How a Sofa Reaches the Eleventh Floor in Seoul — Epoche B1
Seoul — 14 May Dear Hana, I moved in on Tuesday. Eleventh floor. You will want to know how a sofa reaches an eleventh floor here: by the outside of the building. The movers brought a sadari-cha, a ladder truck. It parks under your window, unfolds a ladder that telescopes up the face of the tower, and a flat platform runs up and down the rails like a small open-air lift. Wardrobe, washing machine, mattress, sofa — everything rode up through my window, while one man loaded at the bottom, one leaned out of the window frame to receive, and a third seemed to exist mainly to shout "slowly". Nothing touched the stairs. This is the standard Korean move, not a special service. A wardrobe does not fit in the lift, and the stairwell turns too tightly, so furniture takes the window. When the firm quoted the price, their second question, straight after the address, was: which floor? The higher the ladder has to reach, the more you pay. The whole flat went up in about two hours. Nobody on the street looked twice — two boys waited at the crossing under a hanging sofa without glancing up. Only I stood there staring, which is how the driver knew whose sofa it was. Come and see the place. The view earns the eleven floors, and the kitchen window looks straight down onto the spot where the truck stood. Take the lift up. You are not a wardrobe. Min-jun References Choi, Y. (2018). Korean Culture and Communication. Seoul University Press.