It all comes down to Grapes

Because I said that I'm going to do posts on here after I do posts on my Seoul blog I figured I'd come on here tonight and type up some things that I can't really say on my other one since there are people I don't necessarily want reading all of my feelings who read that one.

I'm not going to say anything too bad about Seoul. I still love it here. There are, however, a few things that bother the shit out of me:

1) The way people walk over here. Back home people usually walk in straight, or at least semi-straight lines. Here, there is little of that. You could be walking down the sidewalk and the person coming in the other direction decides that they now want to meander through the sidewalk and get into your path. Either you run into them or you get out of their way because once they decide to do what I call the "Korean Swerve" there's no turning back for them. A lot of the sidewalks here are brick-lined so I can look at the lines people are walking and oh my god, people seriously don't walk in fucking straight lines. Especially at night. Oh my god. And it's not that they do it to just foreigners, it's everybody. And for god's sake stay clear of bikers. Just like in Charlottesville, they think they rule both the roads AND the sidewalks.

2) The smells on my way to work. At first I couldn't smell what I've deemed to be the "smells of cities" here. But lately I've been smelling some kind of sewer smell on a good part of my 20 minute walk to work. It's pretty bad. I mean, not like how KWHS used to get when the sewer system used to back up into the bathrooms, but it's bad enough that I'm like...ew...it smells here. Maybe it's the little fruit sack things that are dropping off the trees near the sidewalks and being perpetually crushed by pedestrians. Somehow people have a thing for planting smelly trees and shrubbery where people have to walk and I really don't know why.

3) My Yellow Class. They're fucking terrors except for one quiet girl who is trying her hardest to operate in that environment with them.

4) How the Korean people stare at foreigners. It's long, it's hard, and it's bad.

I can't really think of others right now, but I'm sure it'd be something about how something it supposed to taste like something, but it doesn't.

Oh, 5) The grapes here suck. You know that realllllllllllly fake grape flavor in things? Well that's what grapes are like here, except the skins are tough to the point that Koreans actually spit it out rather than trying to eat it; there's probably 4 big seeds in each one that you can't eat, and thus, as the Koreans do, spit them out; and the texture and overall experience of the grapes remind me of the grapes my grandparents used to grow at their house and I can remember people telling us not to eat those grapes.

And 6) Fruit is fucking expensive as shit here. 15,000 won for a bunch of your shitty grapes, sir? I think not. I'll just go buy some fruit-flavored candy from the convenience store down the street. At least I don't have to spit any of that out when I eat it.

The rest of the food has been great here, though. I just know not to bother with grapes while I'm here.