Everyday Life

When living in another country you can often be awoken by strange new sounds. Sometimes it's a man on a truck with a GIANT loudspeaker, hollering down the street about the new sale going on at his shop (sounding strangely like the Muslim call to prayer). Sometimes it's a lady banging on our door and hollering in Korean for us to open up (we rarely do). Other times it's an announcement from the loudspeakers connected to all the apartments in our buildings. Sometimes it's a siren that sounds too much like an air-raid siren. These things happened fairly often when we first arrived and only occasionally now. This morning was one of those occasions.

We were blissfully asleep in our bed when all of a sudden we hear a very loud electronic version of Beethoven's 9th coming from the general direction of our front door. At first, we groggily think it's our doorbell, then we thought, it can't be that we've never heard that sound before. Then I think there's only one electronic thing out there that we have never heard make a sound. It is a little white phone attached to the wall, that has no dial tone, nor ever makes noise. We ignored the sound the first two times, then finally got up. The third time we heard it we answered and realized it was our security guard downstairs. Apparently this phone is a direct line to his office. Thankfully he speaks a little English as he informed us that in 10min. the water and electricity was about to be shut off to the entire building for 3 hours.

We quickly filled some bottles with water so we'd have some to drink and hoped the water/electricity would be back on in time for us to take showers before work. This happens on occasion that our water is shut off....we don't really know why but we've come to accept it as an occasional fact of life. Luckily our security guard usually catches us in time to give us a little warning....which is more than most foreigners get. :) To pass the time, we decided to go down to a local coffee shop and read for a couple of hours before work. Unfortunately, no electricity means the elevators didn't work, so we trucked down 15 flights of stairs and prayed the elevators would be working when we came back. Thankfully, a couple of hours later, everything was working perfectly....as though it was never turned off in the first place.