Christmas Pills and Beer

Christmas is still a month away, but I received my package(s) of presents from home this week. Basically, there are two ways to ship something to Korea from Canada. One is relatively cheap and takes as long as 3 months; the other is unreasonably expensive and takes an unnaturally short couple of days. Thankfully, I got the latter.

I dutifully unpacked my individually-wrapped gifts and posed them under a hastily-drawn Christmas tree (which I sketched on the kitchen cupboard with whiteboard markers I stole from work). Along with the surprising quantity of gifts I can't unwrap for another month, mom included some small slices of home. Cold medication was a welcome inclusion, as the medications here are strange and confusing and don't contain the same ingredients. And speaking of my favourite medication, she also tossed-in a bottle of Blue Star, a Newfoundland exclusive beer; my one indulgence in product-based patriotism. It'll sit in my fridge so I can enjoy it during the 'holidays'.

While I'm on the topic of Christmas and all that, I might as well point out that it's not celebrated much here. I get a single day off for Christmas day, and that's about it. I'm not even sure if I get New Year's day off, because the Lunar New Year in February is actually the one that people celebrate here. I'll be fine celebrating with my little bits of wrapped-up home. That'll be surreal, as I'm a fan of the whole Christmas season, but fuck it, when in Rome, do as the Koreans do.

Just as a little reminder that Korea's a bit of a weird place (to my wide blue eyes, at least) I'm once again taking my camera around most of the time. There's always potential for 'what-the-fuck?!' moments here. I've got a couple of examples here. The blurry photos are the breakdancers in subway station. They're around at least once a week though, so they don't even elicit a 'huh?', let alone an expletive-laced exclamation of confusion.

But then there's these 10-foot-tall stilts-wearing pastefaces. Last Friday, I saw these monsters just strolling around my neighbourhood aimlessly, advertising some bank or something, I believe. Or maybe they were headed to a costume party as stereotypical foreigners: tall, awkward-looking and freakishly pale pretty much sums up the perception some Koreans have of us.

Speaking of freakishly tall pale people, Cahill was supposed to come by this weekend, but he ended up dying of some sort of gypsy death flu. It's pretty typical for people to get sick first when they get to a foreign country. There are thousands of variations of cold and flu in the world, and when you travel to a new country, you're exposed to all kinds of new virus strains. Add to that the fact that you fly here in an airtight tube with a few hundred other people, and when you get here, you spend all day around messy children, and you're pretty much a science experiment turned Nyquil commercial.

And while I'm on the topic of sick children...

The other day one of my kinderchildren met me in the hallway screaming "Teacher, Melonie goopie!" I know this Korean word, it means nosebleed. Kids pick their nose, and tend to get them a lot. When I walked into class, the girl's face was red with blood, as were the table and the floor. There was some incident with pushing or punching or some such thing. While I got her a tissue, one of the other kids was so freaked out by the blood that he puked all over the floor.

The whole thing actually made me laugh it was getting so bad. I told everyone to calm down and strolled out to get a Korean teacher to help.

"Yeah, Maria, Melonie's covered in blood and Kevin's puking all over the place."

I'm not sure why, but teaching them, even at times like this, is making me like kids more.

But enough sincerity, time to call Korea crazy a little more. I like call this 'Anatomy of a Korean Street Scene'. It's just a pretty dull picture of a Korean sidewalk, but it exemplifies a lot of what life in Seoul is.

The sidewalk's littered with useless leaflets from half a dozen bars and churches around the area. There's a stand made of rickety tables, selling seeds, nuts and hideous jewelry. The man running it is asleep in a chair. The light poles are full of the same posters people ignored on the last 20 poles. Traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular zips past on both sides. It's all remarkably unspectacular, but it's all very much Seoul.

That's about it for this week. Although I might have already exceeded my weekly quota for making Korea sound nuts, I'm contractually obligated to close with some kind of weird image. I've got a couple here. One is just your average Korean shirt rack. The shirts all have lots of English words that don't make any sense. "Feel is for this good". I'm not sure if I've ever seen a shirt with Korean characters on it.


The other image is of a coin-operated Rock, Paper, Scissors machine that distributes candy to winners clever enough to outsmart a series of tiny red lights. Rock, paper, scissors may be the only thing more popular here than shirts with terrible English.