Almost all teaching jobs in Korea, and all the jobs that APC handles, include rent-free accommodation for the duration of the contract. Housing is usually within walking distance of the school and is almost always within an easy walk of supermarkets, department stores, restaurants, banks, and other services. About half the jobs offer single housing and half offer shared housing. The housing may be in the form of a traditional middle-class house, an apartment in an apartment building, or an apartment in a large traditional house that has been subdivided.

Some of the traditional working-class houses and neighborhoods have plenty of real charm. My second apartment Korean apartment was in a neighborhood and in housing similar to that on the left. Although the heating wasn't as reliable and the apartment was small, I preferred the older, cheaper housing.

Anyone who has been to Korea will have remarked upon the astoundingly vast tracts of apartment towers machine-stamped onto the landscape. Parts of almost every Korean city look a fair bit like upscale versions of suburban Moscow. Why build three or four identical towers when you could build fifty? Conveniently, if not decoratively, apartment buildings in these developments have large numbers painted on the side of each building; I needed them to find my way home through the maze for the first few weeks I was in Korea.

The size of apartments in Korea is measured in pyeong. One pyeong is equal to about 4 square meters, or 35 square feet. You can expect a single studio apartment to be larger than a university dormitory room but smaller than a standard North American bachelor apartment. A typical single studio apartment is usually around 8 or 9 pyeong and a two-bedroom is 16-18 pyeong.

Apartments for two or three teachers have a bedroom for each person living there and a common kitchen/living room area. All apartments have private bathrooms and most have a laundry/storage area. There is always one very large bedroom and one or two other bedrooms of decreasing size. The smaller/smallest room in an apartment is sometimes less than half as big as the bigger/biggest bedroom. Living somewhere with roommates between leaving home and marriage is not something most Koreans ever contemplate and apartment layouts reflect this.

The quality of apartments varies from school to school; however, all apartments include western-style toilets, private bedrooms (in shared apartments) and the following: a western-style bed for each teacher, a stand-alone wardrobe closet for each teacher, a two burner gas range, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a TV, some sort of table, some sort of common-room seating (in shared apartments), and a fan for each teacher. Extras that are sometimes included are a VCR, a microwave, an air conditioner, and a toaster. Ovens are very uncommon in Korea, as are clothes dryers. Electricity is expensive and not so easy to produce in such densely populated country.

In terms of cooking and eating utensils, there could be anything from a tasteful dinnerware set with lots of cooking implements or a jumble of plastic plates and a teflon frying pan. This is often dependent on what kind of people were living in the apartment. You could reasonably expect to spend a couple of hundred dollars on things you want/need for the apartment over the year.

If you are going to be sharing an apartment, don't be surprised if arrangements as to whom you are going to be sharing with change at the last minute. When a teacher leaves and a room in an apartment becomes available, teachers often take advantage of this to shift around within the apartments rented by their school so that they can live with co-workers of their choice. A last minute change of apartment plans is usually caused by current teachers rather than school administration.

Here are a few interior apartment pictures. A couple of the pictures below, and a few other photos on the site, are from Bill Sharp, a teacher I placed last year in a suburb of Seoul. Others are photos of the housing offered by a school we recently placed a teacher with, also in a suburb of Seoul.

The two biggest differences between North American and Korean apartments are the way they are heated and the bathrooms. Traditionally, Korean homes were heated by means of channelling hot air through pipes under the floor. Today, most apartments are heated by running hot water through pipes under a raised floor. This is great in winter as the heat from the floor actually moves up through furniture like beds and sofas. If you're cold when you come in from a windy -14C night, it's nice to lie down on the floor for a few minutes. It's also very handy for drying things like jeans and towels.

Bathrooms are almost always without a separate shower stall or bathtub. Some apartments may not have a bathroom sink. A shower hose is usually attached to the wall. The entire bathroom gets wet, though there is special cover for the roll of toilet paper. Water runs out through a drain in the floor. At first this seems quite strange; however, when I returned to North America after four years in Asia, I missed the "wet" bathrooms; they're very easy to keep clean. If you only need to use the toilet and the floor is wet, you wear plastic slippers to keep your feet dry.