::A Geek in Korea::

I’m sure that the elderly in Korea have faced tremendous hardships in their lives. They’ve grown up in a country that has gone from poor, isolated, and agrarian to hyper-modern, interconnected in the world at large, and fairly well off all things considered. Still, for all their wisdom and conservative values, the elderly in Korea get away with a lot sometimes.

Due to the Confucian roots of the family structure in Korea, not only can you not contradict the elders in your family, you can’t really say much to old people at all. So, when some old man or woman breaks some sort of protocol the rest of the younger people know about, people go about their ways trying not to make light of the situation for fear of upsetting someone older. This is how old people can get away with some of the stuff they say and do.

For example, I was with my wife in Costco. One of the places that has free samples is the butcher shop. They cook chopped steak with seasonings and serve it to the hungry masses. Korean people are absolutely incapable of learning how to queue, and some families starve their children for days it would seem, as they sit encamped around these various free food vendors devouring their samples. The steak "mob" is the worst, as the cooking time means that everyone in the area has the chance to smell the flavorful meat being prepared. The entire serving of meat is served up and finished in a matter of seconds by hungry families armed with biodegradable toothpicks.

I elbowed my way to the front of the mob, grabbed a toothpick, and scavenged what looked to be one of the last scraps from the feeding frenzy that had gone unnoticed. Dripping with sauce, perfectly flavored with onion and pepper, it was begging for me to pierce it with my toothpick. I launched my attack and speared the meat. My jaw dropped open in anticipation, and a faint trickle of drool could be seen at the corner of my mouth. In slow motion, I slowly brought the piece from the hot serving tray to  my mouth, tongue running over my lips and teeth ready to embrace the warm meat.

Then, the old lady next to me sneezed on not only my hand and meat, but all the remaining portions still left on the serving skillet. Everything was tainted. She said nothing, as she had already finished eating the last piece of non-diseased meat, and simply put her toothpick in the receptacle and moved on the defile the next piece of meat at the next stall.

I stood, mouth agape, unable to believe I was denied my tasty morsel of food. If I wanted to eat some steak I just had to wait around for the next batch and hope that Sneezy Dentures Kim didn’t show up to ruin my meal. The next serving wouldn’t be ready in time for me to sample it, and we never buy steaks because of the steep price tag. That’s why everyone crowds around the steak stall.

I was denied my free bite of steak by a woman so old she didn’t feel she needed to cover her mouth anymore when she sneezed, and she didn’t apologize to anyone for sneezing on them or their food. I couldn’t correct her, as she was way too old and people around me would give me dirty looks. How dare I say something to an elder! She wouldn’t understand a word I said and wouldn’t listen to me anyway, since if she didn’t apologize she must not have thought she did anything wrong. No amount of hygiene discussion was going to make the steak any more edible anyway, so it was a moot point.

I just marked it down in my little mental notebook under "Rude things I plan to get away with when I am way older that I’d never do now." Being old has it’s perks, and it seems one of t his is being completely inconsiderate about hygiene, food safety, and needing to apologize.  I now know this and plan to abuse it when I’m old and wrinkled.