Radioactive Rain

We had dinner with our neighbor Jin the other night. His English is passable but not awesome, and my Korean is not even passable, but he tried to explain to us something about Japan. The next morning, there was a bottle of something on our doorstep with a note, which explained that the kelp-seaweed mix in the bottle was to ward off radiation. Now, I work on a military base, which obsessively tests radiation levels on a regular basis as a matter of national security, so I know there's no harmful radiation here. Nonetheless, the next day it rained and Mr. Pan came in and told me it was radioactive rain from Japan. When we went out for dinner with some friends that night, we did not take out the umbrella because it was only spritzing. A Korean guy told us to use our umbrella because the rain was radioactive.  The Americans we were with thought that was hilarious.

I guess sensationalist news exists all over the world. I'm sure that if there were some way to say that Arab nations were sending radioactive rain towards America, Fox News would be the first to run the story, and probably not the last.

In other news, the cherry blossoms are here! We took a walk down our street this morning, and Maya mostly behaved herself. She had a “conversation” with a Jindo that had the people around us scattering, which is why I don't walk her down the road without Bobby. He had to lift her up and carry her for a few blocks.

Outside of our house

Are you f'ing kidding me?

Okay, I'm finally going to go there.  Maybe it's because I believe I have been here long enough to make a fair assessment in context, or maybe it's just because it's Sunday, it's raining, and we haven't really done anything blog worthy this week.  When I was a younger woman, I used to complain about how appearance obsessed my contemporaries were.  Well, I had not seen anything yet.

Awhile back, a friend pointed out the plastic surgery billboards downtown, and once I noticed them, I noticed how many there were.  Asian women are renowned for their beauty, but Korean women--in particular, as I noticed after visiting China and Japan--have a noticeably airbrushed look.  Well, there's a reason for this.


Did you notice the BMI index in Korea, which is vastly different from ours?  Also, that the plastic surgeon was counseling an underweight woman to get liposuction because she is "bigger than most of the women her age?"  Perhaps you caught the part about job interviews.  Koreans actually have to attach a picture of themselves to their resumes!

I know Americans have our own issues with body image.  It seems like we have a hard time doing anything in moderation.  We're either too large or way too small, and either way we're completely obsessed with food and dieting.  But over here, it's institutionalized.  I should also point out that the people on treadmills are all over 40.  This is because muscles are not considered sexy, so young women prefer starvation diets to the diet-and-exercise combo that doctors recommend.

I could also touch on how Korea is miles behind the rest of the industrialized world in women's employment, women's involvement in politics, and the women to men's salary ratio (60 cents to the dollar!)  Sometimes I think I'm surrounded by Henrick Ibsen's A Doll's House writ large.  I guess that's all I'll say on that.