Bringing the Heat; and, Internet Update

So as the weather has chilled over the last couple of weeks, we've realized that our apartment heating system has been, shall we say, under-performing. (It doesn't help that Celsius makes everything feel colder. It got down to 15 C in our bedroom one night! That feels so much colder than 59 F.) Initially, we chalked this up to the inefficiencies of "ondol," Korea's quirky under-floor heating system that involves pumping near-boiling water through a lattice of pipes under the floorboards, and the fact that our corner apartment, while very well-lit, also catches a whole lot of wind. When we heard stories of people using ondol to turn rooms into de-facto saunas, however, we realized that something was amiss. As it turns out (thank you Paul!) there's an extra button you have to press on the boiler to actually put water into the floor, at which point you can literally trace the course of the pipes with your foot they're so warm (and so much warmer than the un-piped spots on the floor). Amazing how much a heated apartment can lift your spirits, eh?

In other news: internet. After months of frustration, the school has finally forced our crappy ISP into action, and discovered that the reason we have such unreliable service is that the provider has almost no bandwidth for connections to servers outside Korea. This explains why Yahoo (which maintains servers in Korea) and its affiliated sites almost always work, and why Google (which has been largely muscled out of Korea by Yahoo and local-competitor Naver) almost never does. The ISP has asked for one more chance to fix the problem (good luck) before we give them the axe. Which means there's hope that we could have ACTUAL, RELIABLE internet access within a few weeks! Though I wouldn't get your hopes up too high--there's still time for plenty of foot-dragging and bungling. But at least we're a lot closer than we were at the start of the week.