City of Frost-Covered Angels

(been waiting to use that lyric in the title for ages)

A few days from Christmas, halfway through my time here, and it snowed this week. Snowed more than it ever normally does in Korea, I hear. The timing was about right; even if it is all melted again now, it was nice to see snow once before Christmas, for what it's worth...

And it was worth a bit, really. This weekend was one of the nicest I've had in a while. The snow Saturday night was a great catalyst for a fine evening. We ran around and threw snowballs and I hit some random Korean who looked really pissed off and there were snowmen and dangerous roads and slush and cold wet feet and it was really hard to believe I was in Korea and not Canada.

The first snowfall is a bit of a significant event here. I've heard that it's traditional for couples to give gift to each other to celebrate it, and it's quite evident that people all over the city try to take blurry pictures of falling snow with their cell phone cameras. I'd ridicule them a bit more for that, but it seems a bit hypocritical since I was also pretty giddy over a few falling frosted flakes.

Saturday was good on its own merits, without the snow. Earlier in the day, when it was reasonably nice out I took my first bike ride in months, then met Adrian and dropped by a skate shop.

That night we ate Japanese and drank and snowed and walked and ate Korean and never got back to his place until 8 in the morning. I crashed on his comfy sofa and never got home until 8 Sunday night. If you measure the success of a weekend by how late you get home, it was monumental. If you don't, it was still pretty goddamn good.

Back to the 'real' world, it's Christmas in Korean. I think. The poorly dancemixed carols and scattered artificial trees seem to suggest so, at least. Tomorrow's the Christmas party at work, both for the Kiderchildren and the faculty. Later into the evening, we're got the staff party at Outback Steakhouse, but that morning, I have to dress as Santa for the whole school. I have to hope that my own students are too retarded to notice the same guy they see every morning is just wearing a red suit and fake beard. I don't want to ruin the illusion, since they were really excited today when they told me that Santa was coming to see them tomorrow. I had to awkwardly reply that I wasn't going to be there.

"What, Santa was here? And I missed him!?"

Speaking of students, I'm closing with one of the weirdest things I've ever seen a student write here. To be fair, this isn't my student, so I can't vouch for his sanity or lack thereof, but just check out what he wrote about his favourite pet:



Past the typical grammar, notice that he says dogs are "very fast and tasty". Now, this is a real contentious issue for Korea, but some Koreans do eat dog. No urban myth, dog soup is a delicacy here. Dog's not a common ingredient - you won't order something innocuous and end up with a plate full of fido. You can, however, walk into certain restaurants and order up a bowl of dog soup.

This paragraph is potentially funny to anyone, even Koreans. Eating dog isn't about cooking-up your pets. There's basically just one breed of dog eaten, and they raise them in farms just for food, like we do with chickens and all sorts of animals.

It's a cultural difference, one that just freaks us out because we've been using dogs as pets for so long. I'm not personally going to eat any, but I don't think any differently of anyone that does. It's something I'd have never brought up if not for this hilarious essay about one kid's favourite edible house pet. Even more hilarious is that before corrections, this was all written in past-tense, "dog was very fast..."

But that's a fucking awful downer on which to end my last pre-Christmas entry.
So here's a happy condom:


Merry Christmas!