Sending Poo Downstream in Korea

Only about a month remains between me and the conclusion of my one-year contract teaching English at a technical high school in Seoul.

The most difficult thing about leaving this country, aside from kimchi withdrawal sweats, will be the loss of some close Korean friends. I’ve been fortunate to spend the last 3 years living away from my home in Canada. I’ve had countless horizon-widening experiences, and absorbed a great deal of culture. The only difficult side-effect of my time floating around abroad has been the untimely loss of developed personal relationships. More on floating objects a bit later.

I’m really going to miss an English co-teacher I call Sally. I knew she was unique during my first month at the school, when she was adamant in convincing me that the word “wrist” was actually pronounced “riced”:

Wrist, what’s that? It’s pronounced “riced”. Rhymes with ”sliced”. Let me call my uncle in California. Maybe wrist is a Canadian pronounciation?

I’d also like to thank her for teaching me that in Korean, wrist is “son-mok”, which can translated as “hand-neck”. For good measure, ankle is “ppal-mok”, which can be translated as “foot-neck”. During basketball I sprained the ol’ hand-neck … just sounds better to me.

As a young child, Sally took vengeance on any elderly Koreans that treated her poorly. She describes getting payback on a grouchy ajummah in her neighbourhood:

There was this woman that wasn’t nice to me. I didn’t like her, so while she was away one day I went into her house, and peed on one of her shoes. Another time, the lady was washing her clothes downstream in the river near our house. My brother and I seized the opportunity by using the floating property of recently ex-communicated human waste to our advantage. Actually, that was the first time I realized that those kinds of gifts float, and could be sent downstream to play havoc on a seemingly innocent day of laundry.

Kids will be kids.