More Korean Observations.

Man I sure could go for a bowl of Corn Chex right now. Crunchy goodness... so this Sunday's blog will kind of be a fruit salad of little tidbits of info that have been saved up over the last few weeks. I have several Korean Observations (KO's) for those of you who are just joining us, so we'll go back and forth. Sorry if I give you whiplash.
Speaking of food, it's really not that bad here. There is a Costco in Busan and while you may not be able to get the exact type and brand you are used to, you can always find a generic version. So I do miss Corn Chex but I have lots of other cereals to choose from and I have a stash of Rold Golds hidden in the pantry. (I give the kids the generic Korean pretzels, they're too young to have good taste anyway...).  The only exception to this rule is baked goods which I have discussed before - they like to put mysterious centers in their rolls and stuff, and I have now been to several B-day parties and can report that Korean cake tastes like NOTHING. Like a mouthful of packing peanuts lightly sprinkled with sugar. Sooo not worth the calories. But, it makes it easier to do the low-carb thing, so you have to look on the bright side!
KO #1: Koreans eat things that are NOT FOOD. I will give you 2 examples:

The following 2 side dishes were given to me with a recent meal. Both defy description. The thing on the left is some kind of bright yellow root vegetable with the texture of a water chestnut (yuck) and the flavor of a cleaning product. They have tried to disguise the fact that this is NOT FOOD by putting their omnipresent Korean red sauce on it, but I am not that easy to fool. I was not able to discreetly swallow this item. And I can suck it up and and swallow some weird stuff. Had to spit it into my napkin and rinse my mouth. On a scale of 1 to NOT FOOD, this scores an 11. All I can think is that their ancestors must have been really, REALLY hard up at some point. When we were all in the hunter gatherer stage we tried it and spat it out and said, "Yo, Brak (or Thor, Ubu, insert cave person name of choice...) tried this yellow root, and it's NOT FOOD. It may even be poison Bro..." and then we moved on to potatoes or some other yummy option. The Korean hunter/gatherers however were obviously in a situation where they had to classify as food anything they could physically masticate and swallow without either projectile vomiting or death as a result. Poor, poor bastards....
The item on the right is Kelp. Now I could get this down, but it was nasty, salty, and incredibly, jaw-numbingly hard to chew - and nothing about the experience inspired me to take a second bite. If I was starving on a beach, I would go for it, but to pay for it in a restaurant, and eat it with free will when there are other delicious options??!?! They must be crazy!
   Of course, having been raised by survivalists, I can't help putting the emergency, "end of the world" Y2K, massive volcanic eruption, socio-economic breakdown spin on things, and I have decided that in any of the aforementioned scenarios, the Koreans will really have a huge leg up on the rest of the world. We'll be whining and starving and all out of viable food, and they'll be down at the beach eating kelp and getting along just fine thank-you as they wait for all the wegugin idiots to die off from starvation so they can then eat OUR kelp. When you eat things that are NOT FOOD, you have a whoooole lot more options in a survival situation.
   Example 2. Damn I wish I had a picture of this, but I VOW to get you one folks... We were at Costco and lining up for delicious Costco Dogs and I noticed that many, many people had a big plate of what looked like mustard colored baby poop. Hmm. Checked the menu. Nothing weird on there there that I can see, same old standard Costco choices that you find all over the world. Could it be that there is an offering only written in Korean since they think the Wegugin contingent would never be interested? So I asked my friend Soon about this (she was with me) and she's Korean and gave me the whole scoop. Koreans like Costco dogs and a coke just as much as the next person, but they just can't fathom eating a meal without their multitude of side-dishes. So what do they do? They go over to the hotdog fixins area, get a heaping plate of onions, add ketchup and mustard, mix it all together and... tadaaa! A side dish. Not a topping, mind you - a platter of condiments that they eat by itself with a spoon. I am going to repeat this: They make a dish out of condiments. And eat it. And think it's great. Wow. We do that too, but only if you're the main character in a Lifetime Original Movie, living in a singlewide trailer with 5 kids and your husband has left you and it's the "rock bottom" scene of the film where you cry and vow that you and your children will never have to make a meal out of condiments again.


Moving on:


KO #2: Shopping in Korea. Where oh where do I start on this one? So there is, as I stated in the last blog, an incredible mix of old and new here. We went to Busan last weekend on an organized trip and they had a really nice shopping street with any kind of high-end store you could think of. There was Patagonia, Levi's, designer boutiques, you name it. It was almost a step-up from the Old Mill district in Bend or Market Street in the Woodlands. There were these little golden animals all down the sides of the street, presumably so you could get your bearings or have a place to meet your friends "Meet me at the golden pig at 3 ok?" and such.

If you venture down the narrow, steamy side streets however you get to kick it "old school" and check out all kinds of funky little hole-in-the-wall stores selling everything from clothes to chocolate covered seaweed (an actual item, purchased by yours truly. It was chocolate, so I had to try it right? NAS-TY.) to simmering pots of God knows what. So just within the space of a few city blocks you can mingle with the bold and the beautiful, or go taste adventure (literally) in the alleyways. It's nice to have options.
If you go into the high end shops, you get your own personal stalker. This is a salesperson who comes over, and invades your personal space to the point where you know what they had for lunch and whether or not they have good pores. They follow you around, wipe off or re-fold anything you pick up, and will actually start taking things out of your hands and putting them back for you. At first I was kind of insulted and assumed they thought I was going to shoplift or something. I soon learned that they do this to everyone and consider it being "helpful". Which makes browsing extremely stressful. Last weekend I tried to find hiking shoes. Went to a few places that didn't have any women's shoes big enough for my size 9's. Wow. Went to one store and found a sale pair that was 8 and 1/2 and felt pretty good. The problem was that the sales lady would not sell them to me. I don't speak Korean and she didn't speak English but I guess she got the gist that I am normally a size 9 and that I was going for the smaller pair. I said "It's Ok!, OK, they feel good. This works!" She took the shoes and cluched them to her chest and shook her head and went "No Good! No Good!" And wouldn't give me the damn shoes!! So finally we got some other person with limited English to help out and it turns out that she didn't want me to have them because when you hike you're supposed to get a size larger, and since these were slightly smaller that I normally wear, she was pretty sure that buying them would ruin my life and send me into a downward spiral of drug use and depression. I said that it was no problem, and that that they felt good and my toes had space and everything, and they STILL WOULDN'T GIVE ME THE SHOES! I had the money in my hand and they wouldn't do it. I had to walk away. They take customer service to a whole new level.
   I ended up buying Men's shoes at the 5th store. The lady chased me out of the store and gave me a really nice pair of hiking socks. That's another thing about Korean shopping, it doesn't matter what you buy, they love to throw in a freebie. Even my milk comes with a few yogerts taped to the side, and when you buy cereal, you get anything from free tupperwear to free socks. Don't know what I'm going to do when I get back to the states and my cereal doesn't come with free socks anymore...


KO#3: They love hierarchy, and somebody has to be the low man on the totem pole. We have seen this again and again. In Jeff's company the lowest executive has to scurry around at business meetings, serving everybody tea, coffee or beer depending on the situation. And it's always him, and they just keep him RUNNING! Poor guy must be praying for a new hire so he can move up a notch. Jeff says it's like watching a pledge at a frat party. I got my haircut last week and there was the main guy that cut my hair, and then there was the pledge. He stood next to the main guy and swept up hair. Not when the haircut was over mind you, but all. through. the haircut. He swept up the floor every minute or so, he brushed me off with a little brush all throughout the experience, and when the main dude was doing the front, he actually caught the hair on a little tray so it wouldn't fall in my face. Really! And you could tell that these 2 guys weren't going out for coffee or a couple of beers together after work. It was a master/peon relationship to the nth degree.
  About my haircut. You know in Houston I went for short hair, (which I love) and I went to a nice, high end salon to get it cut the first couple of times. Here's how it goes down when I go to a new place:
Me: "Ok, I like it kind of short and choppy, and layered and I like it to just kind of do it's own thing"
High End Salon Artisan: "And what is your daily regimen?"
Me: "My regimen?"
HESA: "Yes, like what kinds of product do you use and do you curl, blowdry, flat iron or what"
Me: "Um Yeah.... I don't do any of those things."
HESA: "So what can you commit to?"
Me: "On some days it will get combed"
HESA: "What?!?"
Me: "Ok, MOST. On Most days it will get combed"
HESA: "Ok, well I have some wonderful product lines to introduce you to!"
Me: "Hmmm, I don't think I can commit to product."
HESA: "How about blowdrying, can you commit to that?"
Me: "Dude, I would love to make you happy and lie right now, but it's not going to happen. So the parameters for the cut are on most days it will get combed. Do the best you can under those conditions. C'mon I have great hair and it does really interesting things all on it's own. Each day is like a nice little surprise!"
So then the HESA goes into the back and cries for a while but then they get a pep-talk from their fellow HESA's and they re-group and come out and do a great job and charge me $60. So after about 4 times of this, I went to Great Clips after a haircut. Showed the girl my hair and asked her if she could do that. She said she could totally do it. So I went to her. And she gave me the same exact same haircut for $12 in a quarter of the time. I mean the chick was like Edward Scissor Hands. In and out in 15 minutes. No product pitches, no wringing of hands over my inability to commit to "regimes".  I loved that woman - she totally got me.
So now I am in Korea and I figure I will go get it cut once and that will decide whether or not I can continue with short hair or just say "forget it" and grow it out. Ask the girls where to go and they say "Tony and Guy - downtown." Ok, so right away you know that if a salon is featured in Vogue Magazine, I got no business going there, but I put my game face on and in I go.
HESA gives me lots of pictures to look at, none of them are really my cut so I give him my shpiel about just keep it short and cute and let it do it's own thing, and he looks truly frightened. I tell him (via translator) "Just go for it, jump right in - I believe in you!" and he proceeds to give me a great haircut, but with massive, painstaking attention to detail. Took over an hour and I think at some points he was literally cutting it one hair at a time. At the end he did the product, style thing and I felt truly guilty. I'm thinking, "It's windy out, I have no car and this little style thing will be all done within one city block. Don't throw your pearls to swine dude..." but there was no way to tell him that so I just sat and watched the Master/Peon relationship play itself out. At least it was entertaining....