Hello friends and neighbors and welcome to this week’s episode
of “Holy Fuck It Is Freezing!”
On tonight’s episode: Siberian Fucking Winds.
I know I don’t ordinarily swear this much, but trust me: it’s
warranted. I’ve been wearing my winter
coat and at least one scarf (yes, at least) every day for a few weeks now, and
it snowed last weekend. One day it was
so cold that I had on three scarves- one on my throat, one on my face, and one
on my head. And I was still cold. Thank god for those inexpensive New York
scarves I bought a ton of, or I would be in even more pain.
The problem is that Korea gets winds that come down from Siberia
and over the edge of China, so the air in extremely dry and biting to the point
that any millimeter of exposed skin is immediately engulfed in painful pins and
needles. It just plain hurts. Supposedly this is one of the worst winters
in many, many years, but that’s no excuse.
Get your shit together, Korean winter.
What doesn’t help is that the office is currently unheated, so
that the only time I’m not wearing my coat and scarves during the day is when I
am physically in the classroom teaching, or when I am in my own home where I
can crank the floor heat, bills be damned.
Most of the school day my hands are numb from having to be exposed in
order to type effectively. We told the
administration that the office was too cold so they gave us one heat lamp,
which barely heats one small section of the room. We told them that and they gave us one more
heat lamp. And then took the first one
away the next day. So that was nice.
Something that I’ve discovered that is nice about Korean winter (or at least, that Koreans do well in
winter) is the aforementioned floor heat.
The heaters are under the flooring so that the first thing to get warm
is the thing you’re putting your cold feet and toes on (brilliant) upon which
you can also quite easily sit (well done).
Plus, since heat rises, having the heating unit in the floor makes the
most sense because it also heats the air throughout the room as the heat rises
from the floor up to the ceiling. This
is the best method of heating I’ve ever heard of. Get your shit together, America.
Speaking of ways in which America needs to get its shit
together, gun control in Korea is a non-issue because they have no guns. Like, nobody has guns. Most adults that I know in Korea are afraid
of knife violence, because you can’t control knives (how would we eat meat, in
one large piece or ripped apart by hand?
Ineffectual!). So when the kids
here pretend their hands are guns or build guns out of Legos or blocks, no one
says anything because they are just playing, and in a way that American kids
can’t play. Korean children aren’t desensitizing
themselves to guns because there are no guns toward which to become desensitized. A gun is a toy when you’re a child, and then
a concept when you are an adult. It
changes the dynamic in an interesting way.
Korean TV even blurs out guns in movies and TV, and knives in
extreme cases, plus cigarettes, blood, nudity, and sex. I watched an episode of TruBlood the other
day and it was about five minutes long.
And you couldn’t see half the things on the screen.
Somehow it wasn’t the same.
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