The First Snowfall and the Garlic Lady

It started snowing yesterday! Just for a few minutes, but it was pretty magical. I've never lived on a floor higher than the ground floor, so living on the 10th floor is pretty special--it's a nice view.

Gwangju has some of the warmest weather in Korea, so it doesn't
get much snow. The morning after yesterday's minuscule snowfall these
mountains had a light dusting.

I went to do a few errands the other day and noticed that the local Shinsegae department store had put up its Christmas decorations! Christmas decorations aren't a big thing in Korea, unfortunately, so it's always nice to see a bit of Christmas wherever you can find it.

A cute little Totoro display at Shinsegae's Christmas stand (Totoro 
is a well-known Japanese cartoon character)

They put up a Christmas tree by the cafeteria at my school! It's small,
but also precious and beautiful. Irene and I both feel very emotional
about this, so we both took pictures :)

Today my grade 3 kids were being naughty, but my grade 4's were pretty nice as usual (although the boys were really rowdy today), and grade 5 was awesome.

Because the grade 3s were insanely late, I gave them the option of staying in with the grade 4 lesson or they could leave if they wish. Surprisingly, they all stayed, which aggravated the grade 4s...I'm not sure why...

Even the one's who don't like my class chose to stay.... Seriously?

Anyway, I hope tomorrow's class goes better. It was a bit of a disaster having a combined class.

--------------------

Now, you might be wondering, based on the title of this post, who the Garlic Lady is. Well, let me tell you!

I can't remember if I wrote about it previously, but one day a few weeks ago, I got on the bus to Damyang and was quickly waved over by a Korean woman sitting near the back. I had never seen this woman before, and I certainly had no idea why she waved me over to sit near her. Anyway, she handed me a map/brochure/booklet of Damyang and all the cool things you can see and do there and then talked to me a little bit. By "talked to me a little bit", I mean she spoke Korean at a normal (read: fast) pace and expected me to understand perfectly. Anyway, I thanked her for the map, tried to go along with this horribly broken and one-sided conversation and then put my earphones in so I could listen to music and de-stress on my way to work. She wouldn't have it of course, and kept trying to talk to me. To be honest I was relieved when she moved to the front of the bus to sit.

Anyway, fast forward to today. I got on the bus and who happens to be there? It's the same woman! This time there was a really strong scent of garlic in that section of the bus, so I'm going to call her the Garlic Lady. Actually, she told me her name today, it's Mi Ok (as in, "me oak" like the tree).

Regardless, we had a very similar conversation to the one before, except this time she was ferociously munching on her gum like a rabbit and using her phone like a radio and playing her music really loudly at the back of the bus. I again tried to put my earphones in and pulled out a notebook to do some work before school, but she wouldn't have it. She interviewed me rapid-fire and then asked for my phone number so she could connect me via KakaoTalk (an insanely popular instant messaging service all Koreans use), or have me as some sort of exotic trophy on a list of friends. Either way, I freely gave out my information due to a combination of wanting to be a good ambassador for foreigners in Korea (remember, Korea has only recently been opened to non-Koreans, so there's a fair chance I am the first white person quite a few Koreans have seen), and that I judged her to be a low-risk, if somewhat odd, person.

The rest of the bus ride was somewhat tense, as she would look over at my notebook all the time to see what I was scribbling down and then ask me questions that I could partly understand.

The smell of garlic was everywhere.

It's the Garlic Lady.