Apartment life

I don't like living in an apartment building. In the city. I'm still not used to it after nearly 7 years. I don't like being able to hear other people. It's weird. I'm not going to miss this aspect of life in Korea when I move to Canada some day.

Here's a sampling of the sounds I hear in my apartment.

4:30 am daily, a man upstairs (I think), hacks, coughs, and spits for at least 15 minutes. It's really disgusting. He must set his alarm every day to do this. I think he should be in the hospital by the sound of his cough.

6:30 am (random days), there's a guy who sells tofu outside, alerting everyone to his presence with a megaphone. I don't know who needs to buy tofu at 6:30 in the morning, but I guess someone must.

8:30 am (maybe every other day), there's a guy who sells vegetables outside from his truck. He also uses a megaphone.

From 4:00 pm into the evening, the neighbors' kids go to hakwons (private schools), so they're in and out, slamming the door and talking in the hallway.

Then there's just random things, like one night last week when the neighbors were having a fight at 2am.

What prompted me to write this? Well, just another random thing. Someone is moving something upstairs and making loud noises. One of the rare nights I get Grace in bed early, she's woken up by this noise! She was also woken up yesterday afternoon from her nap by the neighbors' kids going to hakwon. They slammed the door pretty hard, hard enough for me to get a jolt, and of course Grace is fussing a few seconds later. Lucky for those kids, I was just in my tank top, so I didn't have time to put on my robe and catch them before they got in the elevator. If this happens again, I'm going to knock on their door. I'm sure a visit from a sleep deprived foreign woman in her bath robe speaking broken Korean would give them something to talk about for a while!