The Korean Way (3): warm and cold

It is the time of the year when Seoul gardeners and city employees protect the trees and flowerbeds against the biting cold. Sometimes the yellow straw wrappings look more like artwork than insulation. Hopefully, the extra layer at least partly protects the trees against pollution for a couple of months.
But Korea, as always being a society of extremes, is warm as well as cold. Subways, offices and hospitals are kept boiling hot in the winter, and coming indoors on a cold day (or worse: going out) can be quite a shock.

The other night I was at a dinner party at the home of a European friend. One of the Korean female guests spent the entire evening inside her black coat. I will never know if she had anything underneath, but it's clear she thought it was freezing indoors (it was about +20 degrees Celsius).
Korean homes usually have ondul heating, the traditional and very efficient Korean floor-heating. Another guest at the party told me afterwards, that she usually can see her neighbours sitting on the floor in their small apartments in the evenings, eating and watching TV in their underwear. Cozy.

But this is only half of the story. Now it gets a bit complicated. Five streets down from where we live in Seoul is a big hospital. In the winter, when it sometimes is minus 20 degrees Celsius, I often see patients outside, metal rod with their IV-bottle attached slung over their shoulders, their bare feet in plastic sandals... and I'm freezing inside my lined leather coat. What is it with these people? Can't they make up their mind?

When I say to friends in Europe that I live in South Korea, they often think it sounds nice and warm. "Asia" in the minds of non-Asians often conjure up images of Thailand or Vietnam, beach life and jungles. Either that or Japanese neonlit cityscapes. Korea, in people's minds, especially with the prefix "South", seems to radiate warmth. And it is true that Korea is at the same latitude as northern Africa and southern Spain. But warm? Not so. Seoul has four very distinct seasons, the summer being unbearably humid and hot, the winter cracking dry and cold, much colder than Stockholm, Sweden.
But indoor climate is more interesting, as well as easier to control (no Kyoto protocol necessary).
Koreans live in small apartments, and the ceiling height is lower than I am used to, so the space they need to heat is limited compared to Sweden. Swedes have in average 45 m2 living space per person, maybe the largest homes of any nation. Compare with China, for example, with 11,5 m2 per person. The spacious 3-room apartment or a typical Swedish couple without kids would contain a family of eight Chinese.
And over the centuries, heating the homes have become an artform in Sweden as well. Two inventions stand out in history:

• The threshold, ("tröskel" in Swedish) that cuts the freezing floor draught in wintertime. BT (before threshold) the Swedes used, among other things, chairs with crossbars joining the four legs at the floor: the space was filled with hay, and the feet planted there for warmth. Thick woolen socks, of course. In Belgium, they still sell stuffed, knitted "snakes" to put in front of doors and windows. Thresholds are probably regarded as an unwholesome foreign influence.
  
  
• The Swedish tiled stove, ("kakelugn" in Swedish) a wood-burning wonder that were so much more efficient than an open fireplace. With the tiled stove it was easy to regulate the burning process, and keep the heat indoors instead of letting it disappear up the chimney. Ever since the 18th century, this has been the preferred method to heat a Swedish home. Nowadays, with the price of oil and electricity skyrocketing, most Swedish homeowners keep their dwellings on the chilly side.

The principle behind the Korean ondul is actually very similar to the Swedish tile stove. The old onduls were long, winding chimneys under the stone floor, distributing heat but sometimes also carbon monoxide. Today onduls work with heated water, and thus allow for heated wooden floors as well.
The Swedish tile stove were usually placed in a corner of the room, and the smoke and heat from the small fire was led through a long, twisting chimney, heating the bricks in the big stove. The heat lasted all through the cold night.
Historians claim that the Swedish threshold and tile stove created specific indoor conditions, unique to Sweden, that influenced our behaviour and national psyche. Maybe. Maybe not. Sweden is covered by forests, and there has always been enough firewood in the sparsely populated country. China, on the other hand, chopped down their forests and developed a whole cuisine (the wok) around the bitter fact that they didn't have enough firewood.
Anyway, give me the extremes of Korean temperatures any day, as long as I don't have to endure the darkness of Sweden in the wintertime. For cold weather, you just dress accordingly. But what to do about four hour- days, when you go to work when it is pitch black, and return long after sunset. This is what depressions are made of. No light = no hope.
And maybe the freezing Korean woman at the dinner party only had one of those nice, black little dinner dresses underneath the coat. At least men have their dinner jackets if it's chilly indoors.