Water Update

An update on the water issue:

I just got back from work and everything's working (I was praying and saying positive things like "It WILL be working" on the entire walk back from work). Sink is fine, shower is fine, toilet is flush-able (Thank God, because the odors were starting to get to me, and it looks like I'll be doing an overdue load of laundry tonight.

I asked my director about my water situation today and he gave me a quick answer: talk to your landlady. I spent my free time today thinking about all the Korean I will need to say in order to speak to her: pipes, cold, freeze, kitchen, toilet, shower, days of the week, repairman, phone number....the list could go on forever. On a side note, I realized just how useless my Introduction to Korean Language book is! It's supposed to provide me with a beginner's introduction to the Korean language, but I've learned it's useless to know how to say "The mouse is under the refrigerator". What should I be learning? Numbers, colors, months, days, how to say the date, how to say how I feel, etc.

Anyway, I started each of my advanced classes today describing my home situation and asked if anyone had similar problems at their homes. Many students had no water yesterday and a couple still have no water. I felt better knowing this was a common problem with Korean families over the past few days. And I should count myself lucky. One student told me that a pipe burst! No flooding, fortunately, and all will be repaired this weekend.

I was curious about my own pipe situation last night. There is no access to the pipes inside the house (or any electrical boxes - not that I would know how any of that works anyway). But there is a creepy metal door that leads out from my bathroom into a sort of courtyard. After five months, I decided to explore this door last night and see if it would give me clues toward solving my water problem.

The door does indeed lead out into a kind of courtyard, certainly not the kind you where you would want to sunbathe. It's pretty narrow and there's a ragged tarp serving as a roof, lots of high walls, in short, a great place to get murdered (in fact, this courtyard/alley has served as the stage for all the cat fights I've heard outside my bedroom window for the past five months!) Attached to the wall are dozens of pipes and tubes going into and out of the wall. As far as I could tell, nothing looked frozen, but then the water inside the pipes could be frozen, as all the pipes are fully exposed to the outside elements. I went back inside after my mini adventure, none the wiser.

Ex-pats have let out their grief on ESL message boards all over the place, most notably Dave's ESL Cafe. I keep seeing the same rumor again and again - Korean's don't insulate their pipes for winter. I agree with most of the posts - Korean buildings aren't built for winter (my classroom certainly attests to that statement!). Again, these winters aren't exactly the Nor'Easters I get in upstate New York; it rarely snows here! And while it rarely gets below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, temperatures below freezing are not unusual.

So all quiet on the eastern front right now. I'll remember to leave a trickle of water in the sink every night until winter ends. I still haven't found the reason for this weekend's madness, but my hunch is that the water companies turned the water off to keep families' pipes from freezing. That explains why this water problem has affected so many people.

Goodness, I was so eager for the oppressive summer heat and humidity to end, and here I am wishing an end to winter, Ha!

That's NOT really hot!

IT'S COLD!

Well, not that cold. This weekend it reached 18 degrees Fahrenheit, a record low, especially for a coastal city like Masan. I always feel a bit smug when I hear Koreans complain about the cold. This ain't nothin'! Back at my home in New York it drops to -16 degrees Fahrenheit, and that's with several feet of snow and ice piled on top.

It's been an experiment finding out how my heater works. My thermostat has several buttons and knobs, all labeled in Korean. Although I translated everything and have a line of post-it notes lined up on the adjacent wall for reference, I still don't know what anything does. I figured out how to turn the hot water on for the shower long ago, but everything else has been a mystery. Either I'm not waiting long enough for things to heat up, or I'm pressing the wrong button, or something's broke.

The shower's not always reliable however. Usually I have to wait 10-15 minutes for the water to heat up, and even then, it's sometimes the luck of the draw. Most of the time the water fluctuates between cold and lukewarm, so you get these nasty flashes of ice-cold water shooting over your body. And then there have been several times this winter where the shower has failed to produce any hot water at all.

Then this weekend, this unusually cold weekend, the water stopped all together. No sink, no shower, no washing machine, no toilet. Everything has come to a halt here and I've had to rely on bottled water for showers (if you can call them that)and washing dishes. This has happened two times before over the past month, but things usually go back to normal after a couple hours. I'm going on 36 hours here with no hot water.

If things aren't back to normal tomorrow, I'm going to alert my boss. I've considered asking for help from the lady who owns the building, and I know enough Korean to get my point across, but I fear she'll end up asking me questions I won't be able to answer due to the language barrier. We'll see how I feel tomorrow.

I'm not sure why this has happened. I haven't seen any activity in the apartments on either side of mine, and after reading a foreign teacher's blog post, it may be possible that the water company shut the water off for a couple days to avoid frozen pipes. This might explain why my neighbors have seemed to desert their homes. But I haven't been alerted by anyone--no phone calls, no messages on the door from the water company.

My other fear is that there's some sort of problem requiring repair (and my huge fear is that I'll have to pay for a repairman). After some searching today on Google, I found that it's not common to insulate pipes during winter in Korea. If this is true, it seems very silly to me. Apparently you are supposed to leave your heat on at night to keep the pipes from freezing, and at the same time leave a trickle of water coming out of your faucets. I don't know what to believe; no one has told me anything about living in Korea during the winter.

I'll admit I've been a bit of a Scrooge about money. The cold is cheap. Koreans mainly heat their homes using the ondol system, a heating system that heats the floor under your feet. It makes sense because most Koreans sleep on the floor, and it's a custom to take your shoes off before entering anyone's house.

I haven't really used the ondol system, and to be honest, I don't even know how to turn it on. I've stuck to the space heater. SO far it's been very effective, and I'm not complaining about the heat. I just worry that my frugality hasn't hurt the water pipes and cost me a fortune..

SO until this problem is solved, I'm taking showers using 2L bottles of water bought from the store. Gets the job done. Can't say it's pleasant.