Okay, the first impressions have settled, time to talk about that place I live in.
In Korea, take a narrow hallway and a handful of tiny bedrooms, Add a shared bathroom and a shared kitchen, put in some washing machine and you got what is called a Goshiwon. This form of housing has emerged around 40 years ago as a temporary place to live in for students taking special exams called goshi. It should be no surprise that, in a megapolis like Seoul, living space is very expensive, and that the clearest advantages of living in such a Goshiwon are the low rental costs (mine’s 320,000 KRW a month, roughly 240€) and the fact that you don’t have to have any deposit to rent a room.
While those advantages surely are promising, one mustn’t unterrate the difficulties that come with that type of housing. My room has got a whopping 4m² and a window the size of an A4 sheet of paper. The other residents are different from what I’m used to when living in a private student house back in Germany. Because you just rent the room and don’t show up to talk with your new floor mates beforehand, a large portion of those living here won’t go beyond greeting back when you initiate a conversation. That, together with an unstable environment and some personal problems, could cause a potentially very bad time, as illustrated here.
Naturally, that doesn’t mean that my time here is deemed to be a nightmare. Although my matress is quite stiff, my fridge and the neighboring street is very loud and the air is not always as usable as I’d like to have it (you do run out of oxygen really fast in such a small room, although the air conditioner does its job), I slept pretty well the first three nights. As long as I am able to get some earplugs and the permission to use the on-campus swimming hall to care for my body, my physical condition should not be affected here at all.
Furthermore, the owners are a friendly, mid-aged couple with whom you can actually do smalltalk, the goshiwon itself is clean and the shared rooms are cleaned up regularly. Even further, there is cooked rice, kimchi, ramen soup and potable water for free. And as there actually are some people with whom you can talk and do stuff, I assume that the goshiwon will suit me as a place to sleep – I’m not planning to stay much in my room anyway.