But not to a “de-luxe apartment in the sky.”
No, I’m not moving. However, this entry is about moving in Korea. Why write about that? Well, moving is a little different here. You see, a lot of Korean apartments (like mine) are smaller buildings, only about 3-4 stories high. This makes them too short to require an elevator. And most of the stairwells are poorly thought out, so getting any pieces of furniture larger than a chair up them is a real pain – if it’s possible at all.
And the high-rise buildings aren’t much better. Sure, they’ve got elevators, but those are usually very small, move rather slowly and come one to a building, meaning while you’re trying to move, other people are trying to come and go from their homes. So how does one get all their stuff into (or out of) an apartment?
Through the windows.
No, I’m not joking. Most Korean apartments are designed with large windows for exactly this reason. (High-rises have it even easier, since most of them have sliding doors on the balconies.) To get stuff up to the windows they’ve got these special trucks with extensible elevator rigs on the back. Park next to the building lined up under the correct window, raise the rig and send the platform zipping up and down to deliver (or remove) the goods.
I used to have some really good pics of this from when I lived in a high-rise in Bundang. Sadly, those all got lost last summer in a bout of hard drive stupidity. Luckily, I caught one in action yesterday as I was leaving to go to work.
It’s pretty cool to watch them in action, especially when they’re doing a high-rise move. (Some of the trucks can reach 20-30 stories up!) The platforms move quite fast, and I’ve always had a sick fascination with them, wondering what’d happen if the braking mechanism failed on the way down with a load of furniture. I’ve watched them come zipping down with a couch or TV and wondered if this would be the one. It’s never happened though. The vision of somebody’s furniture just launching off the platform when it hits the bottom is something I want to see just once. Of course, it probably wouldn’t be as cool as I imagine it, so I guess it’s for the best.
Too bad, really….