Chapter 62: "The Nerve"

So, being typically Korean and all, my neighborhood has roughly one hundred-twenty-seven tiny corner shops for all of your random late-night eating needs. Seriously though, on the back street off of where I live, there are about seven corner shops over a 3-block span.

The corner shop closest to where I live is this little bitty shop run by an older couple. And some corner store chain has had the nerve to open another shop of theirs right across from this little one. Because it's a chain, it's bigger, it's got a pretty sign lit up outside, the aisles are big enough to walk forward through, and not sideways. And poor Mom and Pop across the street are trying to compete with all these sales and such, even though their store is about the size of my bedroom, and it's being run out of the front part of their apartment.

So we (the other foreign coworkers and I) have been stoutly boycotting this shiny new shop by shopping quite frequently at the old one. I swear, could this new company not have set up their store just a block down? All of the other stores seem to exist in relative peace.

In other news, there is a girl in one of my classes who I particularly don't care for. She's just getting into junior high, and she's always got the nastiest attitude in class with me. She screams and slams things around when I give homework, and I'm like, uhhhh....how old are you? (She's about 12, if you're actually curious.) She's pretty much just putting on a very juvenile show. She'll barely speak any English to me, and when she speaks Korean, she kind of glares at me and whines and shouts a lot, so she permanently sounds angry and rebellious.

But I was complaining to the Korean head teacher about this (after they locked me out of the classroom), and she said that this girl isn't actually angry, her face is just stuck that way. And her voice is stuck that way too. If that's true, and she isn't playing the Korean teacher a big fat lie, that must be a horrible life. Lots of times Koreans tend to sound angry when they're not, but this girl has it baaaaaaad. I mean, if you're screaming and your eyes are narrowed and you've got a frown on, it must be hard to convince people you're not about to slap them.