It was one of two things. Either the young fella in the shop was extremely polite, courteous and well intentioned in saying 'Excuse me, but are you aware that the new edition of this fine & upstanding Korean broadsheet will be in stock in a matter of hours?' or he was being honest, and asked me the Korean equivalent of 'What the f*ck you up to lad? You can just about manage to wing it with the formalities when you're in here buyin' water so where you off to tryina read the rags, EH?' I was about to tell him that I'd been down to the local bookstore to find the latest in popular Korean literature but to my dismay found it was shut. Then I realised my conversational skills stopped at the greeting stage and said 'Learning,' bowing graciously as I whacked the umbrella up in the shop to add to the surrealism of what must have struck him as some piece of performance art.
They don't get surrealism here, he notices, careful to tar them all with the one brush lest any escape gross stereotyping. I haven't checked the records for the Monty Python films box-office receipts in Korea, but I wouldn't estimate them to have broken records. Slight language issues (dub dee dub dub) but otherwise the sight of a supposed witch on a scales with a duck would leave most Koreans breaking out in a cold sweat, if sweating was something they do, which even in humidity of somewhere off the 100% scale, none of them appear capable of. This tarring thing is mighty craic, or not.
The surrealism thing is sure to find flaw in the stereotype, different folks and all that. The sweating thing I stand by. It's really bizarre. There's mise, in all my glory, strolling down the road in the blistering heat & 100%+ humidity factor. You'll know it's me by the river, sourcing from my pits and diving into any nook along the path, tidal at the height of the afternoon sun, lapsing to a steady stream in the dead heat of the night. I'd say I make for a seriously attractive sight next to the Koreans, casually sauntering along, pits drier than a devout nun in the Gobi desert.
Speaking of the surrealist thing, there's something I can't help but notice every time I stick me head out the window of the apartment. On top of a 40 odd storey apartment block in the distance there seems to be a deckchair the size of the average Korean house. Probably bigger, (these cows are small, those cows are far away etc...) I'm not sure if it is a deckchair, but its shape is certainly in keeping with the theory. Why or how one would fashion a deckchair of such magnitude and then proceed to stick it there is anybody's guess. My guess is that some smart-arse heard about my arrival and thought it amusing to play tricks with my head. I'll find out at some stage, might have to do a bit of rooting into the matter, but barring that once I get a camera next week I'll come back to this post and stick a picture up to illustrate it better than my words are fit to do.
Anyway, enough already. I'm off to read the paper.
No comments:
Post a Comment