Lunar New Year Gifts

Lunar New Year (aka Chinese New Year) is coming up later this month. Here are a few advertisements for New Year's gifts from the newspaper we subscribe to. (Click through for larger images).

A lot of the gift packs contain raw meat. Apparently the way this works is that the store will hand-deliver directly to the gift recipient, after ascertaining that they are home to receive it.

(L) Korean beef gift set #1; (M) Korean beef gift set #2; (R) Korean beef health set #1

Here from E-Mart we've got more raw meat, some fruit, some dried whole fish, and ginseng.

Top: (L) Beef kalbi ($250); (R) apples and Asian pears ($88)
Bottom: dried yellow croaker ($220), ginseng ($218), Asian pairs ($68), nut & fruit set ($92)

And, of course, the fancy Spam gift set.

Top: (L) Richam ($45); (R) hair loss prevention lotions ($39)
Bottom: apples ($34), dried anchovies ($27), canola oil ($8), toiletry set ($16)

UPDATE (10:49pm): About an hour after I first posted this blog entry, a delivery guy came to the door (at 9:30pm) with this package from E-Mart.

It's the exact same beef kalbi set seen in the newspaper ad above!

"Traditional Kalbi Flavoring: 'The Gift' "

 Since I'm here anyway updating the blog entry, here's another ad for a wider array of raw meat gifts, from the store Cheonnyeon Hanu 천년한우 "A Thousand Years of Korean Beef" here in Gyeongu.

Update: I've learned that cheonnyeon "thousand years" is a nickname for Gyeongju, which was an ancient capital city for about 1000 years, and thus is referred to as cheonnyeon godo 천년고도(千年古都) "the thousand-year ancient capital". So perhaps the name of this local beef store is better translated as "Thousand-Year Ancient Capital Beef" or, less poetically, "Gyeongju Beef".

Korea is a small country

Korea is so small that when the government decided a few years ago to switch over from the old postal addressing system to the new postal addressing system, they were able not only to do so quite quickly, but to manufacture an address plaque and affix it to every single building in the entire nation.

They look like this:

An address plaque on a building in Gyeongju. Just as with the system I'm familiar with in Taiwan, small streets don't have their own names, but are numbered as if they were buildings on a larger street. As a hypothetical example: the alley that leads off of Main Street between houses 102 Main Street and 106 Main Street is named "Main Street 104 Alley", and if your house is on that alley, its address might be "57 Main Street 104 Alley".

The new postal addressing system is much like America's: numbered buildings on named streets. For information on how the old system worked, see my post from 2007. (And check out the second comment from cookhie.)

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Korea is such a small country that the GPS navigation systems in cars know the location of every singly speed bump, falling rock zone, speed limit enforcement camera in the country, not to mention the speed limit on every road. Even if you are not using your GPS for directions to your destination, it's a good idea to just leave it on to monitor your current location. You get a constant stream of verbal warnings: "Speed bump 30 meters ahead", "Watch out for falling rocks", "Slow down, camera ahead, you are 10 km/hr over the speed limit", etc.

Korea is so small that even the speed bumps INSIDE our apartment complex parking lot are in the GPS system.

This speed bump would be next to Building 104, if Building 104 existed.

Fear of (words that sound like) death

In keeping with its historical position within the Chinese culturo-linguistic sphere, Korea has a taboo against the number 'four', which in its Sino-Korean manifestation is pronounced the same as the Sino-Korean morpheme meaning 'death'.

Four: sa 사 四
Death: sa 사 死

As in Japanese, the two morphemes are completely homophonous. (This is actually not the case in Chinese, where there is a tone difference, cf. Mandarin sì 四 'four' vs. sǐ 死 'death').

The taboo seems to be taken to an architectural extreme in Korea. In many buildings, the "4" button in the elevator is replaced with the letter "F" (from English "Four"), which I suppose is somehow meant to suppress the Korean number from arising in the mind of the elevator user. (Oddly, in deference to Western superstition, many buildings also lack a thirteenth floor.) [Update: I have been alerted to the fact that this very same information was already posted by me over 4 years ago in a comment made on a fascinating post about similar superstitions in China at Mr.  & Mrs. SB's blog.]

Anyway, the avoidance of the number 4 is manifested in a way I've never seen before in the apartment complex where we live. The complex has nine large residential buildings. They are numbered from 101 to 110.

How's that again? Take a look:

Adjacent buildings 103 and 105

There is no 104! Nobody has to live in "Building One-Hundred-DEATH".

Not only that: every building has three entryways, each with a staircase and elevator. On each floor of each entryway are two apartments, one on the left and one on the right, making in all six vertical stacks of apartments in the building, numbered 1 through 7. That's right, again there is no 4.

So, for example, our building has the following apartment numbers on its second floor, grouped in pairs around the three entryways: 201, 202; 203, 205; 206, 207. Thus nobody has to live in an apartment whose number ends in DEATH.

But this may surprise you: The first digit in the apartment number indicates the floor. Each building has five floors. INCLUDING A FOURTH FLOOR. You might think the people living in the fifth vertical stack of apartments in the fifth building consider themselves lucky to have dodged not one but two bullets. Had the designers of the complex not, in their wisdom, skipped the number 4, these folks might have found themselves inside a DEATH apartment inside a DEATH building.

Don't you then feel sorry for the people living on the fourth floor? Some poor soul is in apartment 405. In fact, there are apartments numbered 401, 402, 403, 405, 406, 406 in each of the nine buildings. Ending up in one of these apartments must feel like living inside a Twilight Zone episode.

Dakteo Hu

From ecstasy to despair.

Ecstasy: I've discovered Doctor Who is on in Korea! KBS1, late Friday nights, 12:30am

Check out the cool Korean version of the logo!

Episode 3 of Season 8 was on the other night.

I've seen the first 8 episodes of the season. In five weeks I'll be able to start seeing the rest!

Despair: It's dubbed. Dubbed!

How close is close?

I've been wondering exactly how long it takes me to walk from Tek's school to my Herren House office in the morning after dropping him off. This short (and incredibly entertaining!) video on Vimeo reveals the answer. You'll need to enter the password "korea" to see it.

To view video on Vimeo, click me and enter password "korea".

Festival of Cuteness

Every year in January Tek's daycare puts on a show, an elaborate performance with sets, costumes, and choreography set to recorded music. They call it a Jaerong Janchi 재롱잔치, which I've translated here as "Festival of Cuteness".

On Tek's first day at the school, we saw his classmates practicing, but didn't really have a sense of what it would be like. There was no way Tek could have participated even if he wanted to, as there simply wasn't time for him to practice before the performance. We did go to the show and take him along with us.

What a shock we got. These are kids between the ages of 2 and 5. I can only try to imagine the amount of time, effort, and money that went into this thing. It was on the one hand impressive to see what these kids could do; at the same time distressing to know that this is where the school is expending its efforts. Most of the parents seemed to really be into it; many had brought fake bouquets with flashing lights in them, which they held in the audience during the performance.

The performance was scheduled for an hour and a half, but probably ran closer to 2 hours. We only stayed for the first half.

Here are a few still images from the show:

The set

The little ones

Three-year-olds

Four- and five-year olds (performing to "We will ... we will ... rock you!")

It appeared that the costumes were ordered as one-size-fits-all for each class; the taller children were showing a lot of belly.

I've prepared a 4-minute video of some of the highlights. It's too big for upload to blogger, you can view at Vimeo using password "korea" here . At 1:13, check out the prize-winning parental sign.

Anyone recognize the song at 0:51? It sounds so familiar to me, I wonder if it's a Korean-language version of something well known in America ...

Bubble Boy

All parents think their children are cuter than average, and we are no exception. We are not so obtuse, however, as to think that everyone shares our subjective opinion.

But here in Gyeongju, he is truly a boy in a bubble.

Not this kind of boy in a bubble:

Seinfeld episode: The Bubble Boy

This kind of boy in a bubble:

30 Rock episode: The Bubble

Old ladies stop dead in their tracks when they see him on the street, stare openly for longer than is polite, and then mutter an amazed "yeppeuda 예쁘다 (adorable)!" Teenage girls stop and point. Middle-aged men roll down their car windows to wave at him in the hopes he'll requite with a "hi" (they are usually disappointed). The 5-year-old boy across the hall exclaimed to his mother that he is "so good-looking!" On one occasion the yogurt-delivery-woman went back into the restaurant she'd just emerged from to drag the owner out for a look. Everywhere he goes he is showered with free swag, including a 10,000-won bill (about US $10) a restaurant owner hurried out to stuff into his pocket as we were leaving.

Some of it could be the bunny-ear hat.

Some of it could be his natural good looks.

But our best guess is that there is something bewitching about his half-Caucasian, big-eyed, fair-skinned visage that just melts Korean hearts.