Today is my one month anniversary with Korea. My shower helped me celebrate this morning by giving me hot water for the first time since arriving in this country. You see, my shower has been putting me through a rigorous series of cruel hazing rituals for the last month. Not only has it forced me to put up with extreme discomfort in tight quarters, a general lack of water pressure, and partial hypothermia, but it also greeted me with a whopper of a clog that even three bottles of Drano could not cure. While I (sort of) fixed the drain issue, the hot water issue proved to be a crippling challenge which I approached with a new method of attempted repair every day…and every day, I failed abysmally. But today, I finally defeated the cold water demons (I won’t bore you with how I accomplished this unremarkable feat). Not surprisingly, a few hours after I relearned that personal hygiene doesn’t have to feel like a mild form of torture, someone finally showed up to my apartment to help me fix my hot water; it looks like the shower got the last laugh.
But alas, I have learned more in the last month than how to deal with a perpetually unpleasant bathing experience. Here is a brief, bulleted list of some of the other things that Korea has taught me thus far:
1. How to routinely escape the untimely death of getting run over by a motorcyclist, a taxi driver, or an elderly but feisty pedestrian
2. How to never be disappointed when the breads and sweets that looked so delicious in the display case fail to taste even remotely similar to the way they appear
3. How to eat cow spine soup and enjoy it immensely
4. How to waste 10 minutes of class time by measuring your eyelashes with a ruler
5. How to get a Korean guy with a Kate Gosselin haircut to tell you repeatedly without inquiry that he is, in fact, not a homosexual
6. How to inadvertently get a Korean co-worker to put random notes and gifts on your desk every day
7. How to get store proprietors and food vendors to inexplicably give you significantly more than you paid for
8. How to unintentionally annoy the entire British population with your accent, vocabulary, and removal of the “u” in the words “colour” and “favourite”
9. How to tell a stranger in Korean that you would prefer it if he didn’t clean your ears (Kwi-so-je-neun ha-ji ma-se-yo)
10. How to get a taxi driver to take you anywhere in three words or less
11. How to feel tall by being yourself
12. How to drunkenly convince yourself that you are, in fact, in the women’s bathroom even though you see men using urinals
13. How to use metal chopsticks with only a moderate amount of incompetence
14. How to take thirty minutes to read a non-phonetic word in Korean (and feel proud of this accomplishment)
15. How to do almost anything with a hangover (and feel proud of this accomplishment)
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Jess, you crack me up. Take care and I'm sending you warm water wishes! Bec
ReplyDeleteI don't really get telling a korean not to clean your ears. Why would you ever use this phrase.
ReplyDeleteAm I taking things too literally. Ma
yes...you are taking things too literally...i would never need to actually use this phrase for any reason...i learned it because of the ridiculousness of it...this phrase was in my phrase book and it seemed odd, so for this reason I learned it...sarcastically...you will never understand my sense of humor, will you?
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