My friend’s roommate moved out early this morning, so I was all ready to pack up and move rooms, we just needed to check with the office. It turns out that it’s a little more complicated than that.
Although the girl had moved out, and had gone to the office to say that she was leaving, that was all she had said to the office. She had walked in and said that she was leaving and then walked out. No reasoning, no further explanation.
The people at the office were as confused over the whole situation as us, so they said that they couldn’t let us move rooms just yet. First they need to get in contact with the girl and then they will contact us with their decision.
So it seems that I will continue to stay on the tenth floor for a while. Which means that it was about time for me to make my current room livable.
Today I set out to clean what I could clean without overstepping the unspoken roommate boundaries.
Now I can see outside without opening the window to the frost, and the floor is clean. There’s only the refrigerator left and that was a challenge a little too big for me today after spending twenty buckets on water to clean the floor.
My roommate’s clutter has reduced since I first arrived and this is due to some... strange circumstances.
Oh the first day someone entered a password on the door and tried to enter but couldn’t since the password had been changed back to the original one assigned by the office.
At the time I thought it was roommate who had arrived, but it turned out to be a friend of hers who had left some things in this room (strange but okay).
She came back repeatedly taking things and leaving others.
Then she came back with another friend and again they took some stuff and left some other stuff. This went on for two days.
The following day (so that must have been yesterday), the other friend tried to come back in. She entered the code on the floor, but obviously the code had changed so she couldn’t come inside.
I opened the door and asked (in Korean as they're Chinese with little to no English) why they kept coming here with things and she said that they were slowly moving and kept their things here in the meantime.
And then I go back to my business and she wrestles around with some boxes and then as I think she is about to leave she comes in and says that she doesn’t think my roommate knows that the password on the door has changed.
I answer that no, she doesn’t, but since she changed the password without informing the office they had to change the password back to the original one so that I could enter the room.
This girl then proceeds to say that if I tell her the password she will pass it onto my roommate.
I did my very best to pretend that I didn’t understand and said: well it’s the original one, so she can go to the office and get it if I’m not here, or you can give me her contact information and I can talk to her.
My roommate had clearly leaked the password to this room to two of her friends, and according to the rules that usually results in immediate eviction. I wasn’t going to mention it to the office, especially not before having met her. But there was also no way that I was going to give out our password to her friend.
Even if it hadn’t been a strict violation of the rules, I don’t like the thought of them walking into my room while no one is there. I look forward to see how things progress on the roommate front. It wouldn’t be a real adventure without some drama.
Speaking of drama, our two elevators have been under repair since last night. And since I live on the top floor (the tenth floor) I got to have a good peek at the action.
I had read the notice that they would be repairing it, but I had completely forgotten until I came home last night after dinner and heard them working until 11pm. They have wrapped up now though (5pm the following day) so the elevators should be working again. That’ll be nice.
The elevator is not only a means of transport here, it’s also the main way that student get their news. In each elevator there is a notice board that gets updated with all important things about the dorms. For example on Tuesday while we’re in class there’s a pest control, and sometimes they show films in the evenings too and those things are always announced on the notice boards in the elevators.
In other news I showed my friend around the Ewha Campus, and we walked up the mountain to the undergraduate dorm at the university to see the view of Namsan.
Tonight street food is on the menu.
