Ahhh, the little things!

Those sometimes fun & entertaining or pesky & irritating little things. Little things like the stairs that you must use to cross some streets, which were built by some mysterious race of people who are FAR, far shorter than I, the Koreans, and possibly the pygmies, yet the height of these stairs was made to the scale of this mysterious race of super-short people.

 Unless they're supposed to be ramps with super angular bumps in them? They're just deep enough that your foot fits, but their height is the perfect height to be a rather tremendous bother. Why are they this height? And why, then, are the stairs inside buildings so damned high? It's like doing box jumps, for God's sake.

Another little thing is that I now have to subsist largely on pork because the chicken at the store isn't tasty. What do they feed the chickens, garbage and flavorless corn? I'm honestly surprised there can be these big differences in flavors for the same animal. My Koreans students went to the US & one said that the pork there wasn't very good. I was puzzled by this, until now. I guess Korea has better pork, hence they eat much more of it. A good example would be the departments at the store. Here is the chicken section at the Lotte Mart, a pretty big Target-like store here:

And here is the one for pork.

 I know you can't see it, but that entire square is different cuts of pork. The only section as big or bigger would be the fish, which I'll have to photograph one day, though also record, since the guys working in the fish & meat sections yell all day. There are tanks with lobsters & crabs, or bins full of SUPER fresh crabs, beautiful fish, the whole seafood section smells like the ocean.

Another little thing is having a good hair day when I didn't leave my apartment all day except to get more pork. As is the fact that the A, Z, Q, 1, caps lock & tab keys on my keyboard no longer work, so I have to use my on-screen keyboard for those letters. & yet, who knows how long it'd take whoever fixes computers here to fix that? I'd have to go up to Seoul & that's SUCH an undertaking.

My freezer is very little. It's smaller than a shoebox (bottle for reference)

& that's after I turned the temp down so the wall of frost would shrink & give the small top shelf of my fridge a bit more room, but also a lot more water since the small defrost meant the wall of frost melting. I'll take a pic of that too, so you can see why a freezer is on my shopping list, right below an oven. What I wouldn't give for an oven, though I just got a crock pot last weekend & am using it a hell of a lot already.

Tomorrow after giving a private English lesson to one of the teachers at my school & some of the women at her sister-in-law's meditation studio @ 11, and why YES, IS super-early for me, particularly on a Sunday! She asked me in front of the whole studio, what could I say? Then they'll treat me to lunch, which would be lovely except that Sandra can't seem to remember I can't eat anything here since there's wheat in practically everything. Though this close to Thanksgiving, I'm lots more flexible. While I can't actually go to any dinners on Thursday or Friday because I work til 10, & Saturday is the lonnnng-awaited St. Andrew's Ball, which we're very much hoping that my gowns will arrive in time for. Kristin kept forgetting to send them, which is very understandable due to her having 3 kids! Plus shipping's expensive anyway. My lovely friend Dannie reminded me that postage to send to Aaron on base is cheaper, so we had her send the package there. They don't express to bases, unfortunately, though the guy at the post office was confident it would arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday here. We shall see. The very good news is that if by chance they don't, which worried me a lot because I did't want to have to buy dresses & spend MORE money is that 2 women on the expat women in Korea site have dresses I can borrow for free, just have to pick the one up tomorrow.

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And now it is tomorrow, or of course today  but yesterday's tomorrow. I have the dress, which fits perfectly, & also have some paleo baked goodies! This sweetheart of a woman enjoys baking in her spare time, posted to the expat women page offering her services, & she was up to experimenting with paleo. Next up I'm going to send her some money so she can buy the ingredients & create a recipe of her own choosing.

The English lesson was actually fun-- Sandra had found a whole list of excellent conversation topics, so today's was the first on the list, how important money is to you, including which is more important, love or money; and do you think you could be happy if you were poor? Interesting conversations.

Well, I guess the only other thing of interest is that the guy I was quasi-seeing in Chile is still getting in touch every 2 months or so. He misses me more each time I hear from him, which is oddly increasing now, when I really want to know where was all this ardor when I was there? Trying to see him regularly was like herding cats, a strange metaphor for this example, yet it feels perfectly apt when applied to Joel. 

OH, there WAS one last thing: I'd discussed this with Mark. Got a reduced rate for the night of the ball at the Grand Hyatt, where it's being held. The price is around $150,000 won lower... but it's still 200,000 won. When I was looking at google maps, it was showing hotels close by that were quite a bit cheaper, so I thought, since I won't be there in the room to enjoy it 200,000-won-worth, I shouldn't stick with that room. However, it turns out that the cheaper rates were for those nights, the night I was looking, a Tuesday. Now the prices are the same or only 50,000 won cheaper. Given the need to then get a cab to them, I'm thinking I may as well just stick with the pricier but much more convenient on-site room. Don't worry, you'll hear all about it in a later post. 

Oh yeah. Taiwan.

Don’t know why, but I suddenly remembered I never wrote about my trip to Taiwan to visit Mercedes & Andy. I’d say the trip had more personal significance than anything else. It was really just to see Mercedes & Andy, with the added bonus that Mercedes & I were going to go through our high school reunion page because ffs, it has been 20 years since we graduated.

First impressions, I have to say I really liked the airport. Second, it was hot & humid, & Mercedes & Andy assured me that the temperature had dropped since the week before. They have a pretty nice place, though I’ll admit I was surprised it was so small because that’s not usually Mercedes’ MO when it comes to traveling. It was nice, & surprisingly educational because I learned that their washer was also a dryer, but the dryer has no settings, except what should be called scorched, as the dryer has burned holes into their sheets. Hanging them to dry as their neighbors do isn’t an option, because they hang their clothes on lines out the windows. The humidity will definitely not let them dry, but the other issue is, most horrifying to me, that their cockroaches fly.

Taipei struck me as pretty clean & modern. The people, few that there were because it was a Lunar holiday so most people were gone, struck me as overall pretty good-looking—better-looking than the Koreans, which is funny because Korean dramas are very popular there, & I was told they think a lot of the stars are really good looking. So, it was far too small a sample of people to get much of an idea of anything except my terror of the cockroaches covering the sidewalks at night. I can’t tell you how terrible I feel for Mercedes having to witness every scream & jump that occurred really every few feet every night. Apparently when the Taipeians are away the sidewalks are theirs.

I also learned a lot about Mandarin, which Mercedes & Andy were staying in Taiwan to study. For one thing, there are 2 scripts. Simplified, which is the one used in mainland China now, which came from the Cultural Revolution. And classic, which of course has lots more lines & is what is used in Taiwan. Basically, as you’d guess, simplified was supposed to make the ornate characters simpler, to make reading & writing easier. Their friends in Taiwan suggested they study classic because it’s what’s used there & would allow them to read simplified too. Funnily enough, that seems only to be true to native speakers, because honestly, to my totally untrained eye & Mercedes’, uh, much more studied eye, there is little resemblance at all, so they can’t read simplified, & switched to that—the impetus for Mercedes to learn Chinese was working in China all those years but never being able to speak it. Initially, it was so when she went back to visit she could better communicate, but she is considering working for a year or two, if she can, so that they money spent on travelling the world could be made back & put toward building her own home, as she has always wanted.

Leaving the reading and writing, then you get into the tones. Well, sort of. We’ve all heard it’s a tonal language, so yes, the tones help dictate the meaning of the word. But more than that, it’s also, even more so, a contextual language. Mercedes showed me the meaning of one tone’s “yo” sound. This one sound with that particular tone had no less than 60 different meanings, some of which even contradicted each other. You also may have heard that there is no past tense in Chinese. For tense & the one meaning that the speaker intended for pretty much every word/sound they utter requires using the rest of the sentence or sentences around it. Hence, Mercedes could never just give one sentence in an email to her coworkers to translate, because it could mean any vast number of things when there are no other sentences around it to tell them if this sentence is about shirts, women, boats, the sun, a leader, a loser, yellow, flies, or God only knows what. Nevertheless, they were both doing well using the language, especially Andy who was studying a bit more consistently than Mercedes, & seemed to be really latching on to the different rules, etc.

We took a cooking class, making various kinds of dumplings, & shockingly my absolute favorite was the sesame seed dessert ones. & I learned that juniper berries are an awesome addition to dishes, only not when they’re green because eating them causes stomach cramps.

Our sesame dumplings

      

Drinks menu & dumplings at restaurant

Otherwise, Mercedes & I spent a good amount of time on our class’ reunion page, where pics from the reunion neither of us attended were. There were a lot of surprises, mainly in how Mercedes, who could never remember the names of people she’d worked with for years, only knowing them by the nicknames she gave them, was suddenly remembering more names of people than I did. This is unprecedented in the 20-some years we’ve been friends. Not only was she the one remembering names & jogging my memory, but she could often place the faces that had changed a lot in 20 years to those names. For the love of God, she remembered this guy Tom that I always called TJ, who ate lunch with me & some friends junior or senior year of high school (she rarely, or never, ate with us because she graduated early, so had more classes). She’s also friends with a lot more people on facebook than I am, so was updating me on them.

I really enjoyed high school, & I never thought I’d never forget pretty much anyone. So the fact that 10 & now 20 years had erased all but my immediate friends was really surprising.

There was one more surprise though, & that was my somewhat new & very different feelings about people from the LHS reunion pics who had also gone to my elementary school. Everyone who was in 6^th grade at St. Luke’s except for Katie, the other girl who was severely harassed along with me, was grouped in with the worst offenders, & I wanted nothing to do with any of them, at all, ever. They were all guilty by association. So when I was still an infrequent user of fb & got a friend request from a girl who I really don’t remember adding to the list of people making my life hell, I was outraged. Did she not remember what happened? How exactly could you forget? No one could avoid it, they could just ignore it at best or join in. But even probably 5-7 years ago, that wasn’t enough for me to see your nonparticipation as not guilty. So I was very surprised to see a comment from the boy I’d had a crush on during the first half of 6^th grade, and think not only that I had no bad feelings toward him (he hadn’t been one of the harassers), but more to the point, felt curious about him.

For a week I couldn’t stop thinking about how I kind of wanted to at least send a friend request, but wasn’t completely sure I should since it was so unprecedented for me to want to reach out to anyone at school that year. I scrolled through his friend list, & none of the offenders were there. I decided to send it. From what I could see of his profile, he was rarely, if ever, on there, so maybe he wouldn’t even see it, never mind consider it.

Usually when I send a request to someone I haven’t seen in years, I send a short message too. I didn’t send one to Jeff, because I still couldn’t figure out what exactly I would say. It was another few weeks after he accepted the request that I finally just said I wondered how he was doing. He wrote back—he seems to be a very laid-back guy who paid no attention to English class & punctuation. In any event, I’m surprisingly glad I did it.

Weirdly, a couple of months ago I started dealing with a lot of leftover feelings from that year, mainly in the way of recognizing that doing the typical victim thing & turning all the feelings on myself had been the wrong thing to do, & working on forgiving myself for doing that. Since then, the rest of life has taken over & I haven’t ruminated on what happened or the fallout since. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll finally be able to leave the past in the past.