And now, the weird things

So my last blog post was mostly positive, but I think it's time for a little complaining. These are the things that annoy me about Korean culture thus far:

-There are rarely paper towels or hand dryers in any bathroom you go into anywhere. You are supposed to wash your hands and then just wave them around for the next ten minutes or wipe them all over your clothes until they dry. I'm sure I've gone into several classes with wet hand marks all over my pants. Annoying.

-Soap in bathrooms usually consists of a goopy green bar sitting in a cesspool of a soap holder, or a suspicious looking ball of soap attached to a swinging metal arm thing attached to the wall, called, for no identifiable reason, Yeremy. Yeremy the swinging soap ball. Man, do I hate Yeremy. Not only do you have to weirdly caress Yeremy's slick blue curvature to get any soap on your hands, but you have to somehow avoid jamming your rings into the soap ball, which leaves you with lovely blue-caked rings. Yeremy is not my friend.

-Bathroom floors are often wet. I never see anyone mopping them, but ostensibly someone is and this is the reason for a constant water slick. I'm sorry, folks, but it just seems dirty to me.

-There are squat toilets in most bathrooms. Squat toilets look like urinals tipped over on their sides and implanted in the bathroom floor. The flusher is low to the ground. To be honest, I have no problem with the squat toilets; after all, I like to camp and I'm not above doing my business in the woods. I'm cool with that. What I am not cool with is the toilet paper baskets that you find in most stalls. The plumbing system in some cases has not been updated to allow for the flushing of toilet paper. This means that regardless of what kind of business you have done in the bathroom, you must dispose of your soiled toilet paper in the plastic basket next to you. You can imagine what sort of weird funk of a smell this engenders. It's not as bad as you might think, but it's not good either.

-The food, for the most part, rules; however, I have noticed that for some dishes color is not a consideration. For example, there was this lovely cold salad type dish I had at school that had cucumbers and onions and leeks . . . all very yummy and colorful, and then thrown in for good measure were dirty water colored cubes of gelatin. These cubes had no taste whatsoever and crudely put, looked like poo water. Then there was a soup with noodles and mushrooms that had the same dirty dishwater coloring to it. It might have tasted fine and dandy, but I couldn't get over the color as I was raising the murk-filled spoon to my lips.

-My desk is in a room filled with other desks and teachers. It's a big communal area where everyone does their lesson preparation and where they all have tea/coffee together and take breaks, etc. Apparently, it's perfectly acceptable to take a nap at your desk. I've seen a few fellows just hunker down into their chairs and snore away for a good half hour. Nobody cares. This doesn't really bother me much, but I do find it fascinating. How is this ok?

-Before we came here, we were told about personal space issues....as in, Koreans don't believe in personal space. Everyone is in your face all the time. So far, I'm ok with that. In some ways it makes navigating through a supermarket or a city street easier--you just walk where you want to walk and people have to deal with it. I don't spend as much time apologizing or saying excuse me when trying to get somewhere. This may mean I'm going to turn into a total jerk by the time I get back to the U.S. We'll see. The other night though, Joe and I were walking around our neighborhood and an old lady was walking beside us. She noticed Joe and started making lustful grunting noises in his general direction. Then she just reached out and started feeling his biceps, all the while murmuring what I can only assume were sweet nothings in Korean. She licked her lips a few times, and then gave him a couple good pats on the old biceps for good measure and went about her business. We're not in Kansas anymore, folks. :)