::A Geek in Korea::

After 6 years of living in Korea, I’ve finally needed to buy another bottle of shampoo. Anyone that’s lived here a few years will realize what a tremendous accomplishment that claim happens to be. It’s not that I don’t wash my hair every single day. It’s just that my supply of shampoo, for a time, appeared to be limitless no matter how many times I would want to wash.

The source of all this shampoo? Chuseok (Thanksgiving) gift baskets and Teacher’s Day. There hasn’t been a year yet where I haven’t been given shampoo. It’s one of those practical, works in any situation gifts that Koreans love to give. At times, I had so much soap available to me, that I not only had enough for myself, but also for a family of four. My wife’s family, when she lived with them during our engagement, was also supplied by my excessive soap and shampoo inventories. I had a backlog of two holidays shampoo when I would manage to finish a single bottle when I lived alone. My mother in law used to re-gift my sets to her insurance clients when we had stripped them of the supplies we needed until the next holiday. We had entirely too much soap.

How the hell did I go from shampoo for a family of four and more, to needing to buy my own shampoo? Timing.

Blame it on having two people living at the house, or the fact that my wife has been growing her hair longer, we do not have shampoo. Chuseok is a scant three weeks away, but we officially ran out of shampoo yesterday. We filled up the empty bottle and ran water through it for it’s soapy residue. None left. We had a set of sample packs we use for traveling we could use, but it wouldn’t last us the rest of the week, let alone the weeks needed to reach the holidays. So, we either had a few weeks of oily, foul hair, or finding some shampoo to last us in the mean time.

There is no guarantee I would get a shampoo and soap set this holiday either. I could finally be upgraded and receive the "SPAM" set for the first time, or get stuck with another oddball "Tuna set" I got one year for a holiday. Who knows what my new employer will get me, if anything at all! For the first time I’m actually looking forward to bringing home the soap sets so that we won’t have to carry any home from the supermarket.