Sleeping on the Floor

            Last week I had my four day vacation and on Thursday night I had a very entertaining night but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to share my adventure as I ended up sleeping in my hallway outside my apartment.  But sometimes in life stuff just happens and if you can’t laugh at yourself then you aren’t really living.  So here is my story of how I ended up sleeping on the floor.

            Last Thursday was the first day of my vacation and I made the most of it by getting my apartment in order, paying off the last of my student loan, getting a haircut and shaving my beard off.  After all that I met up with Jonathan and we went to a mutual friends place for some drinking and games.  There were five of us and we did the standard drinking games but also sat around and talked about Korean society.

            Everyone commented on some of the same things I’ve touched on, specifically the lack of public trash cans, the intense education system and the huge generation gap between the oldest generation and the young one that’s around my age.  Brad, the other guy Jonathan and I were talking to, felt that the younger Koreans are waiting for the old generation to die off so they can then start to implement progressive changes.  A fair point but I think that can be the case in any society but that’s another topic for another day.

            After we finished our drinks we went downtown and decided to go to Speakeasy as our first stop.  They were starting to close up since it was 1:30am on a Thursday but I then saw that Dan Henrickson was there with some of his buddies and we sat down to hang out.  It was at this point that I realized I might have had a couple because I could understand everything Dan was saying.  Dan is Canadian and has the total accent with more “Eh’s” than you can shake a hockey stick at and I understood him perfectly.  So either I was suddenly fluent in Canadian or I just thought I was.  Regardless we hang out for a bit then bounced to meet up with some other people that Dan knew and sat on a patio.  It was fantastic to sit on a real patio and just hang out but I was only there less than an hour before I decided to go home. 

            I walked home, headed up the stairs to my apartment, pulled out my key and unlocked the door.  Except the door didn’t unlock because my key snapped in half with one part still in the deadbolt, and to my shock, the deadbolt hadn’t unlocked.  I was stunned because I knew I couldn’t unlock the door but I still tried to force the broken key back together and then twist it so it would unlock.  It wouldn’t work because when the key broke it somehow stripped itself and wouldn’t catch again.  

Ironic how there's a heart in the key hu?

            I then decided to walk around the apartment complex to see if I could find the janitor’s closet and hopefully find a tool to twist the key.  I walked around but I couldn’t find anything so I went to look at my window and see if I could’ve climbed up to it but there was absolutely no way.  I went back to my door and tried to open it again but had zero success.  That was when I got real serious about getting in my room because if I didn’t I had nowhere else to go.  I wasn’t sleeping in a disgusting sex motel and it was 25 minutes to Jonathan’s place and that was if he was even there so I decided to try my only option left.  I lined up myself up, braced myself against the wall across from my door and kicked my door as hard as I possibly could.  The door just laughed at me because it didn’t budge.  I tried again and again but was stopped cold. 

            I paused and collected all my energy knowing that I’m 2.5inches from my soft bed, a cold glass of water and channeled my inner, “I am the only Highlander!” and kicked that door with every ounce of determination and nothing.  Absolutely nothing happened.  I dropped my head and grudgingly admitted defeat by lying down and falling asleep in front of my apartment.

No way a solid steel door keeps this man out of his bed at 3am.

            I woke up to my neighbor shaking my shoulder and I quickly showed her the broken key in the deadbolt.  She called my landlord and after five minutes of trying to twist the key he finally got it open.

Worst bed ever.

            I don’t know why I wasn’t suppose to stay in my apartment that night but everything happens for a reason even if it doesn’t make sense at the time.  Now let’s take a moment and think about how if I was kicking my house door back home it would’ve busted no problem.  Korea has virtually no petty crime but my apartment door is so strong it would’ve taken C-4 to open it.  I think it sums up Korean culture pretty well.  They don’t want you to bother them and you won’t break down their cultural barriers unless they decide to let you in.  Lastly, how fortunate was I that I didn’t break the door down, my neighbors didn’t call the police and I didn’t break my foot while trying to break into my own apartment.  

           If you've got a funny story like this then email me and share it with me.  I've also fixed how you can comment on my posts so anyone but the spamers can comment now.