Auto Insurance

Our auto insurance is out of this world. Granted, we haven't had to file a claim yet—knock the wood, as Mr. Yu says—but we have still gotten our money's worth. It's very cheap, $300 for a year. With this comes a full set of benefits. When we lock our keys out of the car, someone comes and lets us in at no extra charge. When we blow a tire, someone comes and replaces it, no charge. If we are bad enough planners to run out of gas, someone will come and give us some gas. It's time to renew our policy, and the insurance agent called me and offered to come visit my office so that I can pay and fill out the paperwork. It's going to be hard to go back to our old “pay a fortune and pray you never have to file a claim” stateside policy.

Melly Clistmas to All

This week has been hectic, but fun. On Monday, I had a Christmas ornament making party that drew in an unprecedented 35+ people. I crammed as many in as I could, then I started sending people away. Library events normally draw ten to fifteen people, so I was unprepared for the rush but glad to get the attention. Storytime has been well attended recently as well. I think the library is on the up and up.

On Wednesday, I had some kids from the youth center come in for a storytime. We read some of my old favorites, The Polar Express and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. The Polar Express was once a family tradition, and I was glad to read it to the kids, though they did keep making references to the movie! They sang some songs from The Grinch for me, holding hands and swaying like the whos. I think Christmas is far more fun when there are kids involved.

On Christmas Eve I made a chicken pot pie, which is kind of a tradition, and we gave some to our neighbor, Jin. He gave us a bowl of kimchi. I admit, I'm kind of over kimchi, but the homemade stuff is okay. It works wonders for the digestive tract.

On Christmas Day we had reservations at the Novotel, and we went downtown early in order to catch the new Harry Potter movie. Well, despite leaving at 4pm,we couldn't get into a single showing that would let out in time for our 8pm reservation. We tried four theaters, then bought tickets for the next day. We then wandered around for three hours, stopping for coffee.

The Christmas buffet at the Novotel was something. I actually liked the dinner we had last year better, but this one came with a Korean santa (he had clown shoes and made balloon animals), a beautiful view, and rows and rows of dessert tables. The place was packed, and the food was pretty good. Bobby got a robster (I will now always think of them as robsters). Our place card said “Hyarey,” which I guess is our Korean name.

The cats and dog got Christmas meals, despite the cats' sincere effort to wreck our tree. While we were gone last weekend, they managed to destroy the green lights as well as pulling some of my favorite ornaments off and batting them around the living room. Green is my favorite color! Little devils. Bobby got a PSP and I got an external hard drive and a mink robe. Of course, we bought a Christmas cake. This year was Bobby's choice. He went with the chocolate cake.

Puck next to our ravaged tree

Wrapping paper is Loki's favorite thing about Christmas

Us at the Novotel.  On my right is half of Korean Santa.

This year's Christmas cake

The Dragon Hill Lodge in Seoul.  They really do it up for Christmas

Christmas in Seoul, Reprise

We went to Seoul this weekend. We saw the Korea National Ballet perform The Nutcracker, had Indian food at that fantastic restaurant in Itaewon where we ate last Christmas, and went ice skating at Seoul Plaza. As you may have guessed, this trip was my Christmas present.

I loved seeing the Nutcracker again, which was very similar to the one I've seen at home, but a little different. There were similar costumes and sets, for example, but the Christmas tree had a fish on it. Not a fish ornament, a giant goldfish. There was also no nutcracker. The orchestra made the nut-cracking noise during the song when Drosselmeyer introduces the doll, but the doll was a kid wearing a lot of makeup and more closely resembled a clown. I guess the choreographers thought Koreans wouldn't know what a nutcracker is, anyway. The little girl who played Clara was amazing. She was doing some complicated stuff en pointe and she couldn't have been older than 13. They added a Christmas song medley at the end, when the dancers took their final curtain call.

The cabdriver who took us to the Seoul Arts Center (a fantastic, three storied opera house) didn't know what ballet was, which didn't surprise me after trying to explain it to my staff. There's a credit card commercial over here starring a famous ballerina, so I had thought it was in the public consciousness but I guess not. And yes, it is called ballet in Korea.

Seoul Plaza was all done up with a lighted Christmas tree and a large snow globe, and there was a skating rink in the center. Bobby preferred to stand on the sidelines and laugh at me as I struggled to remember how to skate. I finally got the hang of it about five minutes before closing time.

We encountered a protest at the train station, which isn't unusual. I see protests about 75% of the time I come to Seoul Station. The man on stage was shouting something very angrily, and I wasn't surprised when our cabdriver told us they were protesting the government's inaction in response to the bombing on Yeonpyeong Island. Many Koreans are upset about this, understandably so. The US is still in a war we entered as retaliation for the September 11 attacks nine years ago. Americans who have been in Korea for awhile are very nonchalant about the incidents this year. They say it has always been like this. I wonder if this fervor is going to die down after awhile.

The Good 'Ol Days

As I was contemplating several rather dismal homemade ornaments, the most random person popped into my head.  I do a lot of craft programs for the library.  People seem to like them, though I hate crafting with a passion.  I was never very good at it, and these ugly ornaments are proof.  I like to do my crafts beforehand so I can work out any kinks, though when I'm demonstrating I always start out with, "now, I know yours will look nicer than mine."

But the name was the interesting part of this story.  For the first time in years, I thought of a somewhat unbalanced former patron with a very distinctive voice whom I'll call DD.  DD made calling telephone reference a regular part of his day.  He was one of many.  It wasn't until I began working in telephone reference that I began to realize how many severely mentally unstable people there were wandering the streets.  Anyways, one of DD's tricks was to call every day to ask if a particular person had been released from jail.  I believe he was in trouble when this man got out, which didn't happen while I was working there.  DD would also call for various phone numbers, and once he asked me to write him a business plan so he could submit it to the government and get his free money (thinking, I believe, of an SBA grant).

He was a handful, but he was easier to deal with than Washington DC lady, by far our most persistent caller.  Washington DC lady would call for the numbers to various businesses, some of which no longer existed and some of which had very different names from the ones she gave.  She would call for the same number several times.  When confronted with the fact that her mind was almost gone, like when we told her some business did not exist, she would become very angry.

She was easier to deal with than Morphine Man, who was trying to get his roommate arrested or fired.  When he was done complaining about his roommate and trying to get legal advice from us (we didn't give it), he would try to stump us and then complain about receiving inadequate service.  A typical question from Morphine Man was, "so
what's going on these days?"  He got his name because we suspected that he was at a methadone clinic.

There was the Reverend BJ, who would sometimes ask me to read her every quote from the Bible with a particular theme, and sometimes thought our answers were too quick or simple, at which point she would say, "don't get smart with me!"  Media Man only wanted the numbers to various media outlets, about 3 a day, while HQ man thought that we could find him the direct line to a company's CEO if he just asked the right person (he kept asking for the head librarian).  South Carolina man was fascinated with the Romans, and wanted lots of little facts about them.  He then wanted to know where we found the answer.  He would ask the same question several times, and didn't like it when the answers weren't consistent, so we started photocopying the source material and highlighting the fact.  When someone quit paying his phone bill, he tried to call us collect, but we never accepted.

It's easy for me to tell stories about telephone reference with the fond humor that comes with having left a dismal situation.  Any one of those names would send a current telephone reference employee's blood pressure skyrocketing.  I guess what I'm saying is, crafting isn't really so bad.

Riddle Me This

Supposedly, the greatest human fear is public speaking.

People illogically differentiate between speaking and typing.  It's far easier for me to send out a strongly worded  email than to give someone a dressing down, and I think this is true for many people.  Nonetheless, the words and the effect of them are the same, whether spoken or written.  If anything, it's worse to write something mean or stupid, because the words can sit there in someone's inbox for years, and can be pulled out and dusted off when a spoken argument would be long forgotten.

People remain afraid of public speaking, but not of public typing.  One facebook post can reach hundreds of people.  How many of us, however, would walk in front of 500 people and report that we had pizza for lunch?

As I read my 100th squabble on the USAG Daegu Facebook page, I have to wonder if there was an evolutionary purpose to our fear of public speaking.  Sure, deep down, we don't want to hurt or offend people.  Our adrenal glands tell us this.  Now, by removing ourselves from the podium, we have bypassed this ingrained impulse to be polite in front of strangers and I, for one, don't like it.

And yes, I originally tried to make this a Facebook post, but couldn't condense it to 160 characters.

Christmas shopping

We went to Daegu's biggest shopping enclave, Seoumum market, to do our Christmas shopping. There are almost no traditional shopping malls here. There are a lot of shopping streets, and a couple of underground shopping malls. There are also multistory department stores. None of these sounded particularly appealing to me, and the best deals are to be had at the market.

We had been there once before, just a few days after we arrived. I remembered a rather overwhelming experience. We landed in the fish market and got pretty lost. We had not been back.

Seomum market actually turned out to be like a massive flea market, but with nicer things. We found some good deals. We ran across a store with Christmas trees, where most of the business appeared to be people taking pictures of the trees. The shopkeeper was happy to have a westerner there, and she chatted to me a bit.

For dinner, we went to a place that let you design your own pizza. I am proud to announce that, one year after arriving, we have finally found a place that sells real pizza. Their secret? They let you pick all of the ingredients. So while we could have mayonnaise as a sauce or top our pizzas with sweet potatoes, corn, and squid, we were also able to design a normal pizza. Success!