Moving Day, Korean Style

A first-floor apartment and the soundtrack of cicada season.

We moved into a new place on Monday. The movers came to our apartment, removed the large outer window in our living room, packed up our belongings, and loaded everything onto a lift that carried our furniture, clothes, and books down to a truck in the parking lot. Then they drove it all across the street, unloaded it, unpacked it, and put everything where they thought it should go. Even the food from the refrigerator. They used the closets and cabinets in our new apartment more intelligently than we would have. Korea does service as well as anyone.

It might have been the least stressful move I’ve ever made. We’re still right next to Nammin’s parents in Ilsan. There had been some talk about heading down to Busan after I got laid off and started my new job, which is fully remote, but we weren’t quite ready for a full-on cross-country move on top of all the other chaos we’ve gone through this year. It feels like the right decision. It was certainly easier than the move we made from Colorado to Korea.

Jia gets to finish preschool (유치원) with the same friends. We’re about as close to family as we can be, which has been a godsend. Nammin’s parents are the good kind of in-laws—they don’t make too many demands on our time. We don’t have to figure out where to find everything we need. It’s a first-floor place, so we have something of a yard for Alfie, and there’s enough room for both of us to work from home without being right on top of each other.

Plus, I love Seoul, and staying close to my friends feels important. There’s a strong community of writers and journalists here, and I keep meeting more of them. I can walk two minutes from my front door, hop on a comfortable limousine bus, and an hour later be in the center of one of my favorite cities.

Meanwhile, the new job is going well. I’m finding it genuinely interesting. I also have a couple of reviews and interviews in the works, centered on some excellent books, including American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee, Fights! by Scott McClanahan, and Change the Subject by Claire Hopple.

The soundtrack of summer is the buzz of cicadas—or maemi (매미), in Korean—and they’re at maximum volume right now. I took one to the eyeball when I was walking to the convenience store for beer to celebrate the move. They’re a menace, absolutely obnoxious, but I’ve grown to appreciate the texture they give the season.