Kimchi, not for me

is the lack of privacy. That is, lack of the Western idea of privacy. Also gone is the idea of personal space as it is known in the West. But I'm getting off the point.

My job is actually at two locations. I go to the Kindergarten in the morning (about 15 minute ride from the company headquarters and where the elementary classes meet in the afternoon). The food there is...to be blunt, unedible (for this Westerner, anyway). There is a bakery that sells sandwiches and has a place inside to sit and eat. I go there sometimes. There's also a Bennigan's directly across the street from the kindergarten. I went there today, and came back filled with a mild sense of dread. You see, every day, I am questioned as to my lunch - what I ate, where I ate it, and how much it cost. In short, the kind of questions you wouldn't get asked at a Western job (at least not in such detail).

And so today, yes, I had the lunch steak special at Bennigan's. I'm quite okay with this, as it was quite cheap (especially for beef in this country) and delicious and I hadn't eaten breakfast. But coming back (with took approximately 3 minutes) I was deliberating. What would I tell them? When I told them I had paid 13,000 won (roughly thirteen US dollars) for a salad, they were scandalized. Hmmm. And so, all the morals/ethics - out the window. The red-faced tantrum-throwing personal space-craving, privacy-deprived Westerner in me was screaming inside, "So what if I eat steak ONE time?! What does it matter?! Or rather, WHY???? If I eat CHILDREN on my lunch break, so long as they're not the ones we're taking care of, it shouldn't be any of your business!!!"

And so, yet again, the Westerner in me gets squashed. As do my ethics. I find that, to keep the peace (and by peace, I think I mean my sanity) over here I lie a lot. If I have a cold (which is most of the time as of late) and 90% of the Korean people I know ask me if I take a multi-vitamin, I just smile and say yes. The appaling reality is that I do NOT, in fact, take a multi-vitamin. I do take a vitamin B complex in the morning and at night (when I remember) and I figure that's close enough. Ditto for "Do you sleep with your fan on at night and the windows closed? You know, that's really bad for you." Me, innocent and wide-eyed, shake my head no. "Nope, I don't do that. I hear it's really unsafe." Bwa-ha-ha...(and as I'm typing this I realize this is one of those rebellious things I do to help me cope with life in a foreign and occasionally maddening country) I DO sleep with my fan ON and my windows CLOSED. And I'm still ALIVE. Take that, you and your silly isms! (Isms being the word I have modified to include all the fable/myth type rules and advice I encounter in this place.) I also walk in the rain without an umbrella on occasion, just to prove that my hair won't fall out! Let's see...well, that's all I can think of, and my completely impotent and semi-ridiculous rant has run out of steam. So I'll go now.

For those that care, I'm currently scanning books into the computer to use on the projector. For whatever reason, they don't actually want to make the parents pay for books, so I've got to use them this way. I'm currently on book 4 of 24, and I've been scanning at every available minute. And cursed be Canaan, I just gave myself another papercut! I swear I'm the queen of hurting myself lately. This is the third papercut I've had in less than a week, I've run into so many things at my house I nearly look like a battered woman. Factor into this sudden burst of being even more accident prone, the slippery floor issue I mentioned yesterday, and you should be amazed I'm not stuck in traction somewhere. *sigh* I really am feeling a little frustrated. But that steak sure was good. (Insert sly-bordering-on-evil-grin here.)