::A Geek in Korea::

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, “Mother Night”

I was walking my dog, getting some coffee. I was celebrating after the first early snowfall of the year when I got a call from my wife. She suggested that if I wanted to go to Costco to go shopping that I could go today. Then she listed a half-dozen items that we needed to buy. The suggestion was more of an order. Meh, I didn’t have anything else to do. I went back home, grabbed the cart, and was off to Costco.

I take the subway, as it is warm and doesn’t require a long wait out in the cold wind. It also goes nearly directly to Costco from my home. I was shopping for a while with only minor annoyance due to the crowd. The only amusing thing that kept happening was that the same little boy cut in front of the line and stole samples before me five times. He traveled around the entire store multiple times eating all the samples. I think that was his lunch or something. He and I were on the same sampling circuit and he kept jumping in front of me and stealing the sample I had waited for the longest. If the other adults at Costco are any indication, he won’t ever need to change.

On my way back on the subway I scared someone as I walked outside the store. I was listening to a podcast on my Cowon O2 and lugging around a large cart with the items I was told to buy. I had a hat on and was wearing headphones that were concealed by my large hood. There was a wire leading from my pocket to my headphones that was tucked into my zipper.  I was listening to a comedy podcast and laughed out loud forgetting there were people around me. The guy looked at me and couldn’t tell I was listening to anything. He just thought I was laughing for no reason. Oops. Now he thinks I am a crazy foreign guy.

When the subway finally arrived, I ended up getting a seat. The only seat was across from a gigantic, strange looking foreign guy I didn’t know. He was dressed in sweatpants and a shirt that looked like it was actually a thermal underwear top. While that’s sort of weird to wear by itself in Korea, the stranger thing was that all of his clothes were moth eaten and ragged looking. He didn’t smell, but he was wearing gloves with a hole in some of the fingers. His winter hat was also full of holes. He looked wild, with a large beard, huge glasses, and shifty accusatory eyes. No one around me thought he was any problem, as they were all packed around him trying to get someplace too. It was too cold and the entire subway was full.

This wild looking foreigner would stare at my box of diapers on my cart and gesture and point as if displeased by something I was doing. He was so large, and he kept trying to make eye contact with me, then the box, but he wouldn’t say anything audible to me. His pointing looked as if he was in a rap video shooting someone with an invisible gun, or was trying to make a point in a debate, except he didn’t have a podium in front of him.

If he had said something loud enough for me to understand him I wouldn’t have been worried about it. My headphones weren’t loud enough that he could have addressed me and I wouldn’t have heard him. Instead, he was talking to himself. He looked weird. Really weird. The Korean around him didn’t get up or move because there were no empty seats anywhere on the subway.

Clearly I was the only person worried about this weird foreign guy. He kept looking at me and I wanted nothing to do with him. All the other people had those thousand yard stares you get when put uncomfortably close to strangers with no recourse and ignored each other. They didn’t have this big foreign guy looking at them though. None of the Koreans around me recognized him as being weird at all.

I did the unthinkable. I waited for a stop not far from my own, got up, and pretended to get out of the subway in another car. Instead, I just went down to the handicap and elderly part of the car and waited for the weird guy to get off the subway so that he wouldn’t stare or point at my box of diapers. He left only one stop before my own! I watched him leave to make sure he didn’t sneak back onto the subway train like I had.

Damn it! When did I become the xenophobic guy around here?