Brandy And Cobblers

I am not dead. It is however, 6 months since I wrote a blog and therefore nobody will probably read this or remember who I am. I made a wild and foolish decision 6 months ago that destroyed any hope I had of maintaining my trivial musings on life in Korea.
I decided to actually gain a small teaching qualification so that I could actually teach. As a teacher, this might on the face of it seem like a sharp and almost ingenious move; but in reality it involved having to do more work after finishing working. I don't like working. Working for no money is something I like even less, and so I procrastinated and moaned incessantly for 6 months as I learnt how to teach.

So much has happened that I don't know where to begin. Luckily none of what happened was really noteworthy to anyone other than myself, so I'll summarise some key landmarks. Christmas came. I'm not sure if you remember that, but it happened...AGAIN. My friend Huckle dressed up as Father Christmas to entertain the kids, but by lurking around the corridors and leaping out at them, it had more of a white bearded, paedophile in bright trousers feel to it than might have been intended. Still the kids liked it, must have been the trousers. Or maybe it was the beard.

Our Dear Leader Kim Jong Il died. And my own dear mother came to visit me in Korea. I should point out at this juncture that the two incidents were totally unrelated, in fact my mother is so left wing that she is bordering on being a communist anyway. If anything her arrival would have given the North Korean mourners some welcome support in their time of need.

My mother enjoyed Korea and her visit actually made me go out and see Korea. It was a whirlwind of cultural shenanigans, that included Temples, Stone Buddahs, Singing Rooms and much more besides. She also wanted to visit the North Korean border or DMZ as it's known, which given her political persuasions obviously raised my suspicions. I informed the CIA and then booked us both a tour, but the whole thing went off without any real incident and I managed to buy a bottle of North Korean Pear Brandy.

The words "North Korean Pear Brandy" have been said a lot recently. Usually in the sentence, "Would anyone like to drink this North Korean Pear Brandy with me?" If I had never moved to Korea and someone had offered me North Korean Pear Brand I would have been eager and pleasantly surprised by their kind gesture. If I was offered North Korean Pear Brandy by a friend out here in Korea, I would be as happy as a communist, British mother being taken to the North Korean border by a son who had recently earned a suspect teaching certificate.

But so far, it sits sneering at me alongside my bottle of North Korean Soju. Wait a minute, I hear you shout, nobody told us about the North Korean Soju. Well now I'm telling you. I also have some North Korean Soju. I'm a veritable gold mine of North Korean alcoholic beverages.

In the time that I have been away working, studying and failing to entice people with the fermented fruits of Karl Marx's writings, several teachers and friends have left and several new additions have arrived and one in particular has been a source of great amusement so far.

As you are aware, I am very fond of mocking things. In particular ludicrous things that people say. People who don't think before speaking. My favourite hobby of mocking has been seriously compromised since Little Spoon departed back to LA and I had to make do with sporadic conversations on Skype to get my fix of gibberish.

That was until my little brothers friend arrived in Daegu and under his recommendation looked me up. Due to the fact that this young woman is also the worlds worst cook, I will give her the nickname Chef. Chef has been here a couple of months and has blessed me with a wealth of ridiculous statements and also earned her nickname after adding washing-up liquid to an omelette rather than pepper, frying tomatoes in vinegar instead of oil and making a sweetcorn sandwich with pieces of lettuce replacing bread. Because she had no bread.

I have no doubt that some of her nonsense will form many a blog to come, but for now I will share one story that actually does not involve her, but rather her shoes. Chef had a pair of shoes in which the sole was peeling away and upon hearing that a tiny old cobbler lived near my apartment she dropped off her shoes and asked me to have them cobbled.

If you are too young to remember the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, then a cobbler is someone who fixes shoes. This cobbler appears to have learnt his trade in around about the late 19th Century and there was therefore always a risk that if I did not get these shoes cobbled pronto, that he could well die.

There was of course a small problem that stood like a diminutive problematic thing between me and the cobbler. Language. Due to my commitments and my erm...pathetic lack of motivation in general life, my Korean remains woeful. My poor attitude to language skills seemed to be something that the cobbler and I had in common, as in his 110 years or so in Korea he appeared to have inexplicably learnt no English.

He probably thought he didn't need it, well what a load of old cobblers (apologies to Americans for the forced nature in which I squeezed in that dreadful pun based on an old British saying), because here I was stood before him with some women's shoes and not a lick of relevant Korean. Being a cobbler he sussed out the problem pretty sharpish. Some shoes needed fixing.
However, he clearly thought they were my shoes and yet these were a woman's shoes and no mistake.

I don't know if you recall my blog from late 2011 about my incident with the feminine umbrella, but if not then be aware that I was forced to walk to work one day using a very feminine umbrella. It dawned on me that I walk past the cobbler on the way to work and there are not many white people in this area. If he had seen me with that umbrella and now I was here presenting women's shoes to be cobbled, by God I'd be the laughing stock of Daegu's pensioners!

I wanted him to know that they were not mine, but pointing across the street towards the mountains, pointing at yourself and shaking your head, simply does not say "These aren't my shoes mate, they're a female friend of mines and I'm just doing her a favour".

In fact it probably says more along the lines of "See those yonder mountains old man, I wish to walk them, but alas I cannot because my girly shoes are broken".

I gave up trying to make excuses and comforted myself with the knowledge that he would probably not be around long enough for word to spread too far about my dress code. I had managed to find out that they would be done within an hour, so an hour later I returned to collect my...er...I mean Chef's boots.
It was at this point that I nearly compounded my humiliation, because although I can say thank you, I don't know the very basic term "very good". I do however know "Delicious".

As he handed the perfectly cobbled shoes to me, I immediately thanked him and as he looked up expectantly I thought I'd better let him know just how good his work was, and started to mumble the Korean for delicious. Thankfully as the first syllable left my mouth, I stopped myself, otherwise I would have left an ancient cobbler with the impression that I am a man who collects women's shoes in order to taste them.

Not only that, but so discerning is my palate for leather based footwear, that I simply could not abide licking and chewing upon an old boot that had a peeling sole, and thus I would come to a cobbler for way of seasoning as it were. Ah yes, the soles are fixed back on these beauties, right off to the mountains with these for a picnic, delicious!