Life in Korea

Today is Thursday the 24^th of May.  The Queen’s birthday and Buddha’s are almost together this year.  Jay is doing his home workout, and I’m at the laptop, after sitting on the deck enjoying a fruit salad, coffee and peanut butter on some tasty flat puffed rice things that I bought after a walk on the hill the other day.  One of my favorite pastimes when I’m at the apartment is to sit on the deck that overlooks the street and watch the action of people’s daily lives.  When Jay leaves for school, I’m going to go out and walk all over the neighborhood, much farther afield than I have ventured up to now.  My main aim is to find a birthday present for my mom’s 91^st on June 7.  Mom and Dad’s 70^th anniversary is on June 20^th, so I might try to find something for the two of them.  I will modify the Korean custom of having matching outfits for the honeymoon by buying them similar pants and tops in the style of the old Korean people I see on Jay’s street, not that these couples wear matching outfits, in fact at that age there are very few men, so I might have trouble finding something for dad.  Jay says that in Korea, as elsewhere, men die younger than women.  But here it is even younger because they still smoke and drink a lot more than women do.  You hardly ever see women smoking in public here, certainly not while walking around.  It seems that men go out partying a lot together, often after work.  Women run the house and look after the kids for many years, but when that job is done, they get a bubble perm, start gathering in groups, hiking, etc. and carry on relatively freely for much longer than their partners.  Another thing I’ve noticed is that retired people seem to take on community maintenance tasks, picking up and generally tidying the neighborhood.  Jay’s neighborhood is really clean and well treed.  The whole of Incheon seems to have been planned to provide wide streets as well as sidewalks and bike lanes.  Even the main thoroughfares are lined with hedges and trees so that they are usually shaded whenever you walk down them, not like Highway 97 or 27^th Street in Vernon and Carling Ave. in Ottawa.

It’s Friday morning now, and I’m in a coffee shop near Jay’s.  It has an English name, Angel in Us.  Whenever you see English on t-shirts or signs, it’s usually ‘Konglish’, some enigmatic mix of words that may be meaningless or oddly cute or worse.  I ordered a Dutch Americano, which I am at pains to distinguish from an ordinary Americano, but it cost more, 5,500 won, about $5.25 Canadian and it’s just a black coffee.  I had to ask for milk because they don’t have the stations they have in Canadian coffee shops with everything from cream to cinnamon.  Things are more expensive in Korea than Canada.  I was unable to find anything that was reasonably priced and interesting for mom and dad yesterday, so I think I will buy their gifts at home.  I came to this shop at 9:00am so that I could Skype mom and dad because Jay’s Wi-Fi is down.  I had e-mailed Bert and Peggy to ask them to phone them but then I got the idea this morning that I could Skype from Angel in Us.  It worked, but as I didn’t want to talk loudly for long and as mom and dad don’t hear me unless I do, we had a short conversation.  Here are some pictures of life in Incheon:

A bar not far from Jay's with a name that is as close to my name as you can get in Korean.  May told me that it means 'cheers' in Korean.

One of the many soju and beer bars in the Seoul/Incheon area that has a German/Swiss/Canadian facade.  If you click on the picture, you will see the moose head more clearly.

A retired volunteer cleaning up the area outside Jay's apartment

These grandmas are walking together, although at first glance you might not think so.  They went around the block a few times in this formation.

Jay and the girls relaxing on Sunday morning

May rarely relaxes.  Here she's running back to the kitchen with a bowl of rice from the rice maker that is always warm  in the back porch.

Here's an enigmatic sign in 'Konglish'.  It's the name of an ordinary corner store,'Gag Story Mart'.  Jay says that Koreans always say gag for joke in English and that everything is a 'story'; the word is stuck on to any other word for no apparent reason.