Intercultural Life
I shouldn’t have taught him the response, or I should have said “no returns”. I know there are variations of this too. Do people do it where you live? Or is there something else people do on the first of the month? I think where I grew up people sometimes responded with a “pinch and a kick for being so quick” too.
He actually did this to me hours later… I might go flick him in the forehead to respect his Korean culture…
One of our biggest disagreements is about taking the plastic of new appliances. I always want to do it right away but Hugh NEVER wants to remove the plastic. It drives me crazy because the plastic looks messy, but it drives him crazy because he wants to keep the plastic on as long as possible to keep it “new”. I took one line of plastic off the new TV, but wasn’t allowed to take off anymore. When we got the new washing machine I took the chance to take the plastic off right away, much to Hugh’s horror.
The ongoing theme with Hugh! He either gets annoyed at people speaking banmal (informal language) with him because they think he is young, or he is happy about it… because they think he is young. This time the guy spoke banmal to Hugh because he thought he was his friend, and that’s fine between friends of the same age. By the way, Hongdae is a cool area where all the university kids hang out. (Great food there too).
He also spends half his time in Hongdae enjoying that he fits in fashion wise with his youthful looks and the other half of the time being annoyed at young people. Anyone who frequents Hongdae knows the Hongdae ‘uniform’ at the moment: those Timberland type shoes, a bomber jacket and hair either styled up in the 2 block cut or down in the ‘lego’ hair.
Being in your 30’s is a strange time. Not a young person but not yet an ahjussi.
(This happened on the weekend and Hugh couldn’t wait to tell me that someone mistook him for a friend that is a decade younger).
Hugh does a lot of socializing and a lot of it is business related or important networking. Sometimes I have to show my face because people hear about me but have never met me. I’m elusive! Even when it’s an English speaking environment I’m going to avoid or bail early. I spend so much time hiding away that Hugh thinks he needs to remind me how to dress nicely. Introvert life. I’m happy to go out and have one on one conversations with interesting people, but big group situations are tiring and Korean socializing easily goes until the early hours of the morning.
Hugh is not elusive at all. Whenever he is in Seoul you’ll see him somewhere in Hongdae. He has a love/hate relationship with the Hongdae area. He loves many places there but hates the crowds of university students.
We were walking out of the apartment we were staying at in Seoul when Hugh proudly proclaimed that he wasn’t going to tie up his shoes laces. He didn’t care at all. But within one second he was tying them up muttering, “Just a bit”. His responsible adult side won out. Hugh is at this stage where he wants to wear the younger guys’ fashions but then also worries about things like shoelaces. He goes out in Hongdae a lot, but then at times is annoyed at all the young people. He sees old friends from school or military who now look so old, while he looks quite similar to how he did when he was younger. It’s an interesting time trying to work out identity. We’ll have to see if his fashion changes when we move completely to Seoul later.
When learning another language, sometimes you just latch on to the more childlike ways to say things because it sounds funny or cute to you. Hugh always prefers to say “boobies”, even when talking about his own pecs. I like using the children’s way of saying animal names in Korean as well.
Have you witnessed the way that guys make their friends touch them after their workouts??? haha Unfortunately I don’t show enough interest in the hardness of pecs, but when there are no friends around, I’m the one that has to check how hard they are after working out.
After that he did start to list things he was thankful for, but made that joke first and said, “You should make that into a comic”. Almost all comic ideas are genuine things that actually happen, but he is the one that prompts me to actually turn them into comics.
Not surprisingly, it was a little bit difficult mood-wise coming back to the middle of the Korean winter after being in the Australian summer. We felt a shift in our moods so we’ve been working hard on being positive and motivated.
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