I have just figured out why the office building i work in makes me want to inexplicably down a dozen sleeping pills with a shot ofJack. It is because of the view of the outside from my cubicle. Let me explain.
My office in Seoul, my regular office, is right by the Gwang-ha-mun Palace and the Sejong Arts Center. It is in the middle of crazy financial district and arts district Seoul, with tons of skycrapers, billboards, huge live TV screens, City Hall, and the ancient South Gate. I love this area of Seoul. It’s about 20 minutes from my parents’ house (who live back in the hills behind the Blue House), and from wherever you are standing, you can see the mountains, soothing peaks covered in evergreens and sloping gently towards the sky. You can see the Namsan Tower, glowing like a space-age Tinker Toy from its place at the top of Namsan Peak, and all around you, there is the hustle and action of this city, tiny bars and eateries crammed into impossibly narrow alleys, all stacked up on top of each other, people jamming the streets, picnicking on the grassy areas in front of Seoul Plaza Hotel, cars racing past the huge statue of the great Korean warrior, General Lee, who eons ago built the legendary Turtle Ship, an East Asian version of the Trojan Horse, to lead his troops into a miraculous victory against the Japanese. This is where the steel and cement and smoked glass of modern day architecture, gathering its momentum in height and sharp angles and digital billboard screens, gives way and opens its arms to relics from history, protects the ancient palatial homes of long ago kings, blesses the old gateways of the city’s old walls, built of wood and stone and iron, its buttresses and shingled roofs painted in reds and greens, every detail of the first design painstakingly remembered because the original palace and gates and pagoda-like resting places, that had seen life unfold before them from the same spot for thousands of years, were blown apart by Japanese canons and artillery, when my grandparents were our age. (Funny, the ancient buildings are exact reconstructions of the original structures, but some of them, like the South Gate, have been moved about 500 yards or so from their original locations because urban planning deemed it most efficient for traffic flow. How pliable history can be, I love and also find annoyingly frustrating.)
Anyway, this is where my regular office is, and from my room on the 26th floor of the Seoul Finance Center, I can see sidestreet neighborhood stretch out before me, in crooked alleyways and flooded rooftops. The Samsung Building and the SK Building, built of huge sheets of bent glass and steel and criss-crossing window panes, glitter above the dingy ten-story office buildings, tower over the traffic of greasy motorbikes and taxicabs below. And, of course, the pretty mountains, green and rocky, but smooth. In the offices down the hall, you can see over all everything to the grounds of the Gwang-ha-mun Palace, the yellow dirt courtyard and huge labrynth of worship halls and living quarters.
My office is perfectly air conditioned. It is private, I can close my door whenever I don’t want to see anyone, and my office-mate, whose desk is messier than mine, who is my age and talks loudly in Chinese, then English, then Korean, depending on what conference call she is on, has really pretty eyes and laughs at my jokes. The best part about my office is that it is down the hall from the kitchen, which boasts a fully stocked refrigerator, all the cold bottled water, coke, diet coke (which is actually ‘Coca Cola Light’ here), orange juice, and chilled green tea I want; fresh loaves of all types of bread, pumpkin, cranberry, potato, wheat; full jars of peanut butter and berry jam; a capuccino maker; a toaster; cookies; tea and honey; and a microwave for cup ramen noodles. Last week there were slices of fresh watermelon cut up on big trays, and there are always big baskets of bananas and Korean melons on the counters. Plus, the office is all hardwood floors, mahogany colored wood, with the doors made to look like the old-school Korean paper window sliding doors.
The office I come to four days a week, the client site, is across the river, an hour-long crammed subway ride into Gang-Nam, whose claim to fame is skyrocketing real estate prices, huge apartment building complexes stretching down the length of the polluted river, and "Seoul’s Rodeo Drive." I work in the GS Tower, which is a five block, 30 minute by cab ride, away from Apkujong, the district where Korea’s rich kids play and spend their parents’ money. The TV billboards in the three intersections in this five block radius charge the highest rates to advertise because of the cars in the streets here never move. It is a perpetual traffic jam, honking and blaring and tempers, the worst parts of urban living, no matter what time of day or night. The 18th floor of the GS Tower is one huge room of row-length cubicles. The carpet is thin and frayed and grey. The walls are a dingy grey. The cubicle siding is a pale blue that, because of the dim floruscent lighting, looks grey. The air usually smells of stale cigarette smoke, but today it smells like some odd mixture of stale cigarette smoke and damp dirty rags. There is no toast and jam here, and I have to pay a dollar every time I want a bottle of cold water. One small air conditioning unit sits in the back of the room, which serves no purpose other than to keep the two rows of people sitting in front of the unit somewhat cool. Too bad the entire office has about 25 rows of cubicles.
The worst part about this office, and the reason I am so depressed every time I walk into this building, is that when you look out the windows (and there are a lot of windows, the entire side wall is windows) you can’t see anything. I don’t mean the view isn’t nice. I mean there is no view. You see nothing. This is what I see when I turned my head to the right: white space. I can’t see anything, just greyish-white air. If I didn’t know that there were windows, I might think that it was just white walls with random window sill patterns. Do you know how disconcerting and ugly-feeling it is to not be able to see anything, not even the sky? It makes you feel like you are just floating in the greying polluted atmosphere, like you are joining the ranks of the downtrodden officeworkers who are hunkered down in this worn-down grey block of space, huddled together, while there is nothing happening outside, all life and color obliterated by a thick cloud of dingy white.
HOWEVER. I have received an email this morning, instructing our work team to come to the regular Finance Center office this afternoon at 4! Oh happiness. I hope there is a new flavor of bread today. I was very wary of the pumpkin bread at first because the only way I like pumpkin is when it is solid and whole and just sitting there on your front stoop around Halloween time. But it was so good! Very crunchy (post-toaster) yet chewy at the same time. Not a ton of flavor, but very subtle. Mmmmm.
Last thing before I go back to work….or, to be completely honest, before I start working. (It’s 1:05 pm now, oops. I didn’t get the corporate amex, I didn’t get the corporate amex….) Korean people are obsessive about teeth brushing. Every single person here in the office keeps a toothbrush and a little tube of toothpaste on their desk, and after lunch, the bathroom is packed with people brushing their teeth, very vigorously. It is like summer camp, or communal bathrooms in college, except everyone is of legal drinking age and wearing nice sweater sets and pumps. (And headbands, Korean women just love headbands. I don’t get it.) Once I offered my new friend some gum, and she said, "No thanks, I’ll just go brush my teeth." And she did, at like 2pm, in the office bathroom, because she had just eaten some crackers.
