There’s rarely a need to find a grocery store if you just need some fresh veggies for dinner. It quite common to find old women (an ajumma, pronounced “Ah-zum-MAH”) sitting on a street corner selling them. Sometimes it’s from their own garden, sometimes is from a co-op just so they can round out their offerings.

Since it’s still fairly cold sometimes, they’ll wear a mask like the woman on the right, below. It doubles as a dust protector as in the spring there’s a decent flow of dust that blows in from the Gobi desert in Mongolia.

The ability to sit for hours on a little plastic stool, or worse, on the bare pavement, is a testament to the hardiness of these women.

I’ve seen some of these old women sit for hours on end without making a single won. I really wonder if this is just supplemental income, or this is THE income.

The opposite of Valentines’ Day in Korea, White Day is when boys give gifts to their girlfriends. MyeongHee and I went out and chowed on some tasty seafood last night. The spread before her is typical of most Korean restaurants – one main dish with a couple of million side dishes. That’s a lot of food! We barely put a dent in the Hae Mul Jim, the main course of seafood and veggies.

The day at school was a lot of fun, too. As a male teacher, it’s proper for me to give out candy for White Day to the girls at school, but in the interest of fairness, give it out to all of the kids. I bought a couple of large bags of hard candy and doled it out to each class. Then I spent time teasing the boys about how many girlfriends they have and whether or not they had already kissed them (Ewwww, teacher, NO!)