I Love the Passing of Time

(good tidings of great consumerism)

Christmas is just a little over a week away now, right? Surely it's less than two weeks away. That means I've got a couple of long weekends coming up in the near future. A few ambitious people are traveling for one of those three-day periods, but I've got nothing planned. I'll probably be a bit more ambitious for the significantly longer holiday that comes with Lunar New Year in February. No point in planning too much too soon, though, that ruins the surprise.

But even if Christmas isn't a deep-seeded holiday here, that doesn't necessarily stop its commercial appeal. Stores still use it as an advertising point, and an excuse to put even more gaudy lights and flashy decorations around. As cynical as that sounds, I'm real thankful for it. I'm secretly a big fan of Christmas, and being in a world that doesn't go apeshit for it is a bit easier when they at least acknowledge it.

At least one international sign of Christmas is quite alive here, albeit with a slightly Korean twist. The Salvation Army folk are around with their kettles, but here there's also a high-tech alternative, where you can simply wave your T-Money card (the same one you use to pay for the subway) in front of a little screen and it automatically donates 1,000won (around a buck, American) from your card to the bell-ringers. You can see the Santa-laden display here in my pictures.

I really wanted to send some presents home for Christmas - some awesome interesting stuff for virtually anyone I could think of; things that you might only get in Korea. Procrastination and a long work day and fear of the Korean Postal Service and probably some more excuses means that I've done nothing to that effect, and will therefore miss any sort of Christmas deadline. I'm still intent on sending things home though. Hopefully thoughtful shit - no trinkets.

Another weekend with Cahill this week. We hung around with Mike Jim, a guy he knew from back in St. John's. As is often the case with people from St. John's, me and Mike realized that we'd run into each other once or twice before. Cahill had a similar experience with a little blonde lady from Grand Falls - they'd met in Scotland.

The night itself was pretty standard Hongdae fare. Despite the fact that I had a great grip on that egg-shaped clock in the picture, the evil Korean crane machines shagged me once again, and the flimsy arm dropped the goddamn thing halfway through its trip to the drop slot. That probably counteracts my luck from earlier in the night, where I hopped-in on a 'closest to the bullseye' 10,000won contest with Mike and Cahill, and hit a dead-centre bullseye on my first shot.

We actually stayed out a tiny bit later than usual, and we got to see a pretty rare sight here in Korea: bars closing. After walking into three or four bars that were in the process of cleaning up, we went all home around 6 in the morning.

Bars here are quite accommodating, and often if you just stay and keep ordering drinks, a lot of them will stay open as long as you'd like them too. There's no law to stop them. It reminds me of the flyer I got in Thailand for the 'after hours' Full Moon Party. It started at 10 o'clock... the next morning. Yeah, that's the kinda place Thailand was. While I really want to get out and do life experience-type traveling a whole damn lot, I wanna get back to see that insanity once more, too. Plus, it'd be real nice to be on a beach just a few clicks north of the equator in these chilly winter months.

For closing this week, check out this seemingly innocuous box of butter-lemon cracker sandwiches. Now, neglecting the fact that the 'lemon' is clearly green, and therefore possibly lime, and neglecting the fact that this idea both looks and sounds pretty unpalatable, suspend disbelief for a moment to check out the packaging:


"Ongoing real love story"?

Now I'm not saying Korea is embellishing the veritable Soap Opera that is the relationship between lemon/lime and butter, I'm just questioning whether using their sordid love affair to sell crackers is really prudent.