Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Bunnymonster]

Or I could lock my door when I go to bed EVERY time...............

[mezdupa]

[just because]

I always here that Korea is one of the safest countries in the world.

I call BULL on that one.
Its just that a lot of crimes don't go reported so there a lot of undereporting in the statistics.

Honestly, this country matches any ohter western country for crime.

[JongnoGuru]

We was robbed!

My house is a free-standing two-story structure with a separate garage. There's a garden in the back, walkways running along the front & sides, and a tall wall (3m+ in some places) around the perimeter of the property.

I was out of the country from the first to last week of August. Three days before I returned, a typhoon had passed over Seoul. Not so much rain, but violent, howling, window-rattling winds, particularly in the wee hours of the night. My girlfriend was here alone in the upstairs unit, and our tenants (a Korean couple and their toddler) were asleep in the ground-floor unit.

Sometime between 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., a burglar managed to scale the garage from the street. Following some rather impressive acrobatic manoeuvres up there, he leapt panther-like onto the sidepath a good 2.5m below (leaving his muddy, barefooted footprints on the slate pavers).

Finding the front door & windows of the ground-floor unit locked, he went around to the garden to try the back door. This required him first to negotiate a fairly tall metal side-gate with a sharp pointy top in his BARE FEET, in darkness and in relative silence (something I couldn't do even with thick-soled shoes in broad daylight -- at least, not silently).

Lucky burglar -- the downstairs tenants hadn't securely locked the sliding back doors!! You know how you swing forward the metal lever into the clasp to lock a sliding door/window? Well, apparently the tenant thought it was locked, but the lever missed the clasp, so it wasn't actually fastened.

The burglar took a few ship-mahn-won cheques from the tenants' study, a stash of bank & credit cards from an empty guestroom, and an genuine 1940 Rolex from the bedroom where and while the tenants WERE SLEEPING!!!

Morning rolls around, and the tenant notices the back gate of the property is wide open and swinging in the wind. He goes out to close it, gets ready for work, can't find his wristwatch, his wife can't find her credit cards, they freak, call my girlfriend -- five police officers and a detective are here w/in 15 minutes, measuring & dusting & photographing & asking questions around the neighbourhood.

By the end of the day, the shops and fried chicken hofs in our sleepy dong are all abuzz with news of a least three houses hit by our cat-burglar: Film Director Choi's, Pharmacist Suh's, and ... um... "that waegook-in dood's." (I'll bet the burglar was damn disappointed with his meager haul from our place! ) We've learned subsequently that the burglar may've tried to enter 2 other homes, where people reported hearing noises, woke up and turned on lights, probably frightening him off.

My girlfriend (thank God, thank God, thank GOD the burglar didn't go upstairs!) wisely kept all this news from me until I returned. I mean, not much I can do but freak out & worry pointlessly when I'm on the other side of the planet... So I heard all about it the day after I got back to Korea.

One of my first thoughts was to get a big, snarly, noisy watchdog (thus adding to the canine chorus that is truly one of the only downsides to life here in this small patch of northern Seoul). But even that may not have protected us -- someone told me two dogs (a barky outdoor one and a lap-dog pet one inside) were found dead from poisoning in one of the houses struck in this latest spree. Rough stuff indeed.

Lesson Learned: Don't just lock your doors, but LOCK your doors.

The Guru