Ziploc Buffet

While there might be over a million people in Daejeon, it's still a small city in many respects. Doubly so when talking about the English speaking and teaching community. Word gets around from sources so randomly linked you wouldn't believe it.

For example, one of my old students, a friend of my wife, taught one of my aunt's children. None of the parties involved knew of the coincidence. The aunt used our friend as a sort of "venting" confidant where she would gossip and speak ill of her family. Whatever the aunt said was so mean that the friend sort of mentioned this to my wife without knowing about the family relationship. To her, she was talking of a third party to another third party, just sharing random gossip she heard on the job. It wasn't until the friend mentioned the particular apartment complex did the connection finally get made and the family found out they were getting badmouthed by this particular aunt. I'm sure that made for an awkward wedding reception, as everyone was invited.

Anyway, the oddest quirk of this particular aunt happens to be her habit of abusing buffet meals. At my wedding reception, during the ceremony, before most people had a chance to eat, she went through the buffet with resealable plastic bags and took a good hunk of our food for herself and her family. Since my wife and I were the last people to eat at the reception, we got to eat whatever scraps were left over since most of the meat had been raided fairly heavily.

This is not a poor woman, yet she does this all the time. During the last holiday I spent with my wife's family, she raided the kitchen of the family matriarch and took food home instead of leaving it behind for the elderly grandmother. This is a breach of so many Korean rules of etiquette it makes normal people's heads spin. Due to family quirks and general hierarchy of her being married to the grandmother's favorite son, everyone knows, yet no one says anything directly. They just gossip behind her back, and as we found out, she does the same.

It's odd the way information can travel. What particular bad luck this woman must have to gossip to someone that happened to be a friend of the family, even if she didn't know at the time. If this ends up in her hands sometime in the future I'll have done the exact same thing, so I'll just hope she can't read English well enough to understand.

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