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| The Loot |
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| A heart made of pepero boxes |
November 11, 2011 was Pepero Day. Never heard of it? Peperos are these long chocolate covered stick candy's that are about 90 cents for a box of 12. Of course there are also more deluxe and giant versions that you see around the holiday. The reasoning behind the date of the celebration is the fact that 11/11 looks like four pepero sticks! And since this year it was 11/11/11, it was actually the Centennial Pepero Celebration! The company Lotte which is behind the original peperos claims they were not at fault for creating this holiday, it was actually two teenage girls in Busan who started it by exchanging pepero boxes on November 11th in order to wish each other to "grow tall and slender like a Pepero". Most people don't buy that the real reason behind a candy giving event was truly two girls trying to remain thin, however. Whatever the case of its origins, the event is outrageous. Days before the 11th we saw many moms coming out of the supermarket near our school with their shopping carts literally filled to the top with Pepero boxes. I still have no idea what they were planning to do with all of them! Family Marts (the sort of mini stops Korea has on every corner) all had giant Pepero displays out front complete with spotlights and balloon arches. On the actual day I was given so many boxes of Peperos, giant Pepero sticks, and even some delicious donut type sudo Peperos that I had to make a whole shelf in my pantry dedicated to them.
This holiday is a good opportunity for me to bring up some other very different events and things I have noticed while living in Korea before I get too used to them and forget they were actually odd to me in the first place. It is already becoming alarming how normal I find having rice with every meal, how I do a sort of head dip bow to most elders, and how I have recently began craving kim chi!
One of the first shocking things I encountered was that they do not wear shoes inside public places, including schools. Instead, children keep a pair of "slippers" on shelves there, or (gross) slip on a pair of the communal slippers you'll find at every school, hostel, and Korean restaurant. All apartments have a lowered platform when you first enter made just for taking off your shoes before coming inside. Some Koreans even hang bags outside their doors which they keep their shoes in (I'm guessing the ones that don't smell so great). These "slippers" that people put on vary from what we would think of in western culture, to plastic type slip on shoes my kindergartners wear with power rangers or hello kitty decorating them, to the soccer sandals myself and the other foreign teachers sport, to heeled nice looking ones that many of the Koreans clomp around in. I'm still not sure how taking off a pair of flip flops and putting on soccer sandals every day is more appropriate inside, but I now do so automatically and have noticed I've even stopped wearing shoes inside my own apartment- something I've never worried about before.
There are certain gestures that are used in Korea that I had to become used to as well. As I mentioned above, they bow deeply to their elders or authority figures when saying hello and goodbye- however I've only had a child bow to me when their parent was standing near watching. When accepting or giving something, like change at a supermarket, they place one hand on the forearm of the other arm which is giving the change. This is also to show respect. The farther up the arm you place your hand, the more respect it is said to convey. To call someone to you, you do not crook your finger as we are used to doing in the Western culture. Rather, you gesture for someone to come with your whole hand, plam down. At our school the foreign teachers refer to it as "the claw". This took be a few weeks to get used to; at first I kept getting confused that someone wanted me to sit down whenever they made this motion towards me. Koreans also have a unique was of sitting, or crouching. They do a sort of squat when resting, especially the older ones. It looks easy enough to do until you realize their heels remain touching the ground and it is almost impossible to imitate- and definitely not comfortable to those of us who haven't grown up doing it.
There are some beliefs that I have come across over the last few months which I find humerous. I serve my children lunch every day and have noticed that at certain times some that were sick would refuse the kimchi or anything else in the spicy red sauce. I asked finally one day and they said it was becuase the spicy sauce caused grey hair if they ate it while on medicine. This is pretty interesting to me since almost everything served is in spicy sauce, not just the red stuff. One of the strangest beliefs I have heard recentally has to do with fans. Some (very few I am sure) have started believing that fans kill people by sucking out all the air in a room. This came in the wake of a few deaths cuased by chill that came from fans. To satisfy the minority that hold this belief, Korean fans now almost all come with a 3 hour timer that automatically shuts them off.
It is very common in a school setting, or pretty much any one, to be told last minute to do something. A good example is being at an assembly and suddenly being passed a microphone and expected to give a speach and run an activity. They see nothing wrong with this and we were even warned about it at our one 3 hour training session we went to about a month ago. Also, Koreans do not enjoy confrontation and so preface many statments with "maybe" in order to get around this. This took me quite a while to realize as well, I just kept thinking they weren't quite sure of the answer and would get back to me- then I realized whatever came after 'maybe' was the end of the matter.
Korean couple have started a new trend called "couples wear". Many male/female couples you see walking around town will be wearing everything matching from sweatshirts, to jackets, to hats and shoes. Men often carry "man bags" (usually nicer than any purse I've ever owned), so from the back it can be very confusing which is the male and which the female.
I'll end this list of oddities with one that many of you may be wondering.... do they still eat dog? The answer is basically yes. It is not common at all any more, in fact I have heard rumors that it is illegal to do so still. I ask my kids on occasion just to see how they respond and most of them freak out and look around frantically saying no, but I can't help to feel like some of them are more nervous about what other children will think then necessarily telling the truth. They will tell me that "maybe" their parents or grandparents eat it, though. All I know is about 10 seconds from my apartment is a restaurant that translated reads "Grandma's Dog Soup". I rarely see customers there but there is a truck that sits outside with two cages in the back. One of the worst moments I've had since being in Korea was the day I walked by on the way to the bus and there were two happy looking dogs in those cages. I was half tempted to try and set them free on my way back but by the time I got home they were gone. A friend of a friend who was placed in a much smaller town farther north had a horrifying story about the the first day he came to Korea. He is the only westerner in his whole town, and to honor his arrival they had a bif feast with the whole community. After the meal he asked what sort of meat he had eaten and was told much to his horror that he had just consumed dog. Makes me glad I work in a little more contemporary of a place.
