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further korea randomness

i wrote the following yesterday:

1. today school was cancelled across korea for small children because of a yellow sand storm blowing in from china. apparently this happens every spring and the dust is really harmful to growing little lungs. the streets today were strangely noticably devoid of the usual frolicking children. up in the seoul area apparently the sky was thick and yellow with the stuff, but here in southern coastal tongyeong it was not terribly dramatic.

2. tonight i was sitting alone at the tofu restaurant, crosslegged on the floor as is the style here, and having just finished my fantastic meal was approached by a man brandishing a topless pineapple in a well-advanced stage of dissection. he "blah blah blahed" to me in korean about the merits of the pineapple (i understood the key word "mashikata" which means delicious) and then handed me a slice on the tip of a small fruit knife. i eat at this restaurant all the time (literally daily) and didn't recognize him as an employee. at first i thought he was an overzealous customer cum pineapple-farmer hopped up on soju and the warmth that comes from a belly full of tofu soup, unable to constrain his feelings of generosity toward the universe around him in the cozy little restaurant (i mean, it's korea, so the idea of somebody packing-heat pineapple-style ie b.y.o.p. is not that random)...

but then, when i inserted the pineapple's cold tangy flesh into my mouth and cooed the universal-in-any-language "mmmm", the man began to very aggressively quote the price of the pineapple and urge me (i inferred--my korean really sucks) to buy one. ah yes, of course! i realized the truth of the matter was that this man was a travelling fruit salesman whom the restaurant's proprietors had allowed to come in and go table-to-table spreading pro-pineapple propaganda and using that legendary-among-pushers-of-all-sorts technique of giving the first taste for free. i declined, avoiding eye contact with him and muttering "anio kompsamnida" (no thankyou) and blushed and of course the koreans around me laughed at the spectacle of the silly waygook (foreigner) crossing paths with the pineapple man. harumph. as i exited the restaurant a few minutes later, i saw his truck out front, laden with pineapples, oranges, placards, and megaphones/speakers wired to the cab of the truck. i remembered last year when i first arrived being at a restaurant with a bunch of other expats and a similar man with a pineapple getting all up in our faces with a much harder sell (that man i am quite sure was in fact soju-drunk). korea is a country with amazingly hard-working and passionate fruit sellers. seriously, they sell in the open air markets and they prowl the streets in trucks blaring pro-whatever-the-in-season-at-the-moment-fruit-they're-selling rhetoric. last summer, before i knew the drill w/ the trucks, i heard one out my hagwon's window and wondered if it was some warning about north korea attacking or something--it sounded that ominous in tone to me. anyhow, right now the fuits that are in season are strawberries and pineapples, so it is hard to escape them. when fruits are in season they are really cheap, but out-of-season you can spend 8 bucks on a corpulent apple. ah korea!

before = after