Last week I had a couple days off. I don't get many vacation days and I always tell myself I'm going to have these grand adventures in the city. However, what usually happens is that I sleep late, watch an entire season of some ridiculous tv series and do my laundry. That's exactly what happened last week. The only time I left my apartment last Wednesday was to walk downstairs to the storage room where my washing machine is. Typically for a foreign teacher whose school provides housing, the apartment is furnished with a washer. But I don't have a washer in house, so my sweet landlords allow me to use an extra one they keep in the storage room. It's not convenient, but it gets the job done and I'm thankful to not have had to buy one. Dryers are not a household appliance in this part of the world, so you hang your clothes to dry. Sometimes it's annoying that you can't just throw your jeans in the dryer and run off to work. But you get really resourceful with heated floors and hair dryers. So, with all that said, last week while I was enjoying not grading papers and not having children ask me about my boyfriend who lives on the farm, (Not because he's a farmer, which would be perfectly acceptable. But because he's a pig. Yeah, my kind and uplighting children like to say my boyfriend is a pig. And not like a slob. Like an animal. Like an oink oink pig. They make the sound and everything. I hate them.) I decided to wash a load of clothes. I set out thinking it would be a normal, mundane task. I'd been using this washer for almost a year. I had memorized which buttons to press (because naturally, on a Korean washer the words will be in Hangul) to choose the right setting. No big deal, the internet is very handy. Anyway, so my clothes are washing and I set a timer on my phone for when they'd be finished and ran back up to the apartment to piddle around. And then about an hour later my timer went off and I happily bounced down the stairs to grab my clean clothes. But what I found was a washer full of water. Eh, no need to panic yet. So I turn it off. Press the spin cycle button. Nothing. I repeat this process about 37 times. I unplug it. I plug it back in. Surely this thing can just be reset. It's fine. Well it wasn't fine. I even googled "how to use a Korean washer" just to double check I'd done everything correctly. I try to start the wash over again. Nothing happens. It just makes this weird churning noise. So I do the only thing I have left to do. I go knock on my landlord's door. My landlord is overly excited I'm in his doorway. And I'm just distressed.
"Washer! Storage room! Broken! Help!"
"Okay, okay okay. I look. But Joyce, me no engineer."
So we walk down together. He does the same thing I did. Then he looks at me says,
"I can't fix. I tell my wife. We come see you."
Alright, so he and his wife show up my door about 9 o'clock. They have already been to reexamine the broken washer and they report back to me that it cannot be fixed. So my landlords are going to take my sopping wet clothes out of my washer, take them upstairs to their apartment and rewash them for me and replace my washer the next day. Now doesn't that just sound great? Free laundry service. And she returned it my door. I didn't even have to go get it.
UM NO! IT'S NOT GREAT. MY KOREAN LANDLORD WASHED MY PANTIES AND IT WAS COMPLETELY EMBARRASSING!
Okay, on the other side of the situation, I'm not sure why it was so petrifying. Having a sweet 50 year old Korean lady landlord wash my underwear was just not in the plans. She didn't even let me help her. I reached my hand in the broken washer to ring out the water and she slapped my hand away! She said, "No, no! I do! I ajumma, you know?!"
I do know. I'm sorry. You're right. I'm wrong.
So, the moral of this story is: If you super sweet and helpful Korean landlord ever has to wash your underwear, just keep your head up and say kamsahamnida. This can be survived. At least she didn't make any jokes about how big they are. My students definitely would have done that. "Teacher so big! hahahaha!" I hate them.
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