::A Geek in Korea::

All day was spent in a fugue state of boredom due to rain. My wife and I had made plans to go shopping for baby stuff, but the rain had killed any chance of getting out for a walk with the dog or for exercise earlier in the day. We were sitting around for a while in boredom, then called to make an appointment with one of her church members. Like everything major in Korea, knowing the right people was key. Someone at my wife’s church knows a lady that runs a baby shop at a “Kids Mall”. She said she’d give us a hand getting a steep discount at the store. All we had to do is meet up at the store and we’d get cheaper baby supplies. Awesome.

The process of shopping for baby supplies was this: I sat there staring as the lady pulled out dozens of different things that I knew nothing about, and my wife and the lady discussed the positive and negative aspects of each item before deciding if she needed it or not. For example, there was a pillow with little seeds in it that wrap around the babies head. That helps cool a baby’s head. This sounds good, except that it could also end up making the back of the babies head flat. My wife said her mother used this sort of pillow, and she invited me to fell the back of her head. It was strangely flat, which she says making a ponytail difficult. Who knew?

The alternative is a pillow with a hole in it, which helps the baby have a round head, but makes the baby hot, which causes it to cry all the time at night. These are the only two choices presented to me. Do I want a crying baby? A strangely shaped baby? Tough call. Not knowing any better, I deferred to a friend that suggested the “cool, but flat head” pillow was the way to go. If our baby has a flat head twenty years from now, I’ll know why.

99% of the stuff was either pink or blue. I get that there are “themes” to babies rooms that are traditionally “pink is for girls” and “blue is for boys”, “yellow for uncertainty”, but there are more colors in the rainbow. I told my wife that just because we think we are having a girl, we don’t have to buy pink, pink, pink for everything, despite what the lady was pushing on us. We tried to pick a few different colors for different things. The cloth diapers had green print. The extra shirt was pink. The towels were a soft yellow. The pillow was a sky blue. The rubber sheet cover was also blue, but it had green and yellow too. We’re not being snobby, we’ll take anything people give us regardless of color, but gender stereotypes are ridiculous already in Korea, and you don’t need to start brainwashing babies before they can even see color. If we could have picked purple, or orange, we probably would have. Variety and diversity in most things is good, you know?

If we end up with a daughter that adores pink, that’s fine, but she doesn’t have to wear it every single day just because she’s a girl.

We got a ridiculous discount at this store. We had brought a shopping list that a store gave us to use to cover everything we needed when we first went looking for baby stuff. This was an all encompassing “suggested” list which was clearly on the “more is better” philosophy. We had been taking things off the list slowly, line by line, but the suggested price tag was going to run several hundred thousand won, even if we got lots of stuff for free from friends, relatives, and neighbors.

The lady said our shopping list was redundant, and that the place we were having the baby would give us a basic “care set” that would make purchasing any of the things the store suggested was wasteful.  She knew exactly what was in the hospital care package , and told us exactly what we needed. That’s what knowing someone in the business will get you, a little honesty. We would have paid three times the amount had we gone shopping following the suggested list at a different store. The lady at the store was happy to help us because of the mutual friend, plus, we pay in cash. It’s really nice to have someone you know in a business you rely on.

I got to be the pack mule carrying everything back while balancing an umbrella in one hand. I got treated to a nice meal later nearby, so despite being overwhelmed with choices, I had a nice time.