Happy Mexican Independence day. Or, really, days – the Mexicans cleverly place their anniversary at midnight of September 15th (this is el grito del padre Hidalgo, in 1810), thus ensuring they have two back-to-back holidays each year, the 15th and 16th.
I've joked that one of the reasons I have always felt such a resonance with Mexican culture is because of the coincidence of el grito with my birthday. And because I'm now living on Korean Standard time, I decided that, properly speaking, I should celebrate today (16th) since that's when 21:15 Pacific time is actually occurring. Well, whatever.
To celebrate, I did a load of laundry, listened to internet radio (KCRW of Santa Monica, then the BBC News), and had some ramyeon with cabbage chopped into it. I'm actually feeling a bit under the weather, like an incipient cold or flu, so I've decided not to go off exploring or challenging myself today, but just kind of lurk hermitwise in my apateu.
Yesterday, I spent the afternoon amidst the infinite grid of globalized small-retailer capitalism that is the Myeongdong neighborhood of downtown Seoul: people watching, strolling, looking for a bookshop that would give me a fix of my favorite magazine, The Economist (but in this venture, failing). A man stopped me and asked in halting English if he could interview me – he was holding a video camera. I almost said yes, but suddenly an attack of shyness made me shake my head and decline politely. I had visions of myself as some kind of online video spectacle, the hapless foreigner abroad in Korea.
I'm trying to discipline myself and drag out my Korean textbook that I brought with me, thinking I must work on building my vocabulary and making sure I know what to do with those verbs. But I'm having a bit of a muddle with inertia, and reassure myself I have plenty of time to work on this.
Annyeonghi gaseyo.