INTERSTICE part II: Temporary Apartment

My temporary apartment was kind of cool. It was spacious, even more spacious than my older place. At this point you can understand I was quite curious as to how my then-soon-forthcoming apartment would compare size-wise.

But anyway, this building's layout was interesting- every apartment, on the same wall as the door to the hallway, had a window you can open; thankfully it had iron bars too, to prevent "bad guys" from doing "bad things." Not that this is a huge issue though, since the crime rate is miniscule compared to other countries I've lived in. Hem hem, as Miss Dolores C. Umbridge would say.

So anyway if you open the window, your room's now opened to the outer hall. Some random people leave theirs open, which is nice. Cause when you walk through the halls, and see this room and that room with their window open, it just gives the place a more open community feel, kinda like in a college dormitory. I like it.

In fact, if I go back home to the US and become a Hall Director at a college (likely), then I will market the idea for this kind of window to be installed into the college dorms. It just makes the whole living environment seem more open, friendly and communal, which would be a constructive force for little freshman dummies trying to make friends in the "new environment they're adjusting to." Plus, me being the one to bring the college the idea, maybe they'll build a statue of me so future generations can appreciate my positive influence on promoting social growth. Which I'm all about (the statue and the social growth).

Now, the bathroom in this apartment was hella small. But believe me, I really don't mind small spaces in general. You should have seen my RA room my junior year of college. That year for some reason they gave me, the humble co-leader of the floor (a dorm floor co-led by another certain currently-Korea-inhabiting Crony DiTraglia Civilian), a room smaller than almost all of the freshman residents I held sovereignty over. Isn't that fucked up? Yeah, it is. But my point is that I didn't mind the smallness. Really.

But I was in for a surprise when I investigated this bathroom. Here's a photo:

So here you see the toilet, mirror and shower. But on either side, at the direct right and left edges of the frame of this picture, are walls.

So it's small. But it is, as of yet in the timeframe of this bloggitive narrative, missing an essential component to a bathroom.

Where is the door to the shower?

But actually, nothing is missing. For you see, the entirety of the picture you see here is, also, the shower. Yeah. See that white hose, which hooks around back into the sink? That's the showerhead. So on the sink, theres a little knob you press in or pull out. When you do, the water is diverted from the sink faucet, and comes out of that shower nozzle instead.

So you get into the bathroom, shut the door, and there you are in the shower, complete with toilet, sink, and all your hygenic supplies at your immediate disposal.

It was funny, because the first time I took a shower here I had to manually maneuver the showerhead all over my body to spray/rinse, like they do in old 1930s cartoons with a shower cap or whatever. It was only later when I humbly realized there was a little slot up on the wall that you can insert the showerhead into. This made the water shoot out from a stationary position, therefore freeing both of your hands.

Of course in this mode, the water splashes off you more, which gets the sink and toilet wetter. But by this point, if one is taking a shower and cares about this kind of thing, said person is in the wrong country.

After I got home from the long first day of training, I went to the bathroom with the intention of taking my contact lenses out. I turned on the faucet, and was greeted with a cold-ass burst of water on my left shoulder. And I was still in my work clothes!! I had left the switch on shower mode and had left the showerhead up on its notch near the top, where it remained since my previous shower session, pointed directly at my humble self.

So yeah, this kind of shower is a Korean thing and I've encountered variants of it in the past. For example, I stayed in a hotel place on a work trip and it had a more traditional shower, except that it did not have a shower curtain (intentionally). Apparently, even with a traditional shower shape, Koreans like to take showers and have water splash everyfuckingwhere, over stuff that's not directly involved with the shower!

Also, even my old apartment's shower, while it did have a glass 'stall' partition, there was no barrier on the ground to prevent the water from flowing onto the rest of the bathroom's floor.

But all of these kinds of bathrooms have drains in the appropriate places, so there's never water just chillen where it shouldn't for extended periods of time. I think someone told me that all this free-roaming water tomfoolery's purpose is to make a dent, so to speak, in the amount of time one needs to spend cleaning the floor in a traditional manner. The entire-bathroom-is-also-the-shower model optimizes this feature.

But ultimately, does everything getting wet all the damn time outweigh said convenience? Koreans would say no. I think I would too.