Evacuate."

There is only one way out of the apartment. And there is only one way out of the building. As you throw on your shoes, grabbing your baby and your dog as you do so, suddenly that one way out – down fifteen flights of stairs passing floors that may be alight – seems like a long and uncertain journey spurred on by the urgency of the alarms. On your journey, you might consider how quickly the blaze in the Haeundae 'Golden Suites' apartment block spread last year, and how as crime-ridden as living in a British house can be, at least you can always jump out of a window in an emergency and survive the fall.

Perhaps this is what comes of growing up in a country that, essentially, has never had a great belief in building upwards. But despite my lack of experience with tall buildings, I still believe I made the right choice in choosing the stairs for our escape, even if – on the evidence I saw – in a fire most Koreans will choose to wait for the elevator. So while a few people joined us on the stairs, it is the frantic movements of the elevator that forms one of my strongest lasting memories from that dark descent.

Korean Mother said she thought she could smell smoke, but I haven't learned to differentiate between that and the smell of Korean cooking. Come to think of it, it's remarkable that the thick haze that often accompanies her frying of large dead fish doesn't set off the smoke alarm in our apartment block.

Outside, a quick visual check of the apartment complex suggested nothing untoward, and we made our way to the janitor's office which had already become an impromptu refugee camp, and as it turned out, a pretty angry one at that.

You see, the reality of apartment block life in Korea seems to be this. There is a janitor's office, and a man sits in it who might be a janitor but he wears a uniform bearing a patch which reads "Security", and given the invariably high age of the wearer, one suspects this is actually short for "Social Security" to indicate their status as retirees. Our Sunday evening janitor didn’t look a day below the age of 70, and with thirty people in various states of agitation facing him, he certainly was aging fast, which he could ill-afford to do.

The problem was this. An alarm had triggered in an apartment that evidently was empty. Normally there is a building maintenance person to hand but tonight there wasn't, and there wouldn’t be until tomorrow morning. The janitor said everything was fine, though lacking any evidence for this it was clearly based on wishful thinking, and people should return to their homes, which they were unsurprisingly reluctant to do. They demanded he checked the apartment. He said he would do it the next morning when a maintenance person came. In Korea's Confucian society the stereotype of people having respect for their elders may be well-founded, but people were beginning to shout, and as it turned out one of the loudest was Korean Mother, which in its way was also unsurprising. In another time and a less patriarchal society, she would have been a fearsome tribal leader. Instead, she is merely fearsome.

The sound of a large diesel engine drew me outside and around a corner, to where a fire engine, lights flashing, had stopped. Firemen, wearing so little in the way of special clothing they had initially blended into the ranks of the evacuees outside, made their way into the janitor's office and then presumably to check the offending apartment. With competent professionals finally on hand, the incident rapidly faded into a non-event and fire or not, we drifted back to our apartment building.

An hour later, an announcement came over our apartment's speaker that the alarm had been caused by a non-fire related problem and the janitor/security guard, who was apparently a stand-in, hadn't known to just turn it off. He would be trained properly. Somehow, this explanation failed to inspire any confidence, because it seemed to beg more questions than it answered.

Many years ago I couldn't get an answer to a mathematics textbook problem unless I slightly altered the question, which I did on the assumption it was a misprint. My teacher wrote in bold angry red letters "Don't change the question to fit your answer!" Recently, in the early days of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, faced with rising levels of radioactivity they simply raised the level of radiation considered as 'safe'. I think if there’s something for the world to learn from Fukushima and the apparent history of cover-ups that preceded it, it is that for all the economic heights it has reached, Japan is often a country that likes to change its questions to fit its answers. And as my time here lengthens, I'm beginning to get a nasty feeling that Korea is exactly the same. So when one of the building's smoke alarm sensors are triggered, the official response is not to investigate the cause, but rather to know how to turn it off. How often is this happening while we sleep unaware in our homes?

The sense of a system that doesn't quite work was only heightened by a woman who said that she'd only heard about the evacuation when a friend outside the building phoned her to ask her why she wasn't outside. It was because the alarms didn’t go off at all on the 20th floor. It hadn't previously occurred to me that the alarms themselves might not work, even though, now I come to think of it, I believe that was one of the many complaints about the apartment building which burned in Haeundae. A sobering thought.

At 2.45am the alarms went off again, but this time they were so quiet I slept through it. In growing evidence of the supposition that people here like to change the question to fit their answers, apparently they'd turned the volume down on the alarms just in case they went off again. Who even knew they could do that? But this is the wrong way to solve the problem. My wife phoned the janitor's office where an evidently confused individual seemed to be struggling to know how to react. The quiet alarm finally ended and ten minutes later my wife phoned again to be told that everything 'seemed' OK. When you have only one way out of your apartment, and one way out of your building, it would be more comforting to think that the people who sat and watched over it could deal in greater certainty with greater competence.

The evening's events had raised another odd observation as well, which is why, of all the people that were outside having hastily evacuated the large apartment complex, was I the only person with a dog?

The Trojan Horse

So then the engineer said you can't turn off the wireless connection. But it's protected by a password. It's basically four characters long and can't be changed. What? Let's jump back.

I was still in bed at 09:50 Saturday morning with my wife rushed in to put on some better clothes. Was she going out? No, a KT engineer was coming to our apartment to install an Internet phone.

You know how these days it's quite popular in scripted television to dispense with a linear narrative and instead join a story half way through, and then jump around in time to fill in the back-story? That's what my entire life is like in Korea behind the language barrier.

So what's the Internet phone back-story? Apparently between our Internet connection and TV package we spend a lot of money, so we were offered one for free. Well, I say 'we', but only in the most general sense, because no-one offered me anything. You know how people sometimes say they didn't get the memo? Sometimes I think I might not even be on the payroll.

But OK though – it ticks all the boxes, because the deal contains two of the three most important words in the English language – 'free' and 'Internet'.

The engineer arrives and hacks away at one of the wall sockets behind the TV in the lounge. By the time he's finished a wire will run out from under the plastic housing which from experience I increasingly believe must be the method taught in Korean schools and universities. Later, the plastic cable shielding is dispensed with entirely in order to split the underlying wires off in different directions.

And then our phone comes out of the box, along with a large block of moulded plastic which I quickly surmise from the holes in the back is a four-port router. Interesting, I think to myself – because our current 'Anygate' router is in our office and it seems to have a wireless reach of about 15 feet in our apartment, although it really needs a clear line of sight to work well, despite its six inch antenna. By coincidence, six inches is about the distance my Samsung NC10 likes to be away from the router to get a good connection. Perhaps our apartment has thick walls, bad atmospherics and radio spectrum interference.

The new router transpires to be wireless, for the phone – prompting my first question – how can we turn it off? You can't. I suppose that follows – because it's needed for the phone, and I guess you'd expect to have that on all the time. But now this isn't looking like such a good plan. My computers run a mix of Ubuntu Linux and Windows, the latter being a reluctant necessity for some of my trading systems and Korean Internet banking. I try to aggressively protect our IT infrastructure because computer problems cost money in my line of work, and our office router has the longest possible encryption key and its wireless networking switched off when not in use. Then along comes our new Internet phone and suddenly we're broadcasting to all and sundry.

My next question, translated into Korean, is 'will this frak around with our office network?' So the engineer suddenly enters our office and walks up to my computer before I realise what he's doing. He predictably fails to recognise that I already have a browser window open on my Windows machine because it's sitting inside a VMware window running Ubuntu, but he does win points for recognising the Firefox icon and immediately starting it up. “This country is changing”, I thought – back in 2007 when I presented an earlier KT Internet engineer with a Firefox window so he could check something he practically panicked. In fact, I'm not sure he understood that you don't need Internet Explorer to access the Web.

Personally, I might have turned off the phone at night, because apparently we're keeping the old landline phone, and we all have our mobiles turned on 24 hours a day anyway since this is how we communicate with each other in the apartment. Yes, we're just another Korean cellphone family.

So the router has a password written on the back. It can't be changed. It's four characters long. Four. But hey, I write sarcastically, at least it's a mix of letters and numbers. As a British computer science graduate, I often wonder what they teach computer science undergraduates in Korean universities, because it certainly doesn't seem to be computer science and it certainly isn't common sense either. This Windows-ActiveX obsessed country frets about the risks of cyberwarfare from North Korea and, realising that hardware is becoming increasingly commoditised and made in China, it wants to become a 'global software hub', even though it's kind of hard to base your economy on intellectual property when your citizens think that software piracy is practically a human right. There are a lots of things I like about Korea, but with my background, software and IT security aren't among them.

Every week I go to Busan e-FM and recently they've moved to a new location. They are now housed in a building belonging to the Busan IT Promotion Agency. I wish them luck.

Apparently, our new KT Internet phone can call other KT Internet phones for free. But not SK or LG phones. So if we say it's VoIP, it's a very broad definition of the term because it's only really useful in the walled-garden of our provider; as I understand it otherwise the charges are comparable to normal. But, allegedly, you can buy another KT Internet phone for 30,000 won, take it or send it overseas and plug it into an obviously non-KT connection, and still phone other KT Internet phones in Korea for free, which is quite handy if true. Whether it's really worth potentially compromising your network security over however, is a question only you can answer.

Frozen

One of the things that surprised me when I moved from a self-contained and somewhat isolated one-room apartment into a large apartment block, was the speaker on the wall from which the building's janitors/security guards would issue pronouncements from their bunker far below. The disembodied voice - with its Orwellian overtones - which can suddenly cut into any conversation or private moment and can not be switched off, has continued to be one of the more disconcerting aspects of living in a Korean high-rise community. But it also has a comedic value that I fear I will never truly appreciate until I am fully conversant in Korean.

Sometimes the reason for amusement is subtle - advice is dispensed carrying a chastising undertone of things the residents have done wrong and should not do again. And sometimes the reason is more overt and quite possibly alcohol-related, although to be fair, the disembodied voice has only become so slurred on one occasion that my fellow Korean-speaking prisoners could not understand it either. By comparison the series of announcements that began on Saturday were at least comprehensible, if delivered in a rather uncertain and rambling fashion.

The speaker told us that our building's pipes were frozen, and we should not use our taps. Then later it was OK to use the taps but not the sinks. Then certain sections of the block were clear to use everything, and others weren't. And so it went on through the afternoon, as one imagined the Korean equivalent of the Mario video game character running around desperately from one crisis to the next. Later, when my wife got to the checkout of the local mart, the assistant asked noted the lack of bottled water in her cart and asked if she wasn't buying any. They were running out of water, demand had been so heavy. The apartment announcements continued into Sunday.

I had been surprised to turn on my computer screen on Saturday morning to find Ubuntu's weather applet telling me it was -8 degrees Celsius outside. Surely some mistake I thought. But in fact, temperatures had hit -12.8 in Busan overnight, the lowest here in 96 years according to the JoongAng Daily, although the problems with water pipes were clearly much worse in Seoul, causing problems for Korea's often low-profile poor. Even the higher-profile middle-classes, who are in no danger of freezing to death, are feeling the effects of the cold - with the government imploring them to cut back on their electricity usage as underfloor heating usage saps the capacity of South Korea's power stations. Evidently however, it is a call falling of deaf ears.

Even we finally succumbed and turned on our underfloor heating for the first time since moving here last week, but it didn't work. It transpired that - according to the plumber who came out to fix the problem and turned out to be very familiar with our building's problems - the construction company didn't put the right amount of anti-freeze in the heating pipes seven years ago, leading to many of the underfloor boiler pumps becoming damaged when they tried to move the semi-frozen water. While the freezing problem has long since been solved, the damage caused to the boilers apparently hasn't, leading to new residents discovering the issue the first time they tried to use their heating. Fortunately, our plumber fixed the problem.

As for the weather, unless you've had one of those diseducations (sic) which are so popular in the West these days, especially in America, you probably accept that climate change - whatever factors are causing it - is gradually leading to more extreme weather events. So Busan's coldest temperatures in 96 years are not incompatible with the claim from the National Institute of Environmental Research here that Korea's temperature could rise by 2.2 to 4.2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, although apparently this means that by 2040 the streets of Seoul could be lined with tangerine trees. It's not clear to me that there's a particularly high national demand for tangerines in Korea, and why therefore this is seen as an advantage, but that's what they said. Presumably if it's that warm in Seoul, the higher temperatures in the south will mean Haeundae Beach will stretch inland to Seomyeon. Or that's how they'll probably spin the desertification of Busan, at least.

In fact, last summer had the highest number of 'tropical nights' in ten years, and perhaps mindful of that Lotte Department Store is already doing a brisk - and apparently rationed - trade in selling aircon units for the summer.

When I first arrived in Korea I marvelled at the fact I could wear a t-shirt in October, and I was willing to accept the constant Korean assertion that this country has four seasons. Five, if you count the Yellow Dust season. But perhaps it's a sign that I'm becoming acclimatised because I'm increasingly feeling that recently Korea has just gravitated between very hot and very cold.

Personally, having grown up in a Northern English gulag, snow reminds me of home and I'm rather partial to it. Plus I'm sure it would look wonderful on the nearby mountain which dominates the view from my office. Unfortunately for me this is yet another year of no snow in Busan, although it has tried a couple of times at least, which is more than I can say for previous years. But it's best to hope for warmer weather, because the cold isn't doing anyone - not least the poor - any favours.

The Voice in the Wall

Apparently today was 'no car day'. We heard it in an announcement yesterday evening over the Orwellian-style speaker that can't be turned off which is fixed into our apartment wall.

I don't really understand much of what's said by Big Brother, or at least his local representative - the security guards/janitors who skulk in an office in the basement of the building. But sometimes the rambling and slurred delivery leaves little doubt to how some ajeoshis get through their working day. And as jobs go, I'd rather people like this be working as security guards than bus or taxi drivers, although from the quality of the driving of the aforementioned types of vehicles, I'm rather afraid they actually do both.

It's also not clear who designated today 'no car day'. Of course, you'd like to think it was the local council, but then if I worked as a apartment building security guard I imagine I might have great fun making false announcements. Sunglasses day, no bike day, bike day, wear red day and 5am day would all be my ideas. After all, there's only so much pleasure to be had watching people on security cameras, telling them off for incorrect recycling bin allocations, and reminding them every ten minutes that there's a package waiting to be collected from their office until they come to get it. There's a package waiting for you. I still have your package. You should come and collect your package. Package. Package. Package.

I gather that a growing number of Koreans are seeking help from psychiatrists to relieve stress.

Package. Waiting. For You.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no discernible lessening of the traffic volume on the road outside this morning. And if, disappointingly, this is some kind of Busan-wide political campaign rather than just being the security guard's late evening solution to boredom, I have to wonder what exactly the politicians expect compliant citizens to do? Is everyone who foregoes the use of their car just expected to pile into the rush hour's (or in Busan, should that be rush hours?) already tightly-packed buses and subway carriages?

Recently I became radio active and started travelling to Busan e-FM every week during the busy commuting period, and they certainly don't call it the '지옥철' - jiogcheol - for nothing (a Korean play on words, 'jihacheol' - 지하철 - means subway, jiog - 지옥 - means hell). Trains come every five minutes and you can't really fault the Busan 'Humetro' Authority, but there are just two many people living here all trying to get to the same places at the same times. No wonder people drive in Busan despite the high risk of death involved.

Oh, did I mention there's a package waiting for you in the janitor's office? Right now. Please.

Pong

Normally, I don't really sweat that much, and this may have been the reason why before this summer I've only had around five mosquito bites in Korea. In the last two days, I've been bitten seven times in our apartment, and I have the itchy red spots to prove it.

Having a large apartment can seem like a step up from the 'one-room' place we spent the first fifteen months in, but I discovered it had a downside: the air conditioning unit in the one-room could keep the air cool with only intermittent efforts, but the one in our four-bedroom apartment would need to stay on all the time to have any chance of making a significant difference to the temperature of our office on the other side of the building. The upshot of which is that I'm working in a room which hits 30 degrees and 80% humidity on the bad days, while three computers pump out warm air which has nowhere to go. It's hot, uncomfortable, and apparently it's made me more of a mosquito target.

The question of where the dreaded mosquitoes are actually coming from became a pressing one after their seven-bite feast. Our bed is protected by a large mosquito tent, so it isn't while I sleep. Logically then, it's almost certainly in the office where I've spent almost all my time this week. It wasn't long before careful examination of the large wire gauze cover which prevents insects flying through the otherwise open window (aka 'mogi jang' - 모기장 - mosquito net/bar) revealed it to have four large gaps in the frame where insects can enter the apartment as they wish. One of them is the gap beneath the window and the frame, which might be unavoidable, but the other three are a little inexplicable – they are lozenge-shaped holes which are clearly part of the design of the frame.

Since my wife became pregnant we can't liberally employ mosquito spray wherever we want to as we used to, and truth be told I was never convinced of its efficacy – only a direct hit at close quarters ever seemed to kill, so Korean Mother's strategy of spraying a room heavily and then closing the door for ten minutes before going to bed never seemed like it was going to harm anything apart from the person sleeping inside. I can't spray my office even if my wife isn't in the room now either, since we acquired an aquarium. So I've had to resort to using an insect swatter, which often involves cleaning up blood-splattered walls afterwards.

I hoped technology might come to the rescue, but was disappointed to find that most people on the Korean Internet felt that the kind of electrified lights which I often see in fast-food places back in the UK, but not so much in Korea, don't actually work very well. So we ended up buying an electrified mosquito swatter.

The electrified mosquito swatter seems typical of so much that is sold in Korea. It's made in China, and it's so dangerous that almost two-hundred people were injured by it last year. Shopping forums are full of cautionary tales of the huge sparks which are created and the dangers of it touching yourself or any close family members you'd like to keep. Despite this, the solution is not to ban the product, but rather to offer 100,000,000 won (£53,600/$81,500) of product liability insurance. A Samsung Insurance sticker is therefore attached above the handle for your peace of mind. If that isn't enough, the box has the word 'Safety' written in large letters in the corner, and 'As Seen on TV', though it isn't clear to me whether this was in an advert or a news report.

What kind of design aesthetic should such an apparently dangerous device have? Something that doesn't look attractive to children? No, worryingly it looks like a toy with a tennis racquet shape, a bright orange frame, and a friendly-looking cat face in the middle of the metal strings, inviting you in for a closer look.

The initial test came the day the package arrived. The device is activated with a button which must be held in while hitting the offending mosquito, although apparently it can retain a charge even after it's released. I quickly put the batteries in and pressed it – a loud crack accompanied by large retina-blurring spark immediately jumped off the metal wiring. There was no doubt this was going to be satisfyingly deadly, the only question remained as to who the victim would be. The second loud crack came as I moved the now electrified racquet gently towards the flying insect, which was left motionless in the wiring.

It's easy to be frightened by the rather cavalier attitude to public safety that exists in this country – but the electrified mosquito swatter stands as an example of how it can actually work for you; just because some ajumma set fire to her apartment with one, and just because a young girl put one in her mouth with predictably horrific consequences (yes, both actually happened), apparently nobody is going to stop you from buying it. Which is good if you're careful and responsible, but not so good if you might be Darwin Award material. Later, I'll let you know at a later time which group I fall into. Unless I can't.

The Fast and the Furious

The owners of the apartment we rent recently told us they were planning to sell it, which meant we either had to buy it, or find somewhere else to live. It caused me to consider the fact that in a little over three years, I've moved home four times - three times of which were between countries - and perhaps under the circumstances I shouldn't feel ashamed to be reluctant to add a fifth relocation to my list.

Korean Mother was interested in buying the apartment, but when the owners told her the price she told them she would think about it for a couple of days, since she needed to look into what the going rates were for such properties. This seemed to irritate the impatient owners, who subsequently refused to take her calls. An estate agent then phoned with the news that a potential buyer wanted to come and view the apartment, and they were evasive on the subject of the owners selling it to us. All in all, it was a rather inexplicable situation, but one which left us looking for a new place - lest we find ourselves with two weeks notice and nowhere to go.

It may have been a lucky escape though. Later one evening, a message was broadcast over the Orwellian apartment speakers informing the occupants of our apartment block that if they wanted to join the lawsuit against the builders, they had to submit their paperwork by the end of the week. I can't say that I'm entirely surprised by this revelation - for a building only completed five years ago I've often of late cast a leery eye over the external paintwork and fittings, which it's occurred to me would not have looked out of place in 1980s Beirut. One must keep a sense of perspective however - I've since been shown an apartment which was retrofitted with metal bars to stop the ceiling buckling. Admittedly it was older than ours, but this is no more comforting.

When I returned to Korea the area next door to our ailing apartment block was a building site. Now it's a large hospital. In three months. I couldn't imagine anything like that going up so quickly back in England. Workmen toiled relentlessly seven days a week on that project until at least 11pm every night, possibly even later - which may go some way towards explaining the rapidity of their completion. One wonders about the build quality though - how can people not help but be affected by fatigue into the twelfth or thirteenth hour of work which you know they are doing? And perhaps that explains how our apartment block came to have such a beaten look only five years into its existence.

The realities of certain aspects of life here are hardly lost on the locals, who have a term for this kind of thing - "빨리 빨리 병", 'bbali bbali byeong' - 'fast fast disease', the notion that in the rush to do things certain problems are often built into the results, or to put it even more simply - Koreans are impatient. Personally, I admire the drive of Korean society when compared against my own upbringing in the rump of a stagnated and faded empire, but the endless planning enquiries and health and safety considerations which prevent hospitals being built in three months back in England, also tend to stop people recklessly endangering themselves and everyone else.

So it no longer quite surprises me when I see a man standing precariously on the remains of a floor in a building being demolished, trying to knock down a wall with a sledgehammer, or an impossibly overloaded truck which looks like an accident waiting to happen. It's just '빨리 빨리 병', and you can't escape from it here.

The Couch

Our search for a couch had ground to a halt. The prices on Furniture Mountain had generally started at 800,000 won (£421/$688) for anything comfortable, and this seemed high compared to some of the local stores we'd visited, so we resolved to try again later.

Unfortunately the first opportunity which really arose was the one Sunday in three when a lot of stores seem to be closed, which meant our browsing choices were limited, and when we arrived at the store where we'd bought our desks, the owner was nowhere to be found even though it was open. I tried out the couches and the office chairs, waited, went outside, stared up and down the street, and marvelled at the evident lack of crime - or fear of it- which allowed a business owner to desert his premises on a regular basis. I suspected he was out delivering to a customer.

He returned ten minutes later and we asked about the item we were interested in - 680,000 won (£358/$585), which was an improvement on the Furniture Mountain prices, but not so much that we could do a deal there and then - we would return with an ajumma to battle the store owner. Fast forward 30 minutes and Korean Mother is sat with us in the store, loudly disbelieving the expense of the item. I'd seen this before when buying furniture for our apartment the first time we lived here, but some of the amusement value had been replaced with embarrassment. 'Apparently' she knew people at the factory and there was no way 680,000 won was a fair price. The store owner seemed as taken aback by this revelation as everyone else was. The battle ebbed and flowed and I stepped outside for a while so I could cringe in private.

When I returned the price had dropped to 500,000 won (£263/$430) and Korean Mother was promising to come back and buy everything else we needed from him, to which the store owner replied in an exasperated voice "What difference does it make when you're leaving me with no margin?!" The deal was done and the couch will be delivered tomorrow.

As we left Korean Mother thanked him and said "We'll come back later for some bookcases." to which I heard the desperate reply "No! Please don't!" I think he might have actually meant it.

About 20 minutes after we'd arrived home Korean Mother phoned up the store owner. The day before she'd bought some artwork which needed hanging on the wall - would the owner bring his drill and do it for her while he was here? What struck me as a completely outrageous request was simply met with "Yes, OK" at the other end of the phone, because this is how things can be done in Korea, or maybe he just wanted it to all be over.

Desk Set

When we first came to Busan, we'd bought a couple of small desks for our small one-room apartment, which allowed us enough space for one computer monitor each and a third shared screen to display certain stock market data. This was a big downgrade from the six screens we'd had back in the UK, so now that we were back here to stay, we wanted to get back to having the kind of larger desks which would support more monitors.

It quickly became clear that looking around in our local area wasn't going to yield results; generally speaking, Koreans seem to make do with less living space than British people, and it's primarily small desks which are sold in stores. Fortunately, we were still able to buy a couple from a catalogue in what is rapidly becoming our regular supplier of furniture. They weren't quite an ideal size or shape, but it appeared to be the best selection we could make without a much more prolonged and vigorous search.

Our hopes for a quick delivery were not high, because it was the Friday before Chuseok - effectively making it the last business day ahead of the holiday - and yet four hours later the desks were being delivered to our apartment in preparation for being assembled. Fortunately assembly wasn't a problem, because the owner of the furniture store would be doing this - it's automatically part of the service in Korea, something which I'm sure would be music to the ears of so many of my countrymen who've struggled over incomprehensible pidgin-English self-assembly booklets in flat-packs which often seem to be omitting something important. It's an aspect of the Korean shopping experience I really appreciate.

The speedy arrival of the desks though set up an unfortunate clash. In recent months I'd been on my treadmill in the UK almost every day, and it wasn't an activity I wanted to give up despite my change of country. Earlier in the week we'd been shopping around for a Korean replacement, and it hadn't proved to be easy. I didn't want anything too sophisticated - and invariable larger - but the search for a simple manual treadmill was an elusive one, with one fitness equipment store owner after another telling us that 'no-one' wants a manual treadmill any more - everything they had was electrically powered. We'd eventually found something that fitted my needs - more or less - on the Internet, but because it was a Taiwanese import the delivery would take three days. We'd chosen it anyway and the 'engineer' who would deliver it and set it up, phoned us after we'd bought the desks in order to set up a time to come to our apartment in the afternoon. Sure enough, despite our hopes to the contrary, the desks arrived about ten minutes after the treadmill, leading to the unfortunate arrangement of two workmen trying to set up large pieces of equipment on opposite sides of a room far too small to really accommodate either of their activities easily. It was organised chaos, but as is the way with these people, they rose to the challenge.

The treadmill, as its description had suggested, was something of an oddity. Aside from being twice the price of my old British one, it was surprisingly narrow and short in comparison. Perhaps this suits Koreans - or Korean apartments - but the 33.5cm width means there is little scope for drifting left or right, and 106cm length means it is easier to step too far to the front or back of the running surface, either of which issues could cause an accident. It appeared to be the best we could do though.

While both the desks and the treadmill were not quite ideal, at least the service was much better than anything I could have expected in the UK.

The Couch Trip

The centre of the city where I used to live had a lot of retail stores as you might expect, but beyond that lay an urban residential sprawl punctuated by pockets of small shops and the occasional supermarket. So when I reached Busan I was immediately taken aback to discover that it was not so much the residential areas which seemed endless - although apartment blocks are everywhere you look - but the commercial space, which is so ubiquitous it seems almost impossible to get away from it.

While confusing at first, it later irritated me. I'd studied Economics and it didn't make any sense; there had to be a finite amount of money flowing around the economy, so how could a society support a system where every other person seemed to be running a store? Napoleon had once famously described Britain as "a nation of shopkeepers", but that was never really true and in the modern world it seems a phrase which would much more aptly describe South Korea. But I've resigned myself to never really understanding how such a system is truly economically viable, unless it can be put down to a state of near perfect competition in which people live in some kind of state of commercial subsistence. Anecdotally it's certainly my impression that a lot of people are working very long hours in small stores for comparatively little money, and maybe that's the small entrepreneur's lot in life in this country.

So when I say there are a lot of shops selling furniture in my area of Busan, the statement needs to be put into the context of there being a lot of shops selling everything, everywhere, in a hopelessly, sometimes especially, overlapping way. Sometimes though, you can still be surprised. We're looking to buy a couch for our office at the moment, and the local shops can only take us so far because they are too small. Yes, you can pick items out of a catalogue, but then it's a leap of faith as to whether it's comfortable or not. So when Korean Mother said she'd take us to the large furniture store where she'd bought her couch, it must have lost something in the translation, because before I knew what was happening a taxi was taking us up a mountain which was while still very much within Busan, certainly off the beaten track. And what we reached was not so much a large furniture store, but what I think can only be described as "furniture mountain" (otherwise known as '구평 가구단지'). It very much reminded me of those near single-street American gold-rush towns - except here we had two or three streets laid out like a town, but with every store selling furniture - I estimated there to be between 30-40 outlets. It was rather disconcerting.

Our quest began at the Tom & Jerry furniture store, where the interior layout provided the next revelation - after seeing countless small cluttered and hopelessly jammed furniture shops in our local district, here was the first time I'd seen a place that looked like the spacious furniture superstores we had back home. The floors were flat and not dangerous in any way, there was no loose wiring trailing across it or hanging from the ceiling - for that matter the ceilings were even and there was nothing else to suggest a structural collapse as an imminent or eventual possibility.

Unfortunately this is what invariable happens in these types of stores. You go in, and pass by the two or three salespeople loitering by the entrance. The moment they are behind you, they tail you as though you were in some kind of 1960s spy movie, except their preferred following distance is about 1 foot - close enough to smell the Kimchi. This makes it somewhat difficult to take photos, which is a shame because today I saw two or three utterly hideous beds which one can only assume are being sold exclusively to love hotels or the seriously deranged, and a green couch that can only be explained as a remnant of a failed alien invasion.

I think the best advice in these situations is to buy one of the first three couches you sit on that you find acceptable, because while there might be 39 other stores to choose from, it turns out that everyone is selling slightly derivative works on the same designs. In fact, many of the couches were just the same design no matter what store we went into and it began to become a blur. You'd think that with so many rivals, competition on price would be fierce, but we were none too impressed with the prices we were quoted having shopped around on the Internet beforehand.

The other flaw in Korean Mother's plan was that it may have been easy enough getting up furniture mountain by taxi, but try getting a taxi back down late in the afternoon when people were shutting up. So we set off walking on a descent which looked set to occupy our next half-hour. But it wasn't long before a horn beeped behind us and a woman shouted a respectful "Mother!" to Korean Mother - it was one of the salespeople or owners from the third store we had visited. She kindly offered us a lift down thus ensuring that if we return, it will most likely be to do business at her establishment. However, having been overloaded with broadly similar options, and having found no options which seemed to meet our precise requirements or tastes, we had given up for the day and decided to return home to consider our next move.

We the People

"You know what? I know we have a dangerous job to do here but... I'm taking this. I'm taking this couch" - Peter Griffin, Family Guy - Blue Harvest

About three weeks before the attack on my car which led to our sudden volte-face decision to return to Korea, we bought a Nintendo Wii. It's clear to me from people I know that Wii's are used for one of two things, either to provide an interactive gaming and exercise system, or gather dust in closets. It was soon clear that ours was going to fall into the former category.

This presented a problem because a UK Wii is a PAL output system and Korean TVs run on NTSC, which meant that even if we were prepared to ship it out to Korea, to my mind it wasn't going to work unless we could find a Korean TV that accepted PAL inputs. I may be a former software designer and one-time computer geek, but I'm no expert on audio-visual equipment and everything I read on the subject could basically be summarised as 'forget about linking a PAL Wii to an NTSC TV without a heck of a lot of messing around or some special connectors. My wife scoured the Korean Internet and couldn't find any TVs claiming to take PAL inputs - whereas in the UK NTSC capable TVs are quite common.

So as reluctant as I was to probably lose a hundred pounds in three weeks on a console that we would have to dump quickly, I saw little choice but to write it off as a transition cost and start again in Korea with a locally purchased Wii. Then my wife had her Peter Griffin moment - "You know what? I'm taking this. I'm taking this Wii to Korea". And because as traders neither of us like losing lots of money on a position we've just entered, I found myself seduced by the idea of going along with it.

It logically follows that if you're going to take a PAL Wii to NTSC country, maybe you have to have a PAL TV to use it with if all else fails, and that's how - along with a few other boxes of possessions we arranged to have shipped to Korea, we came to have a cheap 19-inch TV shipped along with them. But the Wii itself along with its accompanying software was not going to be shipped - instead my wife resolved to use about a significant part of her suitcase to bring them with us on the flight. I could only do what any husband would in this situation, which was to offer words of support such as "You're crazy", "Customs are bound to go through your cases", and "I'm really not sure this is going to work anyway". I think it's important to see a marriage as a real partnership.

Despite my disturbing lack of faith I made sure we brought all the connectors and two days after we arrived I'm finally crawling around the back of Korean Mother's 52-mile wide PAVV (i.e. upmarket Samsung) TV looking for a SCART connector, which is what we used to use to connect just about every piece of equipment in the living room to one another before HDMI came along. This exhibited a complete lack of research on my part, because despite having a couple of dozen different connectors in the back - including an Ethernet port of all things - a SCART socket was conspicuous by its absence. I checked the old TV we'd bought when we came to Korea the first time - it's so old it's actually a CRT rather than LCD, and that didn't have a SCART either, which is when it became obvious that Korea doesn't use SCARTs and probably never did. Well, the Wii cables running into the SCART convertor were a left and right audio, and a video cable, so I figured I'd just pull them out and see if I could stick them somewhere else directly - my trademark scientific approach to almost anything technical. There was some colour-coding but since half of the ports seemed to be red it wasn't as helpful as it might have been.

It didn't take long to figure out that the Mega TV set-top box was using the same type of cables to connect to the TV, and by replacing them with those from the Wii we might be in business. And then it just happened - the picture came on - the standard Nintendo warning that their consoles can be dangerous to use or some such thing - and what's more, it even had a splash of colour in the right place despite the cautionary Internet tales that in the unlikely event we had any success, the picture would probably end up being monochrome.

Later I got even more ambitious and succeeded in connecting the Wii to the Korean TV via a non-Nintendo Component Cable I'd bought in the UK, so now it can remain connected without the need to cut off the Mega TV box. And with that we were set up. Admittedly, we can't buy Korean Wii games because they will be NTSC format, so if we want to add any more software to it we'll have to try and find PAL titles from somewhere. But even if we don't, we feel like we really achieved something somewhat against the odds.

I'm not sure that 10.30pm on an uncomfortably humid evening is a good time to be reacquainting oneself with Wii Sports, but we were soon back into the swing of things, and the great thing about Korean Mother's apartment was that we actually had space to move around, unlike our home back in the UK.

Korean Mother came home to discover that we'd seized control of the strategically important lounge area, and her 52-mile wide TV with it, and rushed off to her room to watch the soap opera she'd come home for. But curiosity soon got the better of her, and she was back outside watching with fascination. In fact, she'd been out exercising at a local school, at 9pm, and was intrigued by the idea of exercising in her apartment using a console when we showed her EA Sports Active. After that, it wasn't long before she was playing Wii Sports Resort's table tennis, and unexpectedly discovering she was rather good at it.

But nothing prepared me for what was to follow. Korean Mother discovered Wii Boxing, and suffice to say while I have video of her playing this which I'm sure could be a YouTube sensation if there wasn't a going to be a very long statute of limitations applying to it, I will instead merely have to relate that nothing in life quite prepares you for the sight of an ajumma knocking the hell out of a Nintendo character while angrily suggesting with each punch to the character that his mother might have the characteristics of the son of a fornicating female dog who isn't familiar with the father. What's even more inexplicable, is that having played first and exhausted myself entirely having once again failed to beat my next level opponent, Korean Mother took over my character and beat it on her first attempt. It's clear from watching Korean TV - which run programmes that I always imagined being called When Ajummas Attack - that an angry ajumma is a dangerous animal - but seeing it up close is truly a sight to behold. I tell you this - if Wii Boxing ever catches on in the ajumma community, on the evidence I've seen the rest of us are really in trouble.

Mosquito Night

I got my first mosquito bite on my third day back in Korea, and as bites go it turned out to be rather a painful one for some reason. I've never got on with these insects, and they regularly disturbed my sleep back in the one-room apartment I used to live in. While I have been known to chase 'mogis' around at 3am for as long as 30 minutes at a time, the 'one room' at least had the advantage of being universally decorated in a plain beige colour - which made spotting the offending insects relatively easy. By contrast the apartment we live in now has patterned ceilings and a lot of dark wood, making it much easier for them to blend in.

While it's certainly the case in my experience that most Koreans just put up with the nightly blood-sucking during the mosquito season, we had at least one friend with netting over her bed. It was quite a simple affair hanging from a screw in the ceiling, but it seemed to do the job. So I thought we had to find our own solution rather than being constantly attacked at night, so now we are here permanently it seemed high time to look for a solution to the mosquito problem. We found a website selling various netting and netted enclosures which promised in English to be "Practical use in your trivial round of daily life" - which certainly sounded as though they had my existence figured out.

Because I'd left my wife to do the research and the purchasing, I only saw some brief images of frame-based tent-like structures which I believed would take a little assembly. There was nothing to dispel that impression when the package arrived on Saturday, but I was taken aback when I happened to turn around for a few seconds as she unpacked it, and turned back to see the device had exploded into position on our bed. The whole process couldn't have taken much more than five seconds, though more work was involved in trying to fit it to the bed properly - a task we ultimately didn't quite succeed in accomplishing due to bed being slightly larger than a standard size. It fits well enough though - and certain enough to be effective. They call it a 'Speed Tent' on the cover and they aren't wrong.



Access to and from the bed is now made via a zip on one side of the tent, which takes a little getting used to, but once inside one can hopefully sleep without that sudden middle-of-the-night buzzing near the ear which signals a mosquito honing in on its target. It won't need to be on the bed all year round - just during mosquito season - but in my experience this can actually extend from May until as late as December, so the tent now seems like a vital piece of equipment. I can't say how effective it will prove under combat conditions, but it has already proven quite effective with Evil Korean Dog - who now bounces harmlessly off the side of the tent instead of jumping all over me when I am resting. What price a secure and peaceful night's sleep? Around 20,450 won (£11/$17), and for what it's worth, it came with a mosquito patch and repellent spray for good measure.

So it was with much anticipation that at 1am Sunday morning I looked forward to my first good night's sleep since I returned to Korea. I was of course awoken at 6.55am by the sound of hammering on the walls of a neighbouring apartment, the occupant of which was evidently intent on continuing the DIY job of the previous day which had involved some very loud drilling. I'd probably get quite angry about this kind of thing in the UK, but after being woken up regularly by a Korean salt-seller with a loudspeaker right outside my window at 5.30am for a while last time I was here, I figure that anything goes in a country that apparently never sleeps, and my expectations of neighbourly behaviour are very low. I know we have the legal right to peace and quiet at night in the UK, I know of no such laws in Korea, so perhaps I'm more prepared to accept it due to my ignorance. For now, we have at least solved the night-time mosquito problem - and that's progress - later we'll see about buying a net big enough to deal with our neighbour.

Living Colors

When we first came to Busan in 2006 my girlfriend and I lived in a 'one-room' apartment which I rather liked. The tenancy expired and for the last three months of our stay we moved in with Korean Mother and Evil Korean Dog. When we left, Korean Brother made it his home which somewhat complicated any temporary return to our status quo ante.

All other things being equal, we would have found our own apartment after a brief period staying with Korean Mother on our return. But my wife wanted to live near her mother if possible, not least because since Korean Father moved to Namhae, Korean Mother has spent most of her time on her own, while I inadvertently kept her daughter away from her for years at a time. The more I thought about it, the more I thought the best solution was for us to get a larger apartment and for Korean Mother to move in with us. Undoubtedly some Westerners would baulk at the notion of such living arrangements, but I'm long since reconciled to some of the realities of Korean family life, and I'm not so bothered by it.

At least I thought I wasn't. Maybe it's all about semantics in the end, but for various reasons the notion of our finding an apartment for Korean Mother to share with us instead became us moving back in with her and sharing her apartment. We were all still living together, but now we were living with her, rather than her living with us, which realistically meant she would have control of the strategically important lounge area of the apartment. That wasn't really part of my plan – I'd envisaged lazy evenings lounging around on our inevitably leather couch watching movies on our 50-inch LCD. Instead, we would be confined to the side rooms with her controlling the high ground.

It wasn't a deal-breaker but the added complication now was Korean Brother's increasingly permanent residence. As much as he seems nice enough – it was one person too many for my liking competing for space and the bathroom, so I thought it might be better to find our own place after all – just for my wife and I. Somewhere along the line it looked like another solution had been found, unknown to myself – which was to encourage Korean Brother to find his own place again, i.e. move out. I had to put a stop to that when I found out about it because – admittedly to my English way of thinking – that looked bad, and I was concerned he might hold it against me if he felt forced out. I can't pretend to understand Korean families so it's entirely possible he would have just seen it as his duty without any animosity – but I couldn't live with myself thinking I'd unconsciously ousted him by returning. Korean family politics are complicated and some of their subtleties continue to elude me.

I don't really know where this leaves us as far as our residential situation is concerned. I've lived in plenty of places in my life, but I never really made them my home by furnishing them from start to finish, and imbuing my own ideas of design and function within their walls. I imagined that was something I would finally do on returning to Korea, but it may not work out this way.

A Close Shave

"If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization." - Ludwig von Mises

Death has a name, and it is Tuesday Morning. My shoulder resembled the United Colors of Benetton from the heavy bag I'd carried on my journey, I either had a temperature or Korea did, and despite being conscious here for only a brief few hours, I'd already notched up two confirmed mosquito kills. I was particularly proud of my latter one, which despite being out of practice and defenceless, I'd managed to stun using nothing more than the Microsoft optical mouse I happened to be holding at the time. I felt like an IT ninja and would have done the whole Bruce Lee stance routine afterwards if my body hadn't been stiffer than a Republican politician. Later in the day though I'd watch incredulously as a Korean friend at a restaurant caught one with her hand while she ate, making me realise that I had a long way to go before I reached my first dan in insect control.

Exhausted and unused to the two speed approach to Korean driving – fast and dead stop – I'd fallen over in the bus from the airport twice the day before, dropping my hand luggage in the process and apparently, I discovered, smashing the corner of my Dell portable in the process. The desktop I'd left behind in Korea was apparently registering its abandonment by rebooting itself every few seconds so it looked like it was going to be a long IT day. If only every problem could be fixed by a swift flick of a Microsoft mouse.

I spent an hour of my first morning in Busan searching for the Korean-bought shaver I'd left behind when I returned to England. It was the best I'd ever used and had cost me about half the price of the ridiculously expensive British-bought Philips rotary that came with me, which I'd always hated with a passion. The British shaver had unsurprisingly failed to fit into a Korean power socket, which is what prompted me to buy another when I first arrived. For much the same reason, I hadn't taken it back to England with me because even though I loved it I knew it probably wouldn't work in a British socket. Now I had turned the cupboard we had left some possessions in upside down, while feeling awful, and I had drawn a blank. Where on Earth was it?

The answer transpired to probably be Namhae, because that's where it had travelled with Korean Father, not that Korean Father, who happened to be at the apartment in Busan when I returned, had cared to share this information with me. There is, I'm unsurprised to report, something of a cultural lesson in this, which is that Korean parents are sometimes rather fuzzy on where the dividing line is drawn between themselves and their children, and perhaps more specifically, things which might be stored in cupboards but which belong to their children. So my ex-marine Korean Father had seen the hill, and taken it, so to speak. Did I want it back? I'm not sure I did after he'd used it for a year. It was a small incident although I didn't appreciate the time I'd wasted turning parts of the apartment upside down unnecessarily. The bigger issue was that it did nothing to endear me to the idea of living with Korean Mother if I felt I had to be taking weekly inventories of my possessions, and given that I'd left the UK partly because of my property and privacy not being respected, it's an issue I'm sensitive to right now.

Homecoming

On the deserted platform of Busan station I held my arms aloft to claim my victory. I was home, having endured yet another 27-hour Meniere's-fuelled travel-odyssey, this time with a large and apparently useless side-order of Valium, and now I could finally rest after five intensive weeks of disposing of all my possession back in England. I should have been exhausted, but instead I was filled with an inexplicable energy.

Friends met us at the station, and before long we were in a car playing the Korean version of Grand Theft Auto – I counted three near misses in the first five minutes. You have to remember that this is just the way people drive here. One day someone will make a fortune in this country by inventing a device which enables the local drivers to keep their cars in the same lane for more than five seconds.

Evil Korean Dog, which I parted from 15 months earlier – giving him the finger as I left as I recall – held no animosity towards me and inexplicably was my best friend all evening. In his excitement Korean Father had ordered an unwanted pizza which gave us another task to get through before we could take the showers we felt we desperately needed. I ended up sharing my shower with a mosquito – reminding me of something else I hadn't missed. It was 7pm Korean time and I'd decided that I might as well try and tough things out by going to bed two hours later and maybe getting straight back onto local time after our 31-hour day. But my body had other ideas, waking me up at 2am Korean time and leaving me to spend the rest of the night writing.

My wife couldn't sleep either – we got hungry and raided the fridge for something to drink. “Would you like milk? It's Korean milk though.” The words hung in the air for a moment before my mind connected the facts from my memory. “Oh of course, Korean milk is foul isn't it.” It wasn't really a question. I was, of course though, destined to drink it.

Rear Window

My first residence in Busan was on the first floor of a 'jutaeg' - which while being the Korean word for house, has often been extended to become part of the title of small residential apartment blocks. Newer and larger apartment blocks tend to strive to be called something a little grander, such as 'Rich House' and 'White Palace', so anywhere you live with 'jutaeg' in the title might well in fact, by modern standards, be a rather small and dumpy apartment block. Which ours was. That was fine, because I was perfectly happy to have a small and rather dumpy life in this new country, although I didn't want my new home to be so dumpy that I'd feel like a contestant in the local version of Big Brother, so it was a relief that the windows were frosted.

We're quite big on curtains and blinds in England so I never quite got my head around the idea that hundreds of Korean apartments with their floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall windows happily expose the lives of their occupants to the outside world. When we moved, we made sure our new apartment was fitted with the blinds which the previous residents clearly felt they hadn't needed. It must be said that living fifteen floors up with a clear view of the mountains can lull you into a false sense of privacy, even though you sometimes wonder whether people armed with telescopes are out there somewhere. But what you probably don't expect is to suddenly hear a noise at the window and turn round to see a man dangling outside.



He actually wasn't washing the windows, but seemed to be vaguely cleaning or painting around them. Maybe all apartment blocks get this treatment, but it's the only time I ever saw it. The rope stayed outside our window for two days banging against it in the wind until we finally convinced the building supervisor to remove it.

The Hot Bed

When I originally moved into a one-room apartment with my girlfriend, in was a blank slate, to be furnished with what few possessions we deemed it necessary to buy. But moving into an apartment with Korean Mother has certainly taken my experience to a whole new level, as I find myself immersed in more Korean objects. This cylindrical wicker-looking affair is for sleeping with, but it is not, as I first thought, one of the many tortuous pillow-substitutes you can find the older generation resting their heads on at night.

This is in fact, a sleeping companion of sorts, called a '죽부인' ('jugbuin'). It's actually made from bamboo, and the idea is that when positioned next to you in bed at night and hugged, air can circulate within the enclosed space, which in combination with the bamboo, keeps you cooler. It's unclear however, whether there's a danger of waking up with a deeply imprinted diagonal pattern on your body...

Prompted by Cat's comment, I have to edit this to add that that it transpires '죽부인' literally means 'bamboo' (죽) 'wife' (부인). Interestingly, it also transpires that strictly speaking '부인' is the respectful form for somebody else's wife. Since committing adultery is actually illegal in South Korea, this might be the closest you can get without actually breaking the law.

Takeshi's Castle

"Your prestige will rise from the moment of choice. Lotte Castle will preserve your presitge."

It should immediately tell you something that when someone wants to sell you 'prime Busan real estate', but they have to put their sales showroom two districts away where there are more people walking by, that maybe the area they're trying to sell you isn't that great after all. Perhaps it will be after they've built a couple of dozen apartment blocks, but it's a chicken and egg deal where the early adopters are going to have to take a bit of a leap of faith as to the desirability of their new residence; they could equally end up living in a Pyongyang-style concrete block ghost town, particularly given the way Busan has a depopulation problem.

But then, the conglomerate behind this new vertical town is not one of the usual suspects such as LG or Samsung, but in fact the Japanese-founded Lotte corporation, who have a Lotte Mart supermarket located not 100 meters away from the construction. Coincidence? Not really, the strategy is straight out of the playbook of a certain British supermarket which long since realised that if you can't place your supermarket near your customers, find some way of placing your customers near your supermarket.

The showroom, like the area it's trying to sell, bears the name 'LOTTE CASTLE', or 'LOTTE CAST E' at night. Despite its questionable location, Korean Mother has been sufficiently intrigued to have looked around it once with my wife, and last Sunday I went along with them as they made a second tour.

It's ironic that while I do my best to respect people's privacy while taking photos, and was sensitive enough not to try pushing the perceived limit the day before at Busan Racecourse, I wrongly assumed that taking shots of the model apartments for our consideration later would not be an issue. Not so - because when the stern looking saleswoman realised what I was doing, she informed us in clearly unamused tones that not only was it not permitted, but they had the right to remove the photos from my camera (note - not ask me to remove them but physically do it themselves). Conversely, I have the right to relate the experience on the Internet, but let's face it, only one of these things was actually really likely to happen.

Lotte seem to be concerned at people stealing their interior design ideas - and there was I thinking they were actually trying to sell people apartments. Under the circumstances, you might think that a team of Nobel-winning Lotte scientists had slaved away for years in developing designs that would redefine the concept of Korean living for years to come, but it actually looked like the kind of place a Burt Reynolds movie character might have owned - in the 1970s. But that's Korea for you - dark wood is in... even if it means mixing four different types in the bedroom.

Anyway, the real irony is that - as you might expect - photos of the model apartment interiors are in their sales brochures, so what I was doing to them, that they hadn't already done to themselves, is a real mystery. Korean Mother was not impressed, and I think it's safe to say from the faces she pulled afterwards with an associated diatribe, the saleswoman, and possibly Lotte as a whole, lost any prospect she had of making a sale with her. The moral of the story is, if you're trying to sell £200,000 (384.5 million won) properties, don't be rude to your customers - even the foreign ones, and if not taking photos is such a big deal, put a sign up somewhere.

I stopped taking photos of course, while some of the Koreans who were also wandering around continued to snap away with their camera-phones - and not for the first time. Once again it seems the conspicuousness of my ethnicity and equipment has marked me out in Korea, and I dare say it won't be the last.

And amongst the various ornaments and books placed in the model apartments? The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which despite being out on a couple of desks, evidently isn't compulsory reading within the Lotte group.

But remember, Lotte will preserve your prestige - unless you're a foreigner taking photos.