For the sake of simplicity I have decided that todays entry will be set up in the form of a meal...so lets start off with an apperitif: I have a cold and my head hurts, my stomach is still uncooperative and I have the chills. Wow! That sounds pretty bad for a start, but I will just make today a day of rest and I am hopeful that I will be back in biz by Monday...maybe even sooner. Rest assured the menu will get better.....or maybe not.... Lets throw in the mundane weather info here as well, as all my Swedish friends expects the weather to be part of any and all updates as such is the norm in Sweden: the weather is cold, like winter jacket cold, there is some snow on the ground, but not a huge amount. It's windy and that's probably the hardest part for me - the cold I can deal with, no prob, but the wind....that's another thing.
Now lets move on to an appetizer....let's cover some biz related items here ( thus get the boring necessities out of the way and save the best for last (I am feeling the pressure now to come up with something good for the end...ayayay)):
My fostermom, Kim Gyu-Soon, who is 84, slipped and fell and broker her left femur. She had surgery and is still at the hospital recovering. I was able to visit her the other day. When I got to her hospital bed she was sleeping so I grabbed a chair and just sat at her side staring at the wall, but then a nurse entered and woke her up. Kim Gyu-Soon looked at me for about 5 seconds without any facial expression....I was sure she would either have a heart attack or smile at me, but she did neither.....Korean elders are not the most emotional expressive people I have met.... I grabbed her hand, she put her head down, and that's how we sat for about an hour. Sometimes she would say something in Korean which went right over my head, and sometimes I would say something in English which went right over her head (I might just as well have spoken Swedish to her, or pig latin, for none of our conversation made it the short distance from the chair to the bed o vice versa.) To my fostermom I am Park Soo-Mi, the roly-poly baby that was flown off to Sweden.
Salad/Main Course: here I will do the Swedish version where salad is served at the same time and on the same plate as the main course, as compared to the States where salad is served separately before the main course (really, I'm thinking I just don't have that much to say, and I still have dessert-story to come up with.)
Today is my 6th day in Korea and I am.....
I walk down the street and I am....
In the subway I look straight ahead and i go...or barge is more like it, for I am tired of being pushed and shoved by Koreans....
I eat Korean food, the food I should I have been eating all along....
I watched a Korean drama.....and it was very Korean.
I am happy to be in Korea.
OK, this is really going down hill, but the fact is that when I try to explain how I feel about being in Korea, I run out of words....perhaps it is not me, perhaps there really are no words to explain these complex feelings (OK, Tobias, I know you probably can help me out with the wording here, so help me out man!)
All I can say in my limited version is that I am happy to be here.
Dessert! Finally! I thought I won a pair of bathroom slippers, but it was a hat! One night I had dinner with another ibjangin friend and after we went for a beer at a small, no tiny, bar in Myongdong. This place had two small tables, a short bar along the window and the bardisk itself (no seating .) We're talking and listening to the music that's blasting and sipping our Cass when all of a sudden the lights go out, red lights a la disco starts flying around the little bar, and the he-bartender grabs the mic and starts talking/entertaining while being assisted by the other bartender, a she-bartender. They talk and joke, everyone is laughing except me and my ibjangin friend for we don't understand what is going on.....well, we laugh, but for different reasons then the Korean audience, and then the he-bartender and the she-bartender start juggling bottles and glasses etc and finally they give out a few prizes - the bathroom slippers....until I got one and it turned out to be a hat with a Guiness label. I thought for about a second that I could possibly be the proud owner of a Guiness hat that looks like a pair of bathroom slippers.... and then I offered the hat to one of my roommates instead.
A roommate of mine (not the one with the Guiness hat a la bathroom slippers) thinks I should put more pics on my blog, thus i will try to make the effort.....see future entries.
BE GOOD, BE TRUE. love //m
