Archive for November, 2006

Time Zones

Almost universally, one celebrates one’s birthday according to the day on which one was born. One increments one’s years of age by one at the beginning of that day – despite being anywhere up to 23 hours 59 minutes and 59 seconds short of having spent that many years ex utero. So, it seems to me, my birthday in a different time zone, by such practice, should be the day it was when I was born in that timezone. Having been born in the early morning, California time, I managed to make it into the seven hour window of date-overlap (this time of year anyway – daylight savings time) between Korea time and California time. So I say it is just as much my birthday right now, in Korea, as it ever was at any time on November 28th before the actual time of my birth.

Had I been born later in the day, or, if I was currently teaching English a few time zones to the East, my birth would have been on the 29th already in my present time zone, and then, well, I just don’t know. In such cases, maybe I’d have to wait a day and celebrate on the 29th. Or maybe I just wouldn’t get a birthday that year.

What do you think?

Happy Pepero Day!

On Friday, in my first class of the morning (3rd grade), I did my standard for every class initial ten minutes or so of walking around talking individually to random students. I was getting a lot of “happy”s to my “how are you”s, so I asked one of the more advanced kids “why?” (a question which is apparently very easy to understand and very hard to answer without much vocab). Turns out this Saturday, all across South Korea, is the unofficial holiday of Pepero Day. That’s not a translation, that’s what they call it in Korean.

Pepero is the Korean incarnation of the little chocolate covered stick-shaped cookies, which may be familiar to some of my readers under their Japanese branding, Pocky.

pocky vs pepero

So why Pepero Day? Because the date is 11/11. On the solar calendar anyway. You figure it out. The Wikipedia article on Pepero Day says there’s a rumor that it was started by middle school girls in Pusan. One fellow English teacher posted to our email list to report that a coworker of his claimed it was a 2,000 year-old Korean tradition. When this fellow teacher responded that they haven’t been using this particular calendar here that long (not to mention cookies or chocolate coverings thereof), he was greeted with silence. I’ll go ahead and subscribe to the belief that it’s kind of like the Korean version of Valentine’s day, without any of the pretense of having a saint behind it or anything. It’s just “hey buy lots of our product day.” I’m a big fan of any lack of pretense. I’m also a fan of having the script seriously flipped; rather than me giving out the candy, I received a rather ridiculous amount of it. Here is all the 1-shaped cookies I got from my students – some Pepero, some of other brands – all dumped unceremoniously on the floor. I cleaned them up later.

Hella Pepero

Both Pepero and Pocky are made by the Lotte group, one of several ultra-ubiquitous conglomerates in South Korea. Lotte may have been founded by a Korean, but, unlike the rest of the conglomerates here, is actually a Japanese company. Something that only one out of the eight present one night in my adult conversation class knew. The other big name conglomerates in Korea (Hyundai, Samsung., Dae Woo, etc…), the not-much-taught-to-Koreans story has it, pretty much all got their starts by whole-heartedly collaborating with the Japanese back in the day. But this was a post about cookies that look like 1s, so never mind…

Snow!

Late yesterday morning, as I was stuck in the office of Gohan Boys’ Middle School (my regular morning classes having been canceled) some big, fluffy snowflakes started falling from the cold clouds above.




By lunchtime it was turning into quite the storm, altough everything down in the valley bottom was still melting on contact.




Later, when the clouds cleared a bit, you could see the trees, higher up the mountains, were holding onto plenty of shiny white crystals.




It started snowing again later, and kept at it during the night.




I was not surprised to see that the snow managed to have some staying power when I woke up (after sleeping in a bit – today’s morning classes having also been canceled, this time for a sports day…).



What a way to wake up: with one white world…



Bottom floor’s mine.



I call this playground my front yard.

While this thin sheet of snow will probably melt with today’s shining sun, and is no big deal in most minds, just remember: I have a ski resort 500 meters from my doorstep. And so I share my excitement with you.

Dear global climate change, bring on the blizzards!

p.s. Check out the rest of my most recent pictures here. I’ve even started adding picture descriptions. I know. Whoa.