Seoul is a very large and very small city at the same time.

You can cross the Han River multiple times a day, criss-crossing back and forth by subway, the view over the water changing depending on which number line you’re on. Going this way, I see the National Assembly Building with its rounded, teal rooftop. Going that way, the manmade island 세빛섬, aglow with multicolored lights in the evenings.

The real estate of Seoul is quite high (we can get into rental costs another time), but since public transport allows you to live in a neighborhood far away from your work and easily commute, I always ended up selecting cheaper areas to live in. I never would have admitted this to anyone at the time, but I faced my own number of days staring at my pitiful bank account and wondering if I’d make it past the week. I chose my path and experienced the accompanying hardships.

The kinds of places I have lived in are nothing short of amazing, looking back at it now. When you’re hungry, just about anything can taste good. You’ll be willing to put up with many…'inconveniences’.

But this time, I start with telling you about The Sindaebang House, how I found it and the lead up to meeting a woman who, given the chance, might have killed me in my sleep.

In Seoul, craigslist is used regularly and often to happy result by many people. You’ll come across some seriously deranged posts (like the time a man was requesting for help to pull an elaborate and disgusting revenge scheme on an ex-boss. I’ll tell you about that later) or sexually explicit posts from Korean men seeking foreign women. But that day, I was looking for a room to let and that meant looking in the housing section.

The problem with renting in Korea is the housing deposit. In other countries around the world, nearly every country, where your rental deposit will be maybe two or three months rent, Korean landlords can demand hundreds of thousands of Korean won. Even for rooms that rent for less than 800,000 KRW a month you might be required to first leave a 5,000,000 KRW rent.

It can feel arbitrary sometimes. And the rules are more unclear when you are dealing with a 하숙집 or when a local decides to rent out a room in their own home. Which was the case of The Sindaebang House.

I had found a post written in Korean saying ‘Open room to rent in a two story house, owned by an elderly couple.’ Located in Sindaebang (line 2 in one of the more affordable neighborhoods), it was a ten minute walk from the subway station, quiet, near some local markets and family friendly. A room for rent at 500,000 KRW a month with a blissfully affordable 1,000,000 KRW deposit. I was working in Apgujeong Rodeo at the time and a quick check on my metro app showed me that I would be able to reach my office within 40 minutes with just one transfer. I emailed the poster who quickly responded, “Please let me know when you would like to visit^^” I’ll come tomorrow, I said.

As a whole, we humans like to declare ‘I should have known it was too good to be true’ after we experience something disastrous. We like to believe we are smarter than what our actions may have shown, that we really aren’t gullible, that we have a special sixth sense that alerts us to bad news. But precious few of us are gifted with the true sense of premonition, even when red flag after red flag is waved before our eyes. The Sindaebang House was filled with warnings but I never heeded one.

The owner was a sweet grandmotherly type who enjoyed a quiet life of visiting her grandchildren and neighbors. Uncommon for most parts of Seoul, Sindaebang had a number of houses that were actually walled off from each other, each house having a private front yard in which habitants could grow gardens. Or just stack up odd items like clothing racks, empty flower pots, slippers or a broken umbrella. The Sindaebang House had a stone wall surrounding it and a gate entry which revealed a heavily shaded yard, trees hanging overhead and a narrow path between unruly bushes, lined by 옹기 pots. I was always afraid to walk through the yard at night, because of the massive, green striped spiders and their long webs. 할머니 (or grandmother), as we called her, lived on the first floor alone. The second floor was for renters, complete with a shared bathroom, a tiny kitchen, an even tinier balcony, and a living room with a TV. There were two bedrooms; one small for a single guest and one large for double occupancy. The single room was taken by an Indonesian exchange student, with whom I ended up becoming friends. I took one of the beds in the double room, feeling elated to find such a big space just for myself as no other renter had taken the other spot.

I moved in immediately. I could do with the spiders in the yard, the tiny kitchen, the shared bathroom (which would becoming my saving grace, in a strange twist of the story) and the impending likelihood of a roommate. For the moment, as I finished putting away my sparse belongings into one of the wardrobes in the double room and adjusted my newly organized skincare bottles on my personal table with satisfaction, I was finally somewhere I hoped would be home for a while. Nothing would go wrong.

The Sindaebang House story will continue in my next post - The Roommate