Seoulscapade

Delays still plague the Hanjin project, angering all future residents involved, including us. People were supposed to begin making payments back in February, but without resolutions, no one is parting with a cent, or rather won. However, as shown below, the site is now being cleared.

The main company, Hanjin, is blamed for not solving problems, for being too passive in its dealings. My guess is that as big company, it can afford to wait things out.

The other smaller building company involved is held in disdain for a range of problems. Its name is Daemyung. This company has a shady reputation and is low down on the construction companies hierarchy list. One debate going on is what brand name will be attached to the apartment complex, and no one wants Daemyung’s brand name, which is Luceen. It will lower the value of everything. We all want the Hanjin name.

Some clearing work at last (shot taken from the hill at the back of the site. . . Click for a bigger view).

The next trouble maker is some greedy old bastard with a large stake of property, who is supposed to be one of our community’s leaders but is really a snake in the grass. He’s got his own interests at heart and nothing else. What he’s been doing is rubber stamping everything that comes his way, such as the construction materials to use, without consulting anyone.

The old bastard’s interest is in getting the complex built, making a pile of money, and getting the hell out. People have even given him the nickname of some kind of bird that flies off free from everything. At the moment, the community is trying to do something about making him responsible after things are built, so that he can’t just fly off and leave a trail of damage behind. Rotten old bastard.

Responsibility is a problem with projects like this. Once things are built, everything becomes the community’s burden. It’s too late if the building company or anyone else has pulled a fast one. That’s just how the rules are. So, in the initial stages, everyone is trying squeeze what they can out of the deal. Hence, no one is paying anything until design and materials issues are sorted out.

A view looking south-east towards Soongshil University (Click for a bigger view).

The latest of the design complaints is that the kitchen is old-fashioned. You cannot have that in a newly built apartment because it will automatically devalue property, just like the wrong brand name will. Korean buyers are very savvy on such matters. The look of the kitchen was discovered by people visiting the apartment model house building, which is not officially open but they were allowed in to see what is happening.

It’s the same old same old for us: more delays. However, it was heartening to see clearing work being done on site, even on a public holiday.

Another point of interest discovered on our walk around the site was that yet another small project has started nearby, to the south, and Hanjin apparently has something to do with that. That means this area is going to be dense with apartment blocks.

It’s time for update on Panda and Monty, and for this episode of their adventures, I thought I’d focus on what they are munching on these days. I mainly thought of doing this to detail the treats they indulge, so that other people who have rabbits might try the same , if they don’t give them already. Rabbits don’t live that long; so, why not let them live it up while they can.

Here is what they have in their snack bowl, which is constantly topped up: Quaker Oats on one side and Vita pellets on the other. Panda and Monty would go through a good handful of oats a day. Panda is not keen on the hard pellets but loves the oats. The pellets are mainly enjoyed by Monty, who I think may have been fed similar as a young rabbit, or else he just likes crunchy food.

We order the pellets online, but the for the oats I need to make a special trip to one of the import stalls at the Namdaemoon Markets in central Seoul. I buy a couple of the biggest Quaker Oats containers they’ve got for around $10 each. I don’t just buy them for the rabbits, either. I mix Quaker Oats in with my cereal for breakfast everyday. Sometimes I’ll be eating my oats and cereal and the rabbits will be at their bowl eating theirs, so we’ll be all breakfasting on Quaker Oats at the same time.

Here is the next staple of their diet, a variety of fresh green leaves every morning and evening. Both Panda and Monty prefer these over other leafy greens like lettuce. They’ll only eat lettuce as a last resort. One good thing about Korean supermarkets is that they all have these assorted leaves. People use these with various meals, sometimes wrapping rice or cooked meat with sauce in them. I have them in the vegetarian sandwiches I make for lunch at work.

I couldn’t even begin to name all of the varieties here. All I know is that Panda really likes the fan-like white and purple colored ones.

When I pull the plastic bag full of these leaves from the fridge, Panda prances around much like a dog would, and attacks the leaves as soon as they are set down. Monty is less of an enthusiast. He nibbles on them later, but sparingly, usually after Panda has finished. Of course, sometimes he’ll snatch a leaf away from her, but most of the time, he shows only passing interest. Curiously, whenever you hand a leaf to him at head height, he’ll munch on it, no matter what kind of leaf.

I always leave a handful of alfalfa like this before I head off to work each day. They both go for the tasty soft leafy bits first and perhaps the dry stalks as an after-thought. Usually, I’m left with stalks spread around the floor, which they don’t touch after a day or two. We order this stuff online, and it usually comes to our door in a box packet with whatever else we ordered plus some freebies.

What we find, however, is that the supplied treats for rabbits are generally ignored by Panda and Monty. Only two things can give them bliss, and they expect these at a set time of day, without exception: dried pineapple and dried plum. How we arrived at the times for giving these treats I can’t recall. But now they are a fixed part of Panda and Monty’s daily routine.

A sliver each of dried pineapple like those above is greatly enjoyed by Panda and Monty each morning. Panda sometimes won’t really touch anything else until she’s had her sweet slice of pineapple, after which she may move onto some cool and refreshing leaves. The pair of them jocking for position at my legs when I’m about to pass them out, and I have to draw their attentions in different directions with a piece of pineapple in each hand, so that there isn’t any snatching.

Pineapple is their morning treat and plum is for the evening, around 10.30, although sometimes they’ll start milling around to make it clear they want their treat “now”—perhaps earlier at 10pm. We cut one of these moist plums up with scissors into strips. Monty will eat the most. He inhales them. Panda will be satisfied with perhaps two large strips. After that, any more gooey sweetness seems to be an overload. At the most, they’ll consume one and a half plums, and then show no further interest.

In sum, Panda and Monty’s diet is not really expensive. Some of the things they eat I buy anyway for my own diet. The dried fruits, which I don’t eat, are costly; however, they last a long time, so the cost is minimal because it is spread over a month or two.

Panda is the most attentive when it comes to food, and is ever alert for the sounds food preparation—the unscrewing of a plastic lid or the crackling of a plastic bag from the fridge. Around a scheduled treat time, she’ll be waiting in anticipation, while Monty is perhaps attacking furniture somewhere. At night, Panda is the one who’ll first start hanging around the kitchen, or us, urging us to quit dallying with those divine plums. Maybe she’s the smarter rabbit of the two, or perhaps, like most women, she’s just keener on the sweet things in life.

(Click for a larger view)

After numerous delays and the tediously long wait, trucks and earth moving equipment finally entered onto the Hanjin site this week. It’s all go, finally, with the estimated finish date for our new apartment being October, 2010.

The layout above is the very latest. The light blue buildings will have apartments of 32 pyeong, and so we’ll end up in one of those. I hope it will be in the south-west of the complex.

Those orange buildings along the north perimeter will be right next to the Shinwon complex, which is being built at the same time. Shinwon will consist of four tall buildings, taller than the Hanjin buildings, so they’ll tower over the expensive Hanjin apartments. People won’t be happy about that.

To get an idea of where it’s going to fit, here is a satellite image of the area. The white cross is about at the centre. Where the road ends in the layout above, at the bottom right, is where it meets the main road you see running from the top to the bottom right in the image below. In other words, tilt the top layout 90 degrees left, then shrink and centre it here on the white cross, and you can get any idea of where things go.

In the next image below, you can see where the site is in relation to the larger Seoul area. It’s well located on a main route that goes over the river, past Yongsan, and on into the downtown area. At the very bottom and middle of the following image is where Seoul National University is located.

Here is one of the preliminary apartment designs. Like the apartment buildings themselves, the final look of the apartments has not be fixed. They are likely to change as owners’ ideas or objections are taken into account. It all seems to be a very elastic arrangement.

Here are the three apartment designs for the same floor area (in light blue on the complex site plan) relevant to us. We’ll end up in one of three floor spaces.

I quite like the idea of plenty of balcony space. And on the other corner of other buildings there will probably be an apartment like this, or else like this but adjoining another of the same kind:

I like this style because you don’t have any common walls with neighbors, although according to the complex plan, only a couple of buildings for this apartment size will have these single apartment structures. This last one below is for the other main building type, where thankfully the master bedroom does not have a common wall.

Other designs exist for smaller and larger apartment sizes, but I haven’t seen them and they don’t apply to us anyway.

Our money has been tied up in this project throughout the delays, or should I say invested. Now, it’ll be further invested for three more years. The problem with this scenario is that we haven’t been able see those funds grow in a term deposit or something. It feels like it’s just in a vault somewhere, although our purchase will dramatically appreciate, one would hope, in the coming years.

We are not alone in our aggravation at this. It’s costing all buyers money because everyone has to rent longer than anticipated, waiting for their homes to be built.

In addition, because so much time has passed, building materials are now more expensive than ever. This means that the surplus we have to pay has increased to around $100, 000 or 100,000,000 won. That’s another problem with buying apartments this way—the unknown, variable extras.

Another extra, the one calculated according to how many “features” residents want built in, such as special landscaping, a swimming pool, hasn’t been decided upon yet. All these extra costs will end up in the mortgage, and in turn, they’ll be added onto the value of the property, so we won’t loose out. It’s just that the costs are more than they would have been, had things started earlier.

But what a relief to finally see something happening!

These jokers turned up the other day in front of Seoul National University’s modern Museum of Art. Here’s the official blurb for their antics:

Parfyme is an artist group consisting of Pelle Brage (b. 1978), Ebbe Dam Meinild (b.1980) & Laurids Sonne (b.1980). Parfyme has brought out several projects in public space within their own field of art, practical research and happenings. Highlighting the spontaneous action and using art as a tool for change, Parfyme uses their surroundings as playground for carrying out projects that covers everything from environmental reflections to thoughts on space and the way we use it and often presented with a great deal of humour.

The idea of this “installation” is very simple. The booth is the headquarters for the “artists” and the ideas boxes, complete with pens and paper, scattered about—you can see one above near the guy in the bumble-bee beanie—is their, umm, act. Actually, the idea boxes are basically the whole act, but it’s the public who are required to scribble down ideas and put them in the boxes, so the public, in effect, is doing the act, or rather the public is doing all of the thinking pertaining to the act. The best ideas were then pinned to the front of the booth, pictured below. The front of it is now covered in notepad papers with scrawls on them.

The “artists” only really had one idea. Build a booth and then just sit back and wait for the ideas of others to role in. Well, I’m going to fill out a slip of paper with my own idea and shove it in the box. It’ll go like this: “Why don’ t you bastards pack up and go home? Come back when you have actually cultivated a talent.”

You can just make out in the makeshift booth some sleeping bags. For a few nights, when it first “opened,” the jokers, or one of them at least, slept there. But nowadays the booth is completely empty. I guess the artists have left to perhaps to enjoy some warmer accommodation at nights.

One afternoon I passed the booth and there was a guy there, doing something at the little table they have to the right of the plastic booth. He was rushing about, busily walking to and fro, doing something at the table, with exacting purpose and speed. But I couldn’t see what he was trying to do, or what there was to really accomplish. Maybe he was trying to convey to observers the act of achievement in progress. It was like he was saying, “Look, I have a lot to do, and I’m really accomplishing something here.”

So, what the hell is this installation doing at MoA? It’s because the museum or gallery has an exhibition entitled “Temperance and Opulence – Art and Design works from Denmark,” and I presume these “happening” guests are part of it.

What a laugh to read that their “field of art” is “practical research and happenings.” That “field” would also describe just about anything anyone has ever done at anytime in the history of the human race. Yeah, they’ve pretty much got everything covered there, which means they can do anything and call it art. Nice strategy.

I can picture it now, how it was all conceived. Parfyme were getting pissed in a bar in Copenhagen after smoking some joints. Living off welfare was getting them down. They wanted to do something constructive with their lives. They wanted to travel to Asia.

They had received an art’s grant once for a “happening,” in which they sat in deck-chairs in a busy city mall, sun baking and sleeping, everyday for a week. It was called “Waking of the Oppressed,” and it was much celebrated among fellow installation artists around town, who were also sick of living off welfare, lounging around, and sleeping the daylight hours away.

After a few more Carlsbergs, and racking their brains to come up with the easiest and quickest piece of crap they could throw together to secure a grant, Parfyme hit on the idea that, since they were supported financially by others, why not get others to come up with their ideas as well? Then they could really sit back and relax. They drafted, on bar napkins, a cheap structure of wood and plastic they could nail together. Then they all went off to have another spliff to celebrate. And so it evolved from there.

These guys have worked out how to make life a permanent holiday. Well done!

I’ve mentioned these roving apartment-complex fairs before. They setup for a day or two, featuring stalls with things for the kitchen and domestic life in general, plus a large range of specialty and food outlets. This one was more elaborate than the previous ones I’d seen.

Among the extra goods on offer were wood carvings, as shown below (I wouldn’t mind one of those tables). Another stall was selling antiques, both furniture and ornaments, although I couldn’t see how you could trust the authenticity. Opposite the wood carvings were paintings of varying large sizes, perhaps 50 in all, lining the street.

Around the corner and up the hill there was the fish shop, featured below, selling average and exotic fish and small aquariums. This place was really popular with the kids and seemed to be doing brisk business. I was intrigued how everything needed for aquarium maintenance now was small and lightweight, like those black water filters you just sit on the edge on a tank. All the miniature decorations have become more elaborate than I recollect.

I spent some money at an incense stall. It was all very confusing because the saleswoman, who was dashing back and forward between shops while the incense saleswoman was off taking a break somewhere, didn’t know a word of English. I knew how much to pay but not how much to take. I just chose ten of what I wanted and paid the money. But the real saleswoman returned and was insisting I fill the bag with more. It seemed like I had to choose pairs. I just picking stuff while monitoring her facial expression for when to stop. I wasn’t really counting but got a lot more than what I thought was standard.

The obligatory pig on a spit.

I also bought some dried pear for the rabbits. They love that stuff. The stall I got that from had all sorts of dried goodies, maybe 30 or 40 varieties, just about any fruit you could think of.

One of the things I love about Korea is the recycling ethic. It’s a small country with limited space, and Koreans don’t want landfills from end to end. Everything that can possible be recycled is recycled, included food.

You are not supposed to throw away food in your trash. It has to be saved and then disposed of in large plastic bins. I believe it goes towards feeding animals. What we do is keep a small plastic bag in our freezer and put our food waste in that. That way there’s no slimy mess to deal with.

When we were staying on campus, we could throw away recycling at anytime in the apartment block’s recycling bins. However, the norm for apartment complexes around Seoul is to do recycling on a set day once a week. Until that day, you have to keep your rubbish at home, except for food, which you can throw away at any time.

Our day is Sunday, or rather from around 6 pm Sunday to 9 am Monday. You can see the result above in these pictures I took one Monday morning. This is two weeks worth of recycling for two buildings, ours and another one, because recycling day was skipped the week before due to a public holiday. So, this is a bit more than usual the weekly haul.

The guy in the picture at the top is our building’s guard, who puts out the large bags on Sunday and makes sure it’s all sorted properly ready for being picked up.

People throw out other stuff on recycling day as well, and we’ve pick up a few useful items because of this, such as shelving, an armchair and some large plastic containers. The guard doesn’t care because people have to pay to throw out big stuff, like wooden furniture. He’s already got his cut before we cart anything away, recycling it in a different way by giving it a new home.

Here’s the scene of another crash outside my office window at work. It looks a bit confused but I’ll clarify as best I can, though it’s still a mystery how it happened. The white car, bottom left, crashed into the black car, which was innocently parked beside the curb. What was the white car doing driving along the sidewalk, you might ask? I have no idea. It’s what makes the crash unique compared to the usual routine.

Over the winter season, this spot and a little further down is host to numerous accidents on a daily basis. Most involve delivery motorcyclists losing their traction in the wet and sliding along down the slope. It’s a treacherous patch.

I’ll be sitting at work some rainy days and I’ll hear the typical sounds of an accident in progress. First, there might be the panicked tooting of a horn to herald the event, if more than one vehicle is involved. Otherwise, I’ll just hear the tire’s skidding and clatter of a motorcycle hitting the road. That is followed by the sound of plastic and metal sliding along bitumen.

I used to leap up and look out. There would invariably be a guy in a helmet limping around on the road. His bike resting on its side would be farther down the road. Now, I don’t bother. I just hear the accident and think, there’s another pizza or ja jang myeun delivery guy down. These guys are always in and out of the campus delivering food.

The ja jang myeun I mentioned is a noodle and black bean dish, and it’s part of an amusing tradition at the university. If someone spends a lot of money on orders of ja jang myeun for dinner, it supposedly reflects the overtime they put in, hard at work, in their labs, and presumably well into the night. Rumor has it that some professors used to cultivate ja jang myeun reputations to make themselves look good. What a laugh.

As I said, I used to leap up and look out when I heard an accident, but I just don’t bother these days. The frequency of the accidents, the lack of any real trauma, and the routine scene that greets any witness have made me rather blasé. It’s a curious thing to observe in oneself—and a little disturbing.

In May, I was privileged to have the opportunity to attend two lectures given by Peter Singer for The 10th Dasan Memorial Lectures, 2007, sponsored by the Korean Philosophical Society. Peter Singer is a world-renowned philosopher on ethics, and is the man credited with beginning the modern animal liberation movement with his groundbreaking book, Animal Liberation, published in 1975. He gave 4 lectures in all:

~ Understanding the Nature of Ethics
~ Ethics for One World
~ Ethics and Animals
~ Changing Ethics in Life and Death Decision Making

I didn’t think people outside of Korea would be aware of these or of where to obtain transcripts for them. For these reasons, I have finally gotten around to presenting them here. Click on the Peter Singer category for more.
Here are Peter’s Singer’s acknowledgments:

These lectures in part draw on and develop work that I have previously published in different form, as follows:

Lecture 1:
“Animal Liberation at 30,” New York Review of Books, vol. L, no. 8 (May 15, 2003), pp. 23-26.
“Response to Bernard Williams,” in Jeffrey Schaler, ed., Singer Under Fire, forthcoming, Open Court, 2008.

Lecture 2:
Rethinking Life and Death, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1995.

Lecture 3:
One World: Ethics and Globalization, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2002.

“What should a billionaire give – and what should you give?” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 17, 2006.

Lecture 4:
“Ethics and Intuitions”, The Journal of Ethics, vol 9, no. 3-4 (October 2005), pp. 331-352

The first lecture I went to was “Understanding the Nature of Ethics,” held on Wednesday, May 16, at 3 pm. The venue was SNU’s Auditorium Building 73. The next one I went to, “Ethics for One World” was at Soongshil University the next day. Unfortunately, the one I really wanted to be at was in Daejeon and the last one was over the other side of town. I’d already taken enough time off work.

A week or two back when my wife asked me if we could look after her co-worker’s rabbit for a week, I immediately said no. However, as any married person can attest, sometimes matters aren’t settled and things just seem to happen before you know it.

Last Saturday, it was brought to my attention that the day had arrived for us to take charge of Charles, my wife’s coworker’s rabbit. Obviously, I had not said a big enough no. The reason I had been against it was because I had read of rabbits fighting when they first met and needing around two weeks to adjust to one another.

I get the sense that my wife imagined Panda, Monty and Charles gamboling together on a sunlit balcony, swapping rabbit tales, offering each other tufts of alfalfa, and then cheerfully playing tag before passing the afternoon away in carefree slumber. Not even close.

The coworker arrive and Charles was set down in our lounge room in a playpen, which you can see above, minus the cage. Panda and Monty were allowed in, and although slow to recognize a stranger in their midst, when they did, chaos reigned. Monty attacked Charles through the playpen fencing, biting out chunks of hair. Panda attacked Monty at any slight movement. Monty attacked Panda whenever she went near Charles. Charles sat quietly, demonstrating impeccable good manners.

The coworker left us to it. We soon realized that the only solution to ensure sanity for the coming week was to keep Charles separate from the ill-bred ruffians, Panda and Monty. That meant putting him in the study, as you see above, the only place in the apartment with a bit of room. It is hardly convenient.

But what a polite, well-mannered, calm and friendly rabbit is Charles! What a contrast to our pair of back-street brawlers. Actually, we both joke now how nice it would be if we could swap Monty, the school dropout, for Charles, the Harvard graduate. Charles isn’t much trouble; nonetheless, I have made it more than clear to my wife that we will never again be looking after other people’s pets.

Nothing of note has happened at the Hanjin site that I’m aware of. What I have heard, however, is the news that everything is progressing nicely and unimpeded, for a change. Here is where the main entrance will be, the opposite site of the road. The picture is taken from the corner of an existing main entrance to the Samsung apartment complex. So, this will become a major intersection.

The writing on the left, by an orange “sun” symbol, stands for Hae-mo-lor, which roughly translates as “eternal sunshine,” meaning that the place will always be bright and sunny. I guess it’s equivalent to what Prugio, the name of our present apartment complex, stands for: Spring Fresh, or some such nonsense. Yeah, whatever—just build the bloody thing.

Monty has been getting hairier despite the summer. My presumption is that as he’s maturing, his Lionhead side is emerging. It can be seen tufts appearing on his flanks, cheeks and most noticeably on his crown. This picture—captured as he was licking his lips, or perhaps poking his tongue—shows his current rockabilly hairstyle. Very cool, Monty!

Only a few weeks ago it was hardly noticeable, as you can see below.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere my admiration for Korean practicality, and I might have even noted the way moving in and out of apartments is done with convenience in mind. Here they often use a large retractable conveyor system, or removal lift, on the back of a truck.

These systems have telescopic sliding sections along which a base platform travels. Some of them are huge, as seen in the images here, taken from my balcony window.

With one of these you bypass the pains of using a building’s elevator. I was intrigued when I first saw one, struck by the incontrovertible workaday logic it exemplified.

My second sensation, since I come from over-regulated country, was the conflict between seeing a convenient practice and being unsettled that it was also illegal. I am not certain but I’d predict that this kind of thing is probably illegal in countries like Australia, where you spend most of your life dodging and sidestepping rules.

I doubt anyone’s been killed by falling furniture in Korea. Pedestrians exercise practicality here as well. If you don’t want to risk falling furniture, don’t walk under the conveyor. It’s pretty simple.

I’m all for this mode of removal: pull up, jack it up, load it on, run it down, drive it off.

Last night I heard that our apartment probably won’t be completed until around 2010. It has been delayed further because now we have to wait on local council red tape. All of that should have been cleared up long ago. It was delayed because of the way another building company had been improperly dealing with the long-time residents in the area—a small collection to them up the side of a hill.

This was explained to us by Sunah’s brother-in-law, who works in the building industry and hears what goes on. He and Sunah’s sister bought an apartment in a complex that is going up on land next to ours, the one to be built by the Shinwon building company.

The reason for the delay goes like this. Our two developments are linked, for one thing, because they will both be sharing the main, and perhaps only, access road. More crucially, they are linked to a start date because the local council says that they have to be. In other words, the building companies, Hanjin and Shinwon, are not allowed to start without each others affairs being in order, then everything is to get build at the same time.

However, Shinwon is not ready to start because the company managing things for them had tried to oust established residents by offering them a small sum of money and sending them on their way. The residents naturally protested and in the end refused to deal with Shinwon’s management company. So the result was a stalemate, and Shinwon’s management company was to blame for it. They delayed things for all of us.

Now, from what I hear, our building company, Hanjin, was ready to start building. However, because of the local council’s decision, it couldn’t. So it got its management company to step in and offer to be the go-between between the residents and Shinwon’s company to clear things up. The deal was that if it could get over 50% of residents to move out, then building could start. That goal has finally been achieved with a higher payment offer.

Now everything can start, except that we have to go through the council permissions and approvals process, which should have happened long ago.

What a pain. Everything was supposed to get underway this month. A model house was supposed to have been built by now. But it looks like we won’t be seeing any progress until November or December.

This means that we’ll all have to be paying rent for perhaps a year longer rather than paying off a mortgage. That’s a lot of money going down the drain that could have been invested. Also, in 2010 property prices will probably be higher, so we’ll perhaps have a higher mortgage to pay off. Oh well, it’s the risk you take, I guess.

I feel for others Sunah’s brother-in-low told us about, though, who’ve been waiting for 7 years! Think of all the money they’ve lost, watching other apartment developments start and finish while they have been mired in all the wrangles going on.

One thing is for sure, by 2010, that area is going to be worth a lot more than it is now. I figure that our patience will be paid off in the end.

I’ve heard no news about any developments at Hanjin. Last evening, though, I visited the site with Sunah and her mother, as the sun was going down. That’s kind of ironic because the project is now called Hae-Mo-Lo, which is an old phrase that roughly means “an always shining sun.” I don’t know what happened to “Rose Hill,” the previous name for the development.

We saw the new name on recently erected paneling, which replaces the smaller plain barrier of panels that was there for over a year or so. It stands where the entrance road will be, hiding the unsitely rubble of demolished apartments behind it. The panels show the envisaged complex, which may or may not actually look like that.

Actually, I was a little worried about seeing it because, while it looked good, those 14 floor blocks might be small against the blocks of the other apartment complexes nearby. But whether 14 floors has been settle on for sure is still an unknown. Add to that, I’m pretty much now used to living at 24 floors up–and I love the view. I wonder if it’s going to feel like a step down.

As it was growing dark, we took a walk through the area, passing the empty shells of apartments and whole blocks of land piled with rubble. Things are definitely progressing. The next news we hear, I hope, is that the model house has been built. That will possibly be next month, fingers crossed.

The two favorite methods for committing suicide in Seoul, and probably throughout Korea, are hanging and tossing yourself out of an apartment building. The first method would appear to be the choice of celebrities. The second method probably scores highest as the one preferred by everyone else. This is partly because thousands upon thousands of people live in high rise apartments, which provides the convenience of a high platform for jumping on any given day.

But it has other merits that put it at the top of the list. Provided that you are up high enough, you are guaranteed of success. It’s probably 95% quicker to implement than hanging, especially if you run to the window. It reveals your considerate nature because ambulance personnel are not obliged to go far to retrieve your body; in many cases, they can pull up right next to you. It also makes a dramatic statement, especially desired if there is any spite in it, for society and those around you.

If I were shopping for a suicide method, I’d want these in the package. The one thing that bothers me, though, is the time it takes before the ground breaks your fall and the lights go out. There’s too much room for doubt there, too much time to reconsider and realize, as you plummet, that maybe you had been just a little bit hasty in your decision.

A dramatic suicide occurred just last week in Seoul in which the person, a 27 year old male, chose this jumping method for his exit from humanity. The story goes that he had been a university student but then was called up for military service. He was living with his mother at the time, and she was under the impression that he was still at university completing post-graduate studies. She believed this because that’s what he was telling her; and he was lying to her so that she would keep giving him money, which she thought was going towards his studies.

Things must have been tense in the household, presumably with not much money to go around. The husband and father of the family had died some two years ago from cancer. The mother was in her 60s, and I guess she probably didn’t have a job or, if she did, it didn’t pay much. So there’s the son, mooching off old mum.

Add to the mix his absconding from military duties, or rather civil duties—the service men have to do if they aren’t fit for real military service. So, the police were after him for another kind of social irresponsibility. It seems like this guy was just spiraling deeper and deeper into more and more trouble (no pun intended).

It wasn’t long before it all came to a head. Three months ago while having an argument with his mother, he killed her. It is likely she suspected his duplicity and the argument was about that. Her death may have been an accident, however—who knows? But he didn’t bother to report it, and instead wrapped her body in bed sheeting and just left her in the apartment. He continued to live there with the corpse for three months, which was probably all he could do, not having a job or a mother anymore to keep up his supply of cash.

Last Sunday night, it seems that he just couldn’t take it anymore. He called the police and confessed his crime. He then added that, before they got there, he would commit suicide. At least, in the end, he was a man true to his word. He jumped from his apartment balcony and fell 16 stories to his death.

We heard his body hit the ground. At first, I thought there had been a minor motorbike accident out on our complex’s back road, faced by our apartment. The sound was like a swishing directly followed by a thud. I’d also heard a couple of people, perhaps women, exclaim cries of surprise. All of it was not that loud, but enough to tear me away from the computer.

Sunah and I looked down from our balcony only to see people walking up and down under street lights on that back road, exercising like any other night. Nothing was untoward. Sunah did see closer in to our building, in the quadrangle of the kids playground, people moving toward the apartment building on our left, which borders the left side of the quadrangle. (That building kind of forms an L with ours.) But people milling about was not unusual. The weather was good, and naturally a lot of parents were out with their kids.

I was already thinking kids were responsible for the kerfuffle, and so upon seeing the road clear, I had gone inside. Then we both just went back to what we were doing.

Not until perhaps forty minutes later, when emerging downstairs with stuff for the recycling bins, did we discover all of the commotion going on. An ambulance was there and what looked like a large fire department bus, all lights flashing. People were everywhere, including others like us attending to their recycling (Sunday nights is recycling night). I did the recycling while Sunah went to ask about what was happening. We still hadn’t put two and one point five together.

After asking the apartment building’s guard, who seemed intent on ensuring nothing more than that the recycling was in order, she told me that some fat guy had jumped from his apartment and killed himself. She pointed to an apartment near the top of the building, from where he had leaped. All of its lights were on. The balcony’s outer sliding door wide open (as you would expect!).

That was enough for me; I headed over to the front of the building to have a look for myself. Not that I could get very close—there were officials keeping people back, plus the well-informed police had finally arrived. I couldn’t see a body anywhere, but I think, if it were still there, it might have been in the dark under trees and bushes. His crashing through the trees first would explain the swishing sound I heard just prior to the thud.

We went back to our apartment. Sunah was pretty upset by the whole thing. I was OK. But I did become slightly unsettled later on. What I mean is that, before long, everything was back to normal; just a tad too quickly for my liking. Actually, throughout this incident, everything remained normal just metres away on the back road; people continued to go about playing with kids and doing their exercise routines, and many probably had no idea that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.

I looked out into the night from my balcony and could see the 16th floor apartment from where the guy had jumped, about 40 metres diagonally to my left and a few floors down. It was still all lit up, and still there was no one inside—no cops, no investigators, no one. Little did I know at the time that the mother’s body was still in there wrapped up in bed sheets. To my front, down on the road and even directly in front of our building, the bustle of life continued on.

In a way, the suicide’s overwhelming lack of impact on everyday life probably made it easier to deal with because it was almost like it never happened. Add to that, I’m not at all against suicide and believe that if people want to do it, they should not be hindered. So the thing was not an affront to any sacred beliefs.

No, the suicide did not astounded me, but there was something sad and unsettling in the brief exclamation it represented; after an hour of commotion everything got back to normal, all was calm. There’s a lesson for us all in that.

As a postscript to this incident, Sunah and I happened to see our real-estate friend last night, the guy who helped us get our present apartment. He said he’d heard about the suicide, and that agents in the area were naturally keeping things quiet. There’s nothing like a murder-suicide to reduce the value of a property. Today, before posting this, I saw what appeared to be workmen doing something on the apartment’s balcony; readying things, I guess, for it to be sold.

This apartment complex had a suicide last year as well, I heard, and I’m reckoning that the average would be about one a year for each large apartment complex in Seoul. That doesn’t seem too bad, in my experience.