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1. This morning our thespian kindergartners put on a rousing performance for their parents, roleplaying the timeless tales of The Gingerbread Man and Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Who loves papa? Mama loves papa. Who loves mama? Papa loves mama. Mama and papa love baaaaby bear.

It was great and I'm really glad I didn't sneak off upstairs to power-nap like I had planned. But after the closing bows, parents rushed to the stage to bestow great bouquets of flowers upon their prodigal children. I was momentarily shocked because; number one, it was GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS PERFORMED WITH CUT-OUT BEAR MASKS and, number two, these kids are SIX YEARS OLD. With all the camcording and fawning, you would've thought they just opened a Broadway show to great critical acclaim.

Afterwards the parents swept off with great gusto, wonderous offspring in tow. Curiously enough, several of the children were left behind, ditched by their mothers to take the bus home, which saddened me, so together we drew crayon pictures of their fancified roses. The roses were all purple and blue and acid-green thanks to a wide variety of filthy food-coloring diets, and dressed up brashly in silks and gauze paper. Leave it to the Koreans to try and 'enhance' the beauty of something like a flower. The Western teachers decided the effect was very similar to that of an over-painted court jester, all tassles and jingles and sadness in a corner. A rather dismaying example of When a Philosophy of Continual Improvement Hits a Wall and Clambers Over Anyways.

2. Everyone thinks that double barber-poles outside a building in Korea automatically mean that you can find a massage parlour with happy endings within. This is totally false. Urban Korea is riddled with barber-poles. True, there are lots of hookerhouses around and, true, they almost always fall under the guise and sign of a barbershop, but the signals aren't quite as easy as looking for two barber-poles, or barber-poles spinning in opposite directions or anything so simplistic as that.

There's a regional code-word embedded in the name of barbershops that double in prostutition (in Hangul, of course), and such places are always in the basement. Barber-poles on the roof of a building are also a good sign. And if there's a guy at the front desk who looks pissed off when you accidentally barge into his establishment in a drunken haze, you know you've hit the slut-money.

I'm telling you this as a general source of interest, not because I have actually been sampling said brothels... the word is that most well-established prostitutes won't even touch Westerners for fear of losing their regular Korean clientele. Wouldn't wanna disrupt the delightful undercurrent of flagrant adultery and marital muteness that Korea has built for itself, anyway.

3. Koreans think that a tomato is, categorically, a vegetable. No joke. We argued about this over beers for a long time last night, placing incredulous bets and laughing at each others' stupidity until we Googled tomatoes from the bartender's computer and realized that yes, indeed, Korean science supplants Western definition and fully believes that a tomato is a vegetable. And what's crazier, they think watermelon is a vegetable too! We finally settled on a draw for our debate, citing cultural differences and each quietly contemplating a rift in the world so vast as to leave tomatoes and watermelons drifting in the chasm between.

Posted by Chris at 05:51 AM >> Commentations (1)