Korean Pets And The Tragedy Of Mr Crab.

There are some quite ludicrous beliefs in Korea, in fact so many that they are worth a blog entry of their own, but for now I will just briefly mention one that two girls in a class a few weeks ago told me about.

I realise that this might fall under the same type of fun for the kids bullshit as Father Christmas and The Easter Bunny, but they seemed worryingly convinced that it was real.

Rabbits live on the moon.

Yes. Apparently quite large rabbits who make rice cakes have been plying their trade in some lunar warren for many years now. I objected to this claim with some vigour but the two highschool girls refused to budge ground and our lesson descended into me laughing at them and them loudly insisting that the moon has rabbits on it.

In fairness to South Korean culture, it could just be that I have two retarded students who drop acid before class, but during a break I googled it and sure enough there is an old folklore about a giant rabbit making rice cakes on the moon. The problem is that my students seem to have adapted it to more than one rabbit and seem far too defensive about the probability of this being true.

It was thinking about rabbits that led to a conversation about pets with a few fellow teachers. I informed them that my first pet as a child was a rabbit, that I cleverly named "Bunny". Yes, Bunny the rabbit, and yet I still have the nerve to question the cognitive function of some of my students.

But pets here just seem odd. All the pet dogs are tiny. A while back, we were eating out near a beach resort and a man with a tray of puppies came around to see if we wanted to play with them for a bit. We did. I hope we were not part of some pre- cooking ritual that aims to relax them and soften the meat, but regardless I've seen tiny dogs and once tiny cats whilst out drinking and eating and that can't be normal.

But the main pet that seems weird is the hedgehog. Who the hell has a hedgehog as a pet? It seems quite a lot of people, including one of our former teachers Stacy who has one called Conrad.
During our frank and fascinating discussion of pets I asked what Conrad did, as everytime I saw him he was curled up in a motionless ball. She insisted that he often hangs from the cage by his teeth. Right...no disrespect to him or any of his prickly colleagues but I'm not sold.

I was cursed with bad luck with my pets as a child. Bunny was killed by some local pranksters on Halloween and my pet gerbil Arthur accidentally got his head stamped on by my friend from next door after I had only owned him for an hour.

But I was not the only one with a sorry tale to tell. Little Spoon had a story that was almost a Shakespearean tragedy and it involved two pets that are even more bizarre than hedgehogs.

Sit down and have some tissues to hand as I tell you the tale of Froggy the Frog and Mr Crab.

Froggy the Frog lived in a tank with all the mod cons that a happy go lucky frog in the late 80s could desire. Mr Crab lived in his own tank and led an equally productive and well rounded life. Their paths had never crossed and life was good.

Then one fateful day, a young Little Spoon decided that they might become good friends and she put Mr Crab into the tank with Froggy the Frog. There is a reason that the term "being crabby" means irritable and Mr Crab was evidently the embodiment of cantankerous.
No sooner had Little Spoon left them to become acquainted, than Mr Crab attacked Froggy and upon her return was half way through eating his head.

Clearly distressed that the friendship had turned sour so quickly, Little Spoon decided that she needed to relax and felt that a spot of sun bathing would do the trick. She also decided that Mr Crab (who let me remind you is a crab) might also like to sunbathe.
So they lay out in the scorching hot LA sun until Little Spoon went back inside for a while and forgot that Mr Crab was still soaking up the rays.

And as she finished this tale it went something like this...

Little Spoon: "So I came back a few hours later and he was dead."

Me: "Really? What a shock, how on earth could an aquatic based animal like a crab have died sunbathing?"

Little Spoon: "I don't know, we never found out, maybe it was old age. How long do crabs live for?"

At this point I somehow became the first person in over 20 years to point out that if you put a crab on a dry rock directly under the sun for almost a day with no water it will die. For fucks sake, you could try that trick with all manner of things and they probably wouldn't do too well; a puppy, a newborn baby, an amputee victim and absolutely definitely a crab.

The conversation drifted towards ideal pets, to which I proposed a monkey. No surprises there and I stunned Dubs, Little Spoon and Justice by telling them about monkey greyhound racing. An old sport that I read about and one that surely needs a major revival. Dubs loved the idea and Justice was amused.

Little Spoon said "Why a monkey racing a greyhound, wouldn't some other animals work better?"

When asked for an example of a superior animal combination for a racer and it's jockey, she said "I don't know, maybe a tortoise and a hamster".

I was and still am, utterly and totally lost for words. But please enjoy this picture of a monkey greyhound racer...