I'll take HodgePodge for 500 Alex!

Greetings

When I sat down to write a blog I realized that there were a lot of things that I wanted to talk about that weren't interesting or long enough to warrant their own blogs. Thus, I'm going to subject the loyal fans of Shayne and Jo.com (now the 199,765,876th most popular site on the internet) to a hodgepodge of recent stories and events.

First, as most of you are probably aware, I'm a slurpee fiend. There's nothing I love more than the cold refreshing taste of frozen cola sliding down my throat. In fact, in high school and university I used to drink over a litre of slurpee at one sitting, which in retrospect probably explains why I gained 70 pounds during those years.

I was shocked when I moved to Korea and found myself without access to slurpees. I tried calling Sally Struthers to assist me, but apparently the children of Africa still take precedent. Undaunted, I continued my search for months on end. But as I mentioned in August nothing was going to stop me from finding the Korean slurpee, and I'm proud to announce that a few weeks back I was successful.

Everland, Everland, Everland. Of course the Disneyland of Korea would be the one place that sells slurpees. Every Magic Kingdom needs to be equipped with them; it's the law. I think I scared the attendant when I ran to her booth shouting about how beautiful it was and how I was in love. She was relieved when it became clear that I meant the machine and not her.

Jo and Soon Tae probably thought I was crazy posing with the slurpee lady. But they didn't think I was so crazy when minutes later they were enjoying the fruits of my labour:


Here's Jo and Soon Tae enjoying a classic strawberry slurpee. I had been hoping for a Coke Slurpee, hell I would have even settled for a Pepsi one (maybe). But you know what they say, "in the land of Kimchi beggars can't be choosers."

Anyway, on to the second part of this blog: our door. In the summer we posted a blog about the daily barrage of advertisements we faced. Day after day dozens of advertisements would show up promoting everything from dried squid to pickled cabbage. Here, see for yourself:


Jo's brother Bryn suggested that we simply leave the advertisements on and see what happened after a month or two. We followed his suggestion and stopped cleaning the door every day after work. At first they just piled up. Soon there were dozens and dozens of the little billboards stuck to our door. But then one day something strange happened:


They just disappeared. Yep, one day they were all gone. And the process has been repeating itself ever since. I imagine that one of the neighbors grew tired with the unsightly mess and took the matter into his/her own hands. I think that we've turned into the equivalent of the one house on the block back in Canada that never mowed its lawn. How long until the neighbors start egging our place is anyone's guess.

So next Tuesday is Halloween and even though the Koreans don't actually celebrate it the children are really excited. They know that their Canadian teachers will spoil them with candy and as such Halloween has suddenly become the most important day of the year.

One of the characters most associated with Halloween is Dracula and the children love talking about him.

( The Conservatives eye another budget cut)

The other day in class I had a strange conversation, it went like this:

Shayne: What is Dracula?
Student: A vampire king!
Shayne: And what does Dracula drink?
Student: (very happily) Pee!!

At first I thought the student was trying to be rude for the benefit of his class. In between holding my own laughter, and wondering how my life had gotten to this point, I blurted out "what are you talking about? That's not funny." To which he replied "funny no, but he drinks pee, pee, pee!"

Then several of the other students pretended to bite each other while shouting "pee, pee, pee!" I realized that I was either missing something or I was witnessing a really good organized effort to pull a gag. It turned out it was the former as the Korean teacher came into the room and clarified that blood in Korean is pronounced "pee." Haha, an experience right up there with the salsa episode.

Lastly, today I got my haircut. Back home this wouldn't be worth mentioning but here it was a major event in my life. Luckily I found a place where the stylist spoke English and didn't try to give me a mullet like so many Koreans tend to rock.

The children are like hawks when it comes to noticing any small detail about my appearance. Combine that with the fact that they don't understand the concept of 'inner thoughts' (often telling the various teachers they look fat, etc) and I was a little worried how they would handle my haircut. As you can see I decided to go a little shorter than usual:

The only people in Korea who have hair this short are the men enlisted in the army. The children were as brutal as I expected so I decided to share some of their reactions with you. Thankfully some were a lot nicer than others:

"Teacher looks like a monkey"

"Teacher looks ugly"

"Teacher looks like good hair style"

"Teacher looks like white soldier"

"Teacher, good, look" (poor little Jun Suk, one day he will grasp sentences)

"Teacher looks like monkey excrement left in the sun too long (ok, that one was Jo)

Alrightttttttttty, that's about it. That ended up being a lot longer than I thought. But together we tied some loose ends, made a few friends, and learned about how important telling the truth is. Well, one out of three ain't bad.

Cheers

Shayne