Finding Happiness

Yesterday after class one of my students took me to a neighborhood hardware store, where I bought small lightbulbs for the reading lamp attached to my bed. A small errand, to be sure, but one that I'd attempted and failed to accomplish twice already at different stores. My eyes were getting tired from reading in low light and I was getting frustrated, not knowing how to solve such a simple problem. This is a perrfect example of the kind of minor thing that would've been easy to do back home but requires planning and help here.

Anyway, not to dwell on hardware, my other success of the evening was exploring a new area of Suwon. And, in a way, the same student was at least partly responsible for this success as well.

Let me explain. While we were walkning to the hardware store she asked me what I do in the evenings and I was embarrassed to admit I spent a lot of them at home. She asked why I didn't go out more. I told her I have a lot of work, which she knows is true because she's in my class. My first month or two, when everything was a new adventure, I did more exploring and then I started to feel bogged down with work. (I also started to feel homesick and was periodically physically sick as well, both of which contributed to my staying in a lot).

Whether out of shame about being a homebody, or riding a wave of confidence after the successful light bulb expedition, I decided to go roaming rather than head home after she and I parted ways. I walked to a department store I'd been to with my friend Judy awhile back and browsed the shoe department. Even though I already knew the shoes would be too small (after all, they had been when I was there before and my feet haven't shrunk to Asian women's sizes since then), there was something pleasureable about just looking at them.

Then I went in search of food and wound up at a little place called Fruitspop, which served smoothies and desserts and yogurt concoctions. I got a fruit and yogurt dish, which included the delicious mandarin oranges that seem to be everywhere nowadays. It arrived with plain white toast, which reminded me of Dan Ackroyd's character, Elwood, in The Blues Brothers. The decor was graffiti-based (the only other customers were teenagers) ...the first time I'd seen graffiti in Korean. I wondered if the words were the same kinds of profanities seen in American graffiti (not to be conufsed with the movie), or whether it said things like "Won Il is a bum. He only studies ten hours a day." There was pop music in the background, of course. Not all of it was American though. Some was what I think must be Korean hip hop. The vocals had the same pulsing heavy beat that hip hop has in English. But the tone didn't sound angry. And there was light jazz in the background. Kind of a nice change.

After a cafe latte, I ventured back out into the evening. A few blocks away I saw a department store with a bright neon sign saying "Happiness" and decided I had to check it out. It felt kind of Emerald City-ish. When I got there it turned out that there was a cinema on the top floor (apparently not an unusual set up here), so I decided to check out what was playing. I saw
The Golden Compass simply because it was in English. There were four teenagers and me in the theater. And I had popcorn for the first time since coming here! POPCORN = HAPPINESS!