We had four days off for lunar new year. Well, we got a weekend off, and two more days after that. I would have liked more, but whatcha gonna do?
Though this is Korea’s “big holiday,” nothing really happened in Daejeon, so I shan’t dwell on the festivities, or lack thereof.
What I will talk about is how this holiday was another fantastic opportunity for my school to give us all poorly thought out presents. If you recall my post about Chuseok, I related that they’d given us a box of vitamins for that holiday. We were all unimpressed with those, but our gifts for lunar would up the ante significantly.
All the guys in our school recieved a box containing the following: ‘Fresh Cleansing Foam’ (“Coach your skin with aqua active complex.”), ‘Foot Cream’ (everything else is all in Korean, so I’m not certain what it’s supposed to do for my feet.), and a “soothing sheet mask” which appears to be only one part of a six part “weekly care system.” Awesome.
I suppose it should go without saying why these are poor gifts, but perhaps they just figured that foreign men were as “metro” as young Korean men, despite the fact that we aren’t carrying man-bags. I suspect they didn’t put much thought into this at all.
Supporting this theory is the fact that Nicole (one of our few foreign ladies, she works at one of our Dunsan campuses) received bath salts. She quite aptly pointed out the main problem with this gift when she said “I don’t own a bath. They should know this, since they gave me the apartment.” She apparently now has a special place in her cupboard where she keeps all the bath-related gifts she’s received, and has no way to use. I said she could probably just wet herself down, and rub the bath salts right onto her skin, but she was dubious.
Makes the socks I was gifted by a student seem incredibly useful, and thoughtful.
2 Comments
wow…does Korea have public baths as do the Japanese? Perhaps she was supposed to take them somewhere else? I would suggest she show up at the home of whoever decided this was a good idea and demand to borrow theirs.
You can just admit you purchased the items yourself, Chris. You do not need to make up elaborate stories on why you have that kind of skin care products.