Gas bill

I received my gas bill yesterday (Sunday).  First off, it was weird to receive it on Sunday.  They just tape the bills to your door at my villa, I'm not sure if that's standard everywhere or what.  The bill had a piece of paper with some hand-written stuff on it and 3 amounts: one was W30,000, one was W2008, and one was W582,008 ($23, $1.50, and $446, respectively).  At first I freaked out, thinking W582,008 was my gas bill, but after playing with the Korean-English dictionay on my phone I realized that W30,000 was some sort of housing fee, W2008 was gas, and I had no idea what W582,008 was.  Everyone told me gas would be pretty expensive here, maybe as much as W100,000 or so in the winter, so I thought there's no way my gas bill was W2008 ($1.50).  After trying to decipher the actual bill itself, I was even more lost.  There was another amount for W88,390, and some hand-written stuff that seemed to indicate this bill was for both my apartment and the one next to me.  

Well, I took the bill in to work and after much confusion on their part, as well (I didn't feel so dumb when they had difficulty figuring it out, too), they realized that the landlord had included rent into my gas bill!  Rent here is apparently W550,000 (which Topia pays), the monthly maintenace fee is W30,000 (I pay that), and my gas is W2008.  That means with my electricity bill and my gas bill, I've spent nearly $3.75 on utilities for the month of March.  The water bill has yet to come in, but unless it's W100,000, I'm way under budget for utilities.  Am I convincing anyone to move to Korea yet?

After my accidental splurge on sushi this weekend, I was left with W30,000 until payday, or about $23.  I can eat three meals a day and snack in between for about W8,000, but that's eating kim bap every meal.  Today I was able to spend only W5,000 because I have a little food still at my apt, I had kim bap for lunch, the president of the school bought chicken for everyone around 7pm, and I had 2 kim chi ju mok bap (rice balls with something inside [kim chi for me] and coated in salty sesame seeds and seaweed) after work.  So I'm left with W25,000 for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  That's very do-able. 

Come payday I'm going to feel like a king.  After my overtime has been added, and taxes, medical, housing deposit, etc is taken out, I'll be getting over 2.1 mil.  For the 7 weeks I've been here I've spent less than W600,000, so it'll be nice to have 3.5 times that amount in my account, at least until I wire most of it back to the States to pay bills, haha.