Down the road is a Crown bakery, a chain, I'm sure, where baguettes are cheap and good. Bread is inexpensive, and here is one of the few places where I've seen wheat. Bleached white flour goods abound.
Across from my apartment building is a mini-mart owned by a husband and wife whose English is endearing and guilt-inflicting. She referred me to a tiny bottle of something sugary and menthol flavored when I asked for antacids, which worked well. I buy drinking water in six-liter packs, and it pleases me to have them to patronize.
Gangnam is one of the more affluent commercial neighborhoods in Seoul. Twenty independent and chain convenience stores compete for a quarter of a square mile of business, and all seem to succeed. I can jump from the stoop of one coffee shop to the next and make it for blocks without having to touch sidewalk. Inexpensive sam gyap sal is everywhere, as are seafood restaurants with big, bubbling aquariums of clams and fish. Construction is omnipresent, crews working long into the night setting up new telecom outlets, clothing stores, offices. If anyone knows about the recession, they aren't letting on.
Kyobo tower, at the corner, reaches almost double the height of the surrounding buildings, its red brick facade a warm answer to the grimy white around it. In the lobby, thermal cameras hooked up to LCDs try to weed out the infirm as H1N1 infections climb: above-normal temperatures elicit a long, loud beep. This can be achieved by having a fever, or by vigorously rubbing your shirt cloth together. The displays read from cold to hot backward through the color spectrum (think Roy G. Biv, reversed). My face is a bright yellow-green. In the basement is a large bookstore with a decent English section, and an entire small shelf dedicated to Lonely Planet guides.
Home life is far from luxury but neither is it spartan. The shower is excellent and the mirror next to the head adds ten minutes of shampoo-mohawk modeling time to my washup. I shave and cut my hair in this mirror. The water heater is a tankless with a digital thermostat which I forget to turn off. The toilet seat is a plastic cushion. The washing machine spits suds out onto the tile floor, into the central drain it shares with the shower. To dry, articles are put on hangers on a knotted nylon rope stretched, sloping down across the bedroom.
In the kitchen, a mini fridge holds the last of a pint of cherry tomatoes, a tub of spicy bean paste, soy sauce, six brown eggs, butter, water, and milk. The cupboards hold a supply gradually reaching comprehensiveness: noodles, flour, oil, sugar, salt, baking powder, coffee, a packet of anchovy sauce mix powder and an onion. I have a gas double-burner range with a valve on the wall which I forget to turn off, and there is a VHS cassette-sized baking drawer I haven't tested yet. The last resident left a toaster which smells like melting plastic when turned on. I'm very pleased with my grocery-store knife and cutting board, but I need more prep space. If I had a workshop I'd build a small table to fit the bill, but I don't, so I'll have to improvise something.
The window screens are holy and don't fit right which lets the mosquitoes in which keeps me up at night. Otherwise, I watch TV online, eat breakfast, dinner and snacks, Skype and read sitting up in bed. The breeze flows through and it's usually cool enough. I'm happy here.
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